Infinite Trading Post Sprawl strategy?

[The Snug]

Why is it so difficult to possess a late-game economy? For starters, units cost way too much money. I seem to be artificially injecting life into my economy by simply running constant Golden Ages with every great person that I get every 10 turns. What am I supposed to do, just spam those damn trading posts everywhere and use the money generated to buy my food from maritime city-states, and then stick the new citizens into merchant slots?

From caravan spam, to cottage spam to now Trading Post spam. What boring mechanics.

 

[Lightzy]

I try to keep few units, keep them upgraded.

Something about unit upkeep is screwy.
You can disband a single worker and suddenly get +10 gold per turn, then disband 2 more without change, then disband one more and get another +10.
Seems screwy.

Just keep disbanding all those workers u capture. does wonders for economy.

 

[The Snug]

Upgrading works fine early in the game when you have more money than you know what to do with, but what do you do late game when the economy can no longer stay afloat, and it takes 17 turns in your best cities to build a mechanized infantry unit?

 

[ChronoCore]

I find that specialization of cities is the key.
In my first few games I was building pretty much everything in every city, but the upkeep costs on those buildings will murder you in the late game. It's ok to have a city or two that can do everything, like maybe your capital and one other but other than that you kind of want to limit how many buildings you actually build in the other cities. If you are going to build a large empire, you don't need to have a barracks/armory/military academy in EVERY city, nor do you need to have a harbor in every coastal city (assuming they are attached to your capital by a road).
Try to pick and choose your buildings in each city a little better and your late game economy will be fine.

On a side note, some option to destroy/sell buildings in a city would be nice!

 

[keisukekun]

seriously you should be able to demolish buildings. I mean its not a far stretch to say that in the beginning of the game you wanted kyoto to build an army but now its a gold monger so let us get rid of those military buildings

 

[Wosret84]

The ability to remove buildings would be really nice. A good example is the stable -- why would you keep a building designed for production of mounted units once motorized vehicles are available? You're not going to be making cavalry when you can make tanks so why pay the cost for the building?