Any advice to help with gold?

[gremlins0]

I am playing on avg map avg speed. I am now into the modern era and have major gold issues, ie negative gold per turn. I have around 5 cities, and 10 puppet cities and only about 10 military units. The units are costing me a ton. I am about to switch to the civic that helps with upkeep, but then I am going to lose the other one I like that helped give me happiness for cities connected to my capital. All of my cities are on make gold only, which isnt helping as it gives me like 2-5 difference per city. I only do that instead of building because I can't afford any more upkeep. I also switched my cities to emphasize gold. Finally I think all my cities have market/bank etc. Any ideas/quick fix for anything basic I am missing to help with my income problem?
I dont see how the AI has a ton of cities, like double me, and I barely get any without major happiness or income problems.

 

[Aaroc]

The problem is probably all of those puppet cities you have. Puppet cities will continually build buildings that cost you maintenance. The best thing you could do at this point is either raze a few of the puppet cities, or annex a few of them and manually put them into a gold focusing mode. Maybe rebuild some farms and mines into trading posts.

 

[slobberinbear]

Trading Posts

Trade your excess resources to AI civs for Gold and Gold per turn.

Build Markets and Banks in your high commerce cities.

Delete your excess units.

 

[gremlins0]

I do have markets/banks pretty much everywhere. I will have to try annexing cities sooner next time as I thought they would likely generate me more money but I guess they are just building useless crap costing me money. Thanks. Now my problem is going to be my people are unhappy again. Hopefully courthouses or something will fix it.

 

[Bibor]

Here's the tip: every building, unit or road piece has to bring in more gold per turn than it costs.

Simple Example#1: A granary gives 2 food for 1 gold. If you use that food to feed a citizen who works a trade post - you're even.

Simple Example#2: A unit costs 1-10 gold in upkeep (every turn) and 90-300 gold to upgrade. If there are no wars in sight for the next 100 turns, it's better to just kill it and build a new one in 90 turns (except if it has, like, 250 experience).

 

[gremlins0]

Thanks. I was doing good until I decided to start going to war and expanding. I have yet to figure out the good balance to not overexpanding apparently. I think I am just going to have to start razing cities as the happiness cost or upkeep is killing my small but effective army.

 

[CornPlanter]

Simple Example#1: A granary gives 2 food for 1 gold. If you use that food to feed a citizen who works a trade post - you're even.

Citizen also gives science automatically. I think your tip is a bit too simple, real life game is more complicated than that. You cannot always measure if something brings you more than you spend.