2 questions

[jnebbe]

1: Do different units have different maintenance costs? Or is maintenance just based on number of units?

2: Does city pop contribute to maintenance? Reason I ask is I sometimes build coastal cities and add lighthouses so it can work all the 22 tiles, wondering if having a high pop city work mediocre tiles is costing a lot through maintenance.

 

[SittinDown]

1) No
2) Yes. More pop is usually better though - you can 2/2 tiles are about the break-even point. anything worse than that, and look at specialists, or whip.

 

[Fippy]

Depends on diff. level too, on Deity i'm not growing on 2 tiles just for .
But it's usually still worth doing (if no better tiles are around) for whipping power.
In special cases (Iso i.e.) where i have nothing to whip i use scientists instead.

 

[Snowbird]

2: Does city pop contribute to maintenance? Reason I ask is I sometimes build coastal cities and add lighthouses so it can work all the 22 tiles, wondering if having a high pop city work mediocre tiles is costing a lot through maintenance.

Population adds something to civic maintenance (don't know exact numbers) and reduces unit maintenance (something like 4 pop for extra free unit), so in some cases adding a mediocre tile might reduce costs.

 

[AcaMetis]

IIRC every pop adds 1/8th to a city's base distance maintenance up to the difficulty-based cap, and some unknown amount to that city's number of cities maintenance. I tested it before, and as far as I recall you'll rarely be in a situation where growing a city costs more in maintenance than being able to work even a single pays for.

 

[drewisfat]

Total empire pop affecting how many free units you get was something I didn't understand for a very long time. *checks unit maintenance tab* "Ok says 0, let's make one more unit and see if that pushes me over" *whips*. Game: unit maintenance 2. *head explodes*

The mistake people make isn't growing on mediocre tiles. It's getting fluff infrastructure (temples, aqueducts, colosseums, etc.) just to grow on those tiles.

 

[Gumbolt]

The cost for pop varies on size and distance from capitals/forbidden palace and versaille.. Also on number of cities. @Tonny did some work on this for our SGOTM 26. Of course with Court houses you can reduce some of these costs. state property also helps reduce costs on cities

 

[Tobiyogi]

Watch the upper left corner which displays the cost per turn and then whip once or twice, you'll notice a slight relief on the economy. Otoh, more pop allows more free units (unless you are running pacifism).

 

[coanda]

There's three broad categories of unit "costs."

Unit upkeep. Add up the total number of units you have (they all count as 1 each), multiply that total by a difficulty level scaling (and the AIs get their own reduced costs, which sometimes helps them sustain armies that would bankrupt a human player), subtract off the number of "free" units you get (which primarily depends on your empire's population), and that's your unit upkeep.

Unit supply. Same general idea as unit upkeep, but slightly different formulas and it's only counting units outside your cultural borders.

Military unit upkeep. If you're in the Pacifism civic, you pay 1 gold per "military unit." Workers, settlers, privateers, and great people don't count.

There's also some tags and logic in the game files that could potentially allow more variety in unit upkeep costs; it's just that nothing in the game-as-shipped actually makes use of them. For example, iExtraCost in the unit infos .xml file could potentially add additional cost for specific types of unit, except every single unit in the game by default has an iExtraCost of 0.

 

[Gumbolt]

If the units have a purpose unit cost should not be an issue. However if you are using 4-5 defenders per city for no reason then they should likely be deleted. Unless you are running HR civic for happiness. That or need a stack due to poor diplomacy or some powerful ai that could be a threat. Overall saving 10-20 gold a turn can be difference between 100% science or 50%. That being said I was churning 34gpt on my last immortal game before I had reached cuirs. All pends on your game. Micro is important here but play the map/game at times.

 

[krikav]

IIRC every pop adds 1/8th to a city's base distance maintenance up to the difficulty-based cap, and some unknown amount to that city's number of cities maintenance. I tested it before, and as far as I recall you'll rarely be in a situation where growing a city costs more in maintenance than being able to work even a single pays for.

I recall that we had that discussion somewhere too, but can't remember where.
Adding extra population just to work ocean (2F 1C) is still always profitable.
That in turn would mean that it's always profitable to increase population with the aid of warriors and hereditary rule and work coast (2F 2C) too.

The problem comes from opportunity cost. The food required to grow from pop7 to pop8 could instead have been used to specialists-turns earlier, which trumps the miniscule long term yield of working more ocean tiles. (Same thing with the hammers for the warriors too.)