Economic tips for a puppet empire?

[montitro]

I've been playing on Deity a lot lately, because that seems to be the only way to get the military side of the game to be a challenge, but I'm having some problems keeping my tech rate and economy up. My latest game, I'm playing as the Mongols, and I've managed to carve out a pretty big puppet empire - I'm the biggest civ by land area, although my population isn't the biggest - but I'm faltering now that the AIs have riflemen (and lots of them).

At turn 165, I'm barely breaking 100 beakers per turn. I am getting a decent amount of loot, in the 140s, but I end up spending most of it trying to keep about -10 happiness. Without having the ability to rush-buy libraries and colloseums in most of my cities, I feel like I'm sort of stuck on both happiness and science. Any advice?

 

[DaveMcW]

Sell all your extra resources to the AIs.

 

[Slowpoke]

Also: Don't let cities grow beyond size 5. Take meritocracy/theocracy If you're trying to keep puppet population low, perhaps only use two maritimes. Also, make sure to convert all their farms to trade posts.

 

[diz2]

I've been playing on Deity a lot lately, because that seems to be the only way to get the military side of the game to be a challenge, but I'm having some problems keeping my tech rate and economy up. My latest game, I'm playing as the Mongols, and I've managed to carve out a pretty big puppet empire - I'm the biggest civ by land area, although my population isn't the biggest - but I'm faltering now that the AIs have riflemen (and lots of them).

At turn 165, I'm barely breaking 100 beakers per turn. I am getting a decent amount of loot, in the 140s, but I end up spending most of it trying to keep about -10 happiness. Without having the ability to rush-buy libraries and colloseums in most of my cities, I feel like I'm sort of stuck on both happiness and science. Any advice?

Well, I guess the 1st question is why are you using a puppet empire? Are you going for cultural victory?

I'm sure you can get more science w/raze & replace + build libraries & run specialists.

 

[kamex]

I tend to get this problem a lot. By advice is to focus on meritocracy, FP and planned economy to help keep people happy, then maritime bribe with excess gold to get large populations.

 

[biohazard72]

Freedom is a huge happiness bonus as well, especially if you grab Statue of Liberty and Civil Society to make unemployed citizens 1F2H. At that point you can grow your cities huge and reap the trade route gold.

 

[Paeanblack]

Build tradeposts on hills near puppets. Since puppets have a gold focus, this will curtail their growth and keep them from using up your available happiness on extra population with low marginal value. This also lets them crank out the +Happy and +Money buildings faster.

If your puppets are building culture buildings that you don't really want, it's because you either had positive happiness when they came out of revolt or they need to grab tiles.

The easiest way to deal with both of these issues is to bring settlers with your invasion force. Settling cities is the cheapest and easiest way to get negative happiness, and settling them right next to puppets lets you add tiles. If you time this right, the puppets' first buildings will be Colosseums instead of Monuments, which is much more useful later on.