This is something covered in the user manual, but new players especially may find themselves in the dreaded economic death spiral.
Usually, it happens when you expand too quickly, but if you get an early game event that say, gives you +2 scouts you can crash your economy by spending too many orders moving scouts and not enough orders on the nuts and bolts of the economy.
Most of the time, players find themselves in an economic death spiral because several factors converged at once. ie - you didn't spend as much time as you should have building the bedrock economy, then you expanded faster than it could keep up and on top of that, a neighboring Civ called you up and demanded a big bucket of resources from you and now you're bleeding red ink. It sucks but it happens, especially if you don't watch your econ like a hawk.
When it happens, here's what you do:
1) Make sure your workers get top billing. No matter what else is going on, workers get jobs. Half chop whatever forest/scrub is available and half building bedrock econ improvements. If that means you have to hang a unit out to dry here and there, so be it.
2) place half your cities on running "council" missions for gold and civics, and the other half on training specialists to bulk up your bedrock econ counts in tandem with worker activity.
3) Don't move any military unit unless you absolutely have to.
As you begin pulling your economy out of the muck, you can rotate cities - those that were running councils begin training specialists and those that were training specialists drop to council mode if and as needed until you start seeing surplusses again.
For a moderate death spiral, you can expect to lose a decade. For a nasty one, it could take as long as 30 years to pull yourself out of it.
Usually, it happens when you expand too quickly, but if you get an early game event that say, gives you +2 scouts you can crash your economy by spending too many orders moving scouts and not enough orders on the nuts and bolts of the economy.
Most of the time, players find themselves in an economic death spiral because several factors converged at once. ie - you didn't spend as much time as you should have building the bedrock economy, then you expanded faster than it could keep up and on top of that, a neighboring Civ called you up and demanded a big bucket of resources from you and now you're bleeding red ink. It sucks but it happens, especially if you don't watch your econ like a hawk.
When it happens, here's what you do:
1) Make sure your workers get top billing. No matter what else is going on, workers get jobs. Half chop whatever forest/scrub is available and half building bedrock econ improvements. If that means you have to hang a unit out to dry here and there, so be it.
2) place half your cities on running "council" missions for gold and civics, and the other half on training specialists to bulk up your bedrock econ counts in tandem with worker activity.
3) Don't move any military unit unless you absolutely have to.
As you begin pulling your economy out of the muck, you can rotate cities - those that were running councils begin training specialists and those that were training specialists drop to council mode if and as needed until you start seeing surplusses again.
For a moderate death spiral, you can expect to lose a decade. For a nasty one, it could take as long as 30 years to pull yourself out of it.
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