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I think if health were in civ5, we'd have heard about it by now. I think it's safe to assume it's gone.

Ahriman said:
Buildings have gold maintenance costs again?

Ugh. I thought we'd fixed that?

Do not want.
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It's probably because they noticed gold was piling up and they couldn't spend it fast enough (or they thought they having to spend it too frequently - tedious). Presumably maintenance costs of cities are either gone or lower, and civic upkeep is probably gone too. They needed to put some costs in the game.

I suspect unit upkeep will be a bit higher this time round too.
 
Actually I think its more likely to be a response to removing the gold/science slider.
If they noticed gold piling up, they could easily fix that by making everything that cost gold more expensive.

With the slider, if your treasury runs out and you have negative gold income, you lose science income, and the slider is shifted downwards.

Without a slider, the only way to reduce expenses is to lose something that costs you.
They don't want you do be losing your army, so they made buildings have a maintenance cost so that there is something else to lose if you start going bankrupt.

I still don't like it though. I should always want to have more stuff; to have production be rare and needed to build either buildings or units. I don't want to be in a situation where I can't afford more buildings or more units, and so production is no longer useful.
 
Ahriman said:
I still don't like it though. I should always want to have more stuff; to have production be rare and needed to build either buildings or units. I don't want to be in a situation where I can't afford more buildings or more units, and so production is no longer useful.
Click to expand...

Maybe you'll be able to produce ... gold.

BTW, I agree, building maint. sounds ominous. OTOH, TANSTAAFL.
 
Just a guess, but I reckon even with building maintenance it's going to be really hard to send your economy backwards. I think it looks like they're making your empire run into severe happiness problems (and hence growth problems) before you start losing gold. At worst, your spending of gold will just have to go down - no more purchasing tiles, buying research pacts etc.

I know it would make sense to have buildings with maintenance so they can be sold or disbanded to bring your gold reserves positive again, but I don't think that'd be the motivation for it. It's just too "unfun" in a game where just about everything else is being changed to be simpler or more fun. If they did force things on you to keep your gold positive, I think they'd start taking control of your governors, emphasising gold in your cities before they started selling buildings.
 
Two Things;

1) Number of Cities: As the number of cities in your civ grows, so does your unhappiness. In other words, a civ with 2 cities each of population 1 is unhappier than a civ with 1 city of population 2, even though they both contain the same total population.

This makes the Indian Special Ability make more sense to me now.

2) I hope that they have a stark, obvious line as to when a civ moves from "Unhappy" to "Super Unhappy." I'd hate it if it was just a vague kind of opaque thing where suddenly now everyone is just extra sad. I want to know precisely how many turns I have to deal with the situation so I can best weigh my options.
 
I'm not that concerned about building maintenance, they completely changed the happiness and now many of the old "maintenance" items like number of cities, distance from capital, and inflation seem to have been eliminated or moved to Happiness.

Happiness is now impacted by number and size of cities, which is the new factor putting limits on how fast the empire grows and expands. Too much unhappiness seems to create a form of anarchy.

Maintenance costs are now more straightforward. You pay for only the tangible items like units, buildings, and roads. From the information so far, they are not as ambiguous as in Civ4. From the screenshots, gold seems to flow readily, which is good as there are lots of uses for gold now.

Even a negative gold flow doesn’t seem to have a drastic impact growth, but there is no information yet on the effect of empire debt, if allowed.
 
PieceOfMind said:
I think if health were in civ5, we'd have heard about it by now. I think it's safe to assume it's gone.



It's probably because they noticed gold was piling up and they couldn't spend it fast enough (or they thought they having to spend it too frequently - tedious). Presumably maintenance costs of cities are either gone or lower, and civic upkeep is probably gone too. They needed to put some costs in the game.

I suspect unit upkeep will be a bit higher this time round too.
Click to expand...

Well, and I suspect they have maintenance in there to make people weigh the options they have available to them. "Do I want the extra gold per turn, or do I truly value having a theater?"

More questions like that are better.
 
PieceOfMind said:
Just a guess, but I reckon even with building maintenance it's going to be really hard to send your economy backwards. I think it looks like they're making your empire run into severe happiness problems (and hence growth problems) before you start losing gold. At worst, your spending of gold will just have to go down - no more purchasing tiles, buying research pacts etc.

I know it would make sense to have buildings with maintenance so they can be sold or disbanded to bring your gold reserves positive again, but I don't think that'd be the motivation for it. It's just too "unfun" in a game where just about everything else is being changed to be simpler or more fun. If they did force things on you to keep your gold positive, I think they'd start taking control of your governors, emphasising gold in your cities before they started selling buildings.
Click to expand...

I agree that it will probably be quite hard to run out of gold, or in other words, you'll be probably getting quite a bit of it. Things like gold mines should give a decent chunk now that they no longer give commerce. And the game should give you a good gold income, because it just won't be much fun if you can't use any of the new functionality like buying tiles, research pacts, influencing city states etc if you build a decent number of buildings. You will probably be able to build almost all buildings and still run a small surplus, even though in that case you can't do other things.
 
Well building maintanence is back in, unit maintanence will surely be included too.
 
About health,

Note that we do not yet know how city growth will work in this game. The fact that unhappiness gives a penalty to city growth suggests that it might not work like it used to. (Such a penalty does not make much sense in the old fill a foodbar to grow your city system.) In particular, it is not unlikely that other things (things that used to give (un)healthiness) might directly effect the growth rate of your cities.
 
Trias said:
About health,

Note that we do not yet know how city growth will work in this game. The fact that unhappiness gives a penalty to city growth suggests that it might not work like it used to. (Such a penalty does not make much sense in the old fill a foodbar to grow your city system.) In particular, it is not unlikely that other things (things that used to give (un)healthiness) might directly effect the growth rate of your cities.
Click to expand...

The population part of unhealthyness could quite easily be modeled by making the curve for the food needed to grow to the next level steeper. In Civ4 the food needed to grow to the next level was 20 + 2 * current population. In Civ5 they could make that 20 + 3 * current population, or maybe 20 + 2 * current population under a certain size, and 20 + 3 * current population over that size.
 
Based on the screenshots there is a "fill the foodbar"-thing (or should I say "fill the foodhead"). It also looks like it works a bit like the health-system in Civ4, if your above the cap some food is wasted and thus giving a growth penalty.

In the screenshot of Berlin which is 4 pops over it's happycap the surplus is only +1.5 even though it should have been +2 if you count the tiles being worked and assume that each citizen consume 2 food.
 
I have a feature that details how gold works in Civ V (what it's used for, how you get it) which will shed some light on a lot of the things you guys are hypothesizing here.

It will hopefully go up today. :)

Sneak peek: Gold is no longer the "growth limiter" - that responsibility now rests on happiness, as you have learned from this article. In my opinion, gold is a lot more fun and interesting this time around :)
 
I hope there will be some differences regarding the upkeep of units. Because in Civ4, I had never any control in how many units I could have. I still have no idea how the limit of how many free units you could have was calculated. I suppose I should have checked on Civfanatics, but I never remembered to do it.
 
Thanks Greg, this has been a good week for new features huh? Can't wait to read it.
 
These new systems look like an interesting new way to approach certain concepts that have always been in Civilization. I think that some of them sound like they'll actually be more fun to work with than in Civilization 4. I'm really looking forward to the natural wonders as well!
 
Thanks Greg. Any chance (trying to make this as minimalistic a question as possible) you could confirm whether or not Aqueducts are still in the game? No need to comment on a health system as a whole or what the Aqueduct does, just something to fuel speculation (or close this debate once and for all if the answer is a negative). Or, you could just give info about the existence (or non-existence) of a health system :p
 
Im willing to bet that health has been fused with food and not with happiness.

Basicaly, imagine that Civ5 cities will be like unhealthy Civ4 cities the whole time. In Civ4, if you had a positive health then getting a bonus that boosted your health or gave you some unhealthiness had no impact in your cities, as long as you stayed positive. By contrast, if you were in negative health, then every bonus to health (positive or negative) would be transformed into a food bonus at a rate of 1 to 1. Civ5 has streamed lined this by saying that everything which gives a health bonus (+ or -) in Civ4 will now give a food bonus (+ or -) in Civ5.

Now this is, of course, conjecture at the moment, but seems to corroborate with cities getting a food bonus when they are connected to a food resource. It would make sense for this to work with buildings too, so I'm placing money on aqueducts being in and giving cities +2 food, and on factories giving cities -2 food. I also think that this means that the amount of food needed to make a city grow will initially be higher, but then won't climb as fast.

That, anyway, is how I would do it.
 
It looks like unhappiness itself reduces food production (and other production). In the Berlin city screen shot, the empire's Happiness is at -4 (+4 sad face), and the Food, Production and Gold income are fractional (1.5, 19.2, and 21.25 respectively), suggesting that they're being hit by a penalty. Which is what you'd expect if unhappiness is meant to be a limiter on growth.
 
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