How do you make money in the early game?

[DisRuptive1]

I was playing as America and I ended up getting crippled early game some how and I can't figure out how to fix it.

I had 4 cities all connected to each other by roads sizes 7, 4, 3, and 2. I got my happiness under control through luxuries but I was overdrawn by 17 gold per turn. The excess was taken out of my science budget which prevented me from researching Guilds (so I could build Wealth).

Every tile that was being worked in each city had an improvement. To try to fix it, I ended up selling off a bunch of my units and ended up with 3 workers, 3 spearman, and 1 warrior. I think I had about 3 or 4 policies in the Liberty tree. No civilizations or city states were in range to run caravans.

I was losing 17 gold per turn.

 

[Browd]

Sounds like you weren't working enough gold-generating tiles, overbuilt units and your roads were probably premature. Each building, each unit and each road segment costs gpt for maintenance, and it all adds up.

On roads, your city connection income will eventually outstrip your maintenance costs, but you need to be savvy about it. Each road segment costs 1 gpt. Assuming your cities were an average of 5 tiles apart, that would be a total of 15 gpt of road maintenance, but with those population numbers your city connection income would only total about 10 gpt, so you were losing 5 gpt on your road network alone. You don't say how many units you disbanded, but at 1 gpt per unit that also adds up.

Solutions that come immediately to mind include:

• avoiding building roads prematurely,
  
  
• building even longer roads to extend the range of your caravans (costs more gpt but may make a profitable trade route possible),
  
  
• working gold tiles (improved luxuries),
  
  
• selling excess luxuries (you must have at least one duplicate luxury in your capital) for gpt (don't need friendships for gpt trades--neutral should get you 6 gpt while mildly grumpy should get you 5 gpt), and
  
  
• if you need to invest in an army (when the AI is too far away for trade routes, maybe you don't), use your army to bully CSs for additional gold.

 

[SYahoo]

Make sure you are working your maximum number of trade routes. The earlier you are able to develop them the more stable your economy will be.

Here's a few tips I have come across since BNW launched:

1. Trade initial AI embassies for 1 gold/turn instead of embassy for embassy. You can scout their capitals usually anyway.
2. Plunder trade routes by landing a unit on the caravan or cargo ship. Caravans will give you 100g and cargo ships 200g. (Domination style)
3. Trading 1 gold/turn for 30 gold and vice versa if you are friendly with an AI. Its like taking an interest free loan out or can pull you from a negative to a positive.
4. Trade 2 strategic resources for 3 gold/turn or excess luxury resource for 6 gold/turn. You can be a little unhappy if it means + gold/turn, especially if the 2nd copy of the luxury is being upgraded by a worker when you trade.
5. Have citizens manually working luxury tiles. Luxury tiles are the only tiles that initially give gold per turn. A little less growth or production can keep you out of the negative or keep the negative at least reasonable.
6. Scout city states for 30g or 15g.

BNW seems to put less focus on the instant-Philosophy tree and puts a little more emphasis on hitting Currency earlier for the markets.