So where's the documentation on Unit upkeep costs?

The maintenance costs also scale with the difficulty level you're playing on. However, the tooltips do not change to reflect this, and I only found it mentioned once as a passing reference in the civilopedia (or was it the manual? most of the "manual" is just dumped word for word in the civilopedia anyhow).

For example, if you're playing on less than Prince level, many of the buildings don't cost anything in upkeep at all. I haven't tried anything above Prince, but I'd be willing to bet that the costs are increased as you go up. However, how can anybody plan anything, if the tooltip doesn't change to reflect what's the actual cost in your current game?

The costs appear to rise per two units, as ainwood said. I get the feeling that, surprise, someone slipped on the civlopedia because the entry on unit/building maintenance points you to each unit/building page.

Ankh88 said:

The maintenance costs also scale with the difficulty level you're playing on. However, the tooltips do not change to reflect this, and I only found it mentioned once as a passing reference in the civilopedia (or was it the manual? most of the "manual" is just dumped word for word in the civilopedia anyhow).

For example, if you're playing on less than Prince level, many of the buildings don't cost anything in upkeep at all. I haven't tried anything above Prince, but I'd be willing to bet that the costs are increased as you go up. However, how can anybody plan anything, if the tooltip doesn't change to reflect what's the actual cost in your current game?

Click to expand...

I'm confused. Are you making an assumption?

An assumption, no. It's an observation.

I first observed this when I noticed that on my first game, I built a Monument in my city. The tooltip says, and the civilopedia echoes it, that the Monument costs 1 gold maintenance to upkeep.

However, after I built it, there was no charge. I played the entire game on Chieftain level and monuments in any city never cost anything, despite their tooltips saying they did.

However, on Prince level, they cost the stated 1 gold, as they should.

So it wouldn't suprise me if, above that level, they cost more than one gold. Nor would it surprise me if this were behind the explanation of the mysteriously rising costs of units. It doesn't bother me if they alter these things with the difficuty level, but I'd certainly like the tooltips to tell me exactly what the costs are at any given time.

This seems to be even worse than you think. Sometimes, deleting a unit will give you a lump sum of cash, sometimes it will decrease your upkeep, sometimes both, and sometimes neither

Needs to be fixed and documented.

I'm halfway certain that captured workers don't give you gold when you delete them. I'm probably going to play a few games just to chart/graph certain numbers, like unit maintenance and trade route value.

CrimsonEdge said:

Unit supply are your strategic resources, so while your Military Advisor is telling you that you have lots of Iron, Coal, whatever else, your unit upkeep may be much more. What did your Economic Advisor say?

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No, I don't think Unit Supply is my strategic resources; the numbers don't match up, and the Unit Supply is taken from my number of cities and population, as if having a larger population should help you to keep a larger army, which makes sense.

Here's the screenshot from my military advisor:

ainwood said:

The maintenance costs appear to scale in pairs-of-units. If you delete one and get no reduction in maintenance, delete another one and you normally will.

Aside from that, actual units maintenance costs scale exponentially with number of turns.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that seems to correlate with my findings so far. Just for a quick insight into unit maintenance I deleted 11 units, and the maintenance costs were as so:

48 units: -268gpt
47 units: -256gpt (12 difference)
46 units: -256gpt (0 difference)
45 units: -243gpt (13 difference)
44 units: -243gpt (0 difference)
43 units: -231gpt (12 difference)
42 units: -231gpt (0 difference)
41 units: -219gpt (12 difference)
40 units: -219gpt (0 difference)
39 units: -207gpt (12 difference)
38 units: -207gpt (0 difference)
37 units: -195gpt (12 difference)

Then moving a few turns ahead gave me the following costs, still with 37 units:
1 turn later: -196gpt
2 turns later: -197gpt
3 turns later: -197gpt
4 turns later: -198gpt

Not enough there to come up with any formulas, but it shows some interesting patterns. I'm just glad I've found a way to save my economy - half my number of workers and I'll save ~40gpt .

Jamesds said:

No, I don't think Unit Supply is my strategic resources; the numbers don't match up, and the Unit Supply is taken from my number of cities and population, as if having a larger population should help you to keep a larger army, which makes sense.

Here's the screenshot from my military advisor:

Click to expand...

I suspect (but do not know since it's not in the manual) that it's a hard cap on how many units you can have. Not that it matters; maintenance is going to kill your economy long before you reach those numbers.

The state of the documentation on this release ought to embarrass everybody working at 2K.

ainwood said:

The maintenance costs appear to scale in pairs-of-units. If you delete one and get no reduction in maintenance, delete another one and you normally will.

Aside from that, actual units maintenance costs scale exponentially with number of turns.

Click to expand...

I would have thought it was function of the tech level. I found keeping a big army in the early game was a LOT easier than a small army at the mid-late game. In part I think the maintenance costs are INSANE for everything by mid game. Short of Golden Age bombs there really is a poor money producing system for late game and large modern empires will just bankrupt themselves banks, stock exchnages, even huge cities on wealth produce very little gold. You cant even make much off trade as the AIs are usually just as bankrupt as you. Nothing brings me so much joy as seeing every AI at 0 gold and -3 to -80 GPT

Rat

Wolle68 said:

I suspect (but do not know since it's not in the manual) that it's a hard cap on how many units you can have. Not that it matters; maintenance is going to kill your economy long before you reach those numbers.

The state of the documentation on this release ought to embarrass everybody working at 2K.

Click to expand...

I am not sure how this supply works. I have had games with 10+ cities and I was way under the supply level (14 units total) and I was paying a kings ransom in military upkeep.

Rat

The "documentation" is in the lua source code somewhere. Somebody want to go take a look instead of empirical speculation?

inflation is making the costs go up as you play...

inflation... what a joke of a concept in this game. constant growth economies are necessary as a result. lol

rickb said:

The "documentation" is in the lua source code somewhere. Somebody want to go take a look instead of empirical speculation?

Click to expand...

I suspect it's not in the lua scripts, but rather in the DLL. Until we get the C++ source...

Cheers, LT.

It definelty seems like something isnt working right for unit maintenance . I hope so anyway because this better not be how its supposed to work . Hope they look at it soon.

Playing Gandhi yesterday I won a Science victory and had to disband lots of units in the endgame. I think the unit upkeep is broken.

I had only 3 naval units, 2 planes, 2 worker, 2 Art, 6 Garrison (15 total) in 2020AD, and probably 25 in 1500AD. I had to disband everything. They still costed me about 140 gold per turn so I was making a net loss of 50! I had to adopt policies and sacrify my GP for Golden Ages to make at least some profit.

The AI is even crapier, they spam lots of trading posts and are still losing money. Their tech rate brakes down as their cities don't grow and science is spent on gold. All were tech par with me till late Renaissance and at the end game I was 1,5 ages in front.

Another thing the AI cannot manage annexing puppets. America conquered almost complete Germany and some city states and made them all puppets. Then Japan invaded America (AI naval invasion, seems to be working somehow) capturing all American cities leaving only the puppets. America never annexed a puppet although they had 6-7 undefended cities left!

shamsael said:

I'm halfway certain that captured workers don't give you gold when you delete them. I'm probably going to play a few games just to chart/graph certain numbers, like unit maintenance and trade route value.

Click to expand...

Captured workers do give gold when you delete them, however like all units you only get the gold when you delete them in your territory.

for what its worth,

i just deleted 5 captured workers and got back 7 gold on unit maintenance plus and around 20 gold in cash

out of the red yay

Why don’t you just look it up in the Civlilopedia?

/sarcasam

That was a bit of a thread bump.

I'm pretty sure it was worked out fairly well in one of the threads in Strategy and Tips.