Is city maintenance important or not?

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

The numbers used are for deity and standard speed/map size so they can be different depending on your settings.

First we look at how bad is the numbers of city maintenance because that is the tricky one as each new city will increase the number of city maintenance in all old cities.

A good forumula for how much each new city will increase the total number of city maintenance is:
Total increase = total old city maintenance increase + new city maintenance.

I found this formula for the number of cities:

"number of cities cost" = (0.6 + 0.033*(city pop - 1))*(number of cities)/2

For simplicity I assume all cities have 1 city pop.
New city maintenance increase are thus given as 0.3*n (n being the total number of cities after founding the new city)
Total old city maintenance increase are thus given as 0.3*(n-1).

So the total increase is 0.3*(2n-1)

The "number of cities" cost cap is 8GPT

The cap is reached at 27 cities (even for cities with 1 population), after that you can continue to build cities without any worring about increasing number of city maintenance for old cities.

This list tell us how much each new city will increase the total number of city maintenance assuming all cities are at 1 population.

1. 0.3
2. 0.9
3. 1.5
4. 2.1
5. 2.7
6. 3.3
7. 3.9
8. 4.5
9. 5.1
10. 5.7
11. 6.3
12. 6.9
13. 7.5
14. 8.1
15. 8.7

If all your cities are at population 10 you get the correct formula by increasing the number of city maintenance by 50%. Courthouses halve the number of city maintenance and it is capped at 8.

The other city maintenance is the distance to the palace

The total "distance from Palace" expanses of a city (D) are : D = (7 + p)*d/8

with d being

d = (ring number)*0.29

.

Ring number mean the number of border pops needed to reach the tile from the palace or other center of government assuming infinte amount of border pops is possible. So the tiles around the capital is 1, the big fat cross is 2 and the diagonals that is not included in the big fat cross are 3. To minimize the distance cost, avoid settling a city in a straight diagonal to the capital.

Roughly each 3 distances from the capital is going to cost 1 gold per turn from distance maintenance at population 1 and double the amount at 9 people. Of the two penalties this one is probably the more serious one because it can reach some very large numbers for distant cities but it can be halved with a courthouse or removed with state property. Unlike the number of city maintenance I don't think this one have a cap.

Even tougth both type of maintenance increase with city population, the ratio of maintenance/population do go down with larger population and number of city maintenance is capped at 8 anyway. Overall Im not so sure that city maintenance is a big deal as the values are not all that high even without courthouses (they do however increase with inflation). As long as you make sure to produce enough gold and maybe build a few courthouses each city that can grow to a resonable size should actually contribute more to your economy than it will cost to maintain.

 

[InovA]

d = ring number * 0.29 is a bad way of writing it
d = FLOOR[MIN(X + Y/2 , X/2 + Y)] * 0.29 is more proper and easier to calculate at a glance, where X and Y are the absolute value of the number of tiles the new city is from the capital in the given x- and y-coordinate planes.

A -0.6/turn/city definitely adds up. If we pretend we're only looking for a good : or : (forgetting about multipliers and strategic resources for now), then the city must have good enough workable tiles to make up for the cost it's about to add to the empire.

The 10th city costs an extra -5.7/t by city number, and, say, a distance of 8X and 4Y adds -2.9/t for distance. -8.6/t can be considered beneficial once the city reaches 9 or more +. It starts with 2 in the city tile and 2 from 2 trade routes (after Currency), so 5 additional can be accomplished with maybe 2 or 3 improvements.

The 15th city costs an extra -8.7/t by city number, and, say, a distance of 13X and 8Y adds -4.93/t for distance. -13.63/t can be considered beneficial once the city reaches 14 or more +. The additional 10 may require 4 or 5 improvements while we're factoring in the necessary food.

Strategic resource improvements can be considered 2 normal improvements in this case, since they have much higher yields. Getting workers over to improve the tiles can take a long time as you try to REX. Bonuses from Forge, Library, Courthouse, etc. Can help tremendously, of course.

And don't forget that population and city number affect the costs of all civics!
On average: 5*(FLOOR[P(N-10)]+FLOOR[C(M+1)])
where N = Empire Population; M = City Number; P = 0, 0.08, 0.12, 0.16; C = 0, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6
P and C are based on whether it is a: No Cost, Low Cost, Medium Cost, High Cost, upkeep civic.
The scalar, 5, is included to account for all 5 civics.

Spoiler Actual Civic Equations :

Gov:[D[O([P(N-8)]+[C(M-1)])]]
Legal:[D[O([P(N-9)]+[C(M+0)])]]
Labor:[D[O([P(N-10)]+[C(M+1)])]]
Econ:[D[O([P(N-11)]+[C(M+2)])]]
Religion:[D[O([P(N-12)]+[C(M+3)])]]
D=1 (Difficulty modifier); N=PopNum; O=0.5 (for ORG trait),1; M=CitNum; P=0,0.08,0.12,0.16; C=0,0.4,0.5,0.6
All in brackets are the FLOOR function

So each city on average adds -2.5/t and each population adds -0.6/t for civic upkeep. (That's with 5 Medium Cost upkeeps selected, which your average will likely be a bit below this for most of the early and mid game)

So if my 15th city is costing 100 (100) Settler and -20/t, I need to be ready to start its improvements immediately and whip that Granary + Forge to start getting my money back. Hopefully I can sell its extra Fish resource (or w/e) or it had a + resource for me. Overall I think the maintenance matters very much as long as you're improving the tiles ASAP, establishing trade networks for foreign commerce trade routes (or domestic island trade routes), and whipping/chopping the early buildings it needs so it can start becoming an asset and Wealth building ASAP.

If you don't have currency yet, you can't expand nearly as much and the maintenance takes a much larger toll. You're 1+ short per city (that trade route rules) and can't translate to other than through fail gold.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

You can expand quite alot even before currency if you setup capital cottages very early as well as setting up capital support cities which grow cottages for the capital, these cities also have minimal distance maintenance and can share food resources with the capital to make better use of slavery. The purpose of cottages are not to help you tech but to support the gold per turn needed for cities. Techs comes by great people and trade as these have far better returns than cottages for quite a while. With bureaucracy and gold multiplier buildings, the capital is good enough for a quite large empire. Science buildings come later and are worse than gold multipler buildings and cottages are quite bad before you have free speech and emancipation at which point you can spam them everywhere.

Most cities are built for specialist and military production, improvements are built with slavery, I try to avoid building wealth due to poor conversion value, find military units to be more valuable. Military units are not just about expanding your empire but they are as much about weakning the ai empires as well, more cities quickly translate into a larger army, especially when you factor in slavery and draft. Eventually it is the army that win the game so everything else should probably be seen as something that support your army.

 

[civvver]

The title makes no sense. Of course it's important. It's the only limiting factor in how fast you can expand.

What we should be discussing is ways of mitigating it like in your last post, that's relevant. There are many ways to deal with maintenance costs. But you do have to deal with it, somehow.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

The title makes no sense. Of course it's important. It's the only limiting factor in how fast you can expand.

The question is really how important are maintenance, like how far can you get before it really starts to drag you down.

 

[lymond]

....important is maintenance

I think the wording of your thesis here is off. Maintenance IS important in this game. It's a major driving factor in success. So there is no argument here about its importance. An analysis of the impact of maintenance is certainly worthwhile. Obviously influenced by various factors, including difficulty level map size, etc etc. It can drag you down real quick on Deity even after your 3rd or 4th city.