Unit supply & maintenance costs?

[Grotius]

What exactly is unit "supply"? I vaguely recall reading something about it in Civ 5 previews, but I can't find much on it in the manual. Is it a hard cap on how many units I can build? A soft cap?

Also, are unit maintenance costs listed somewhere? The manual doesn't seem to do so, and the Civilopedia says they're in the Civilopedia -- but I don't see them there.

Thanks!

 

[Williscwm]

There is a cap. It's calculated based on number of cities and population count and a few other things. I've noticed the cap is usually higher then a civ can afford to maintain with out going into negative gold per turn. To view the cap, it's in the military overview menu. I'm typing this at work from memory, is found under the first button on th left, in the top left corne, that drops down for a few over view options.

 

[krunsh]

I'd realy like more information on units individual maitnenance cost. Anyway to find them?

Building are listed in the civilopedia but not units.

 

[Zhahz]

Supply is a limiter on how many units you can build - but I don't think it has anything to do with unit maintenance.

It would be nice if unit maintenance was more transparent. It's actually absolutely annoying that it's not transparent.

Managing my economy has been one of the biggest challenges for me so far in Civ 5 and not knowing up front how much maint a unit will cost makes deciding whether to build units or not a pain in my backside. You also never know whether you should delete a few units or not because you have no idea what's costing you what. Does that outdated archer cost you as much as that new mech inf? Who freaking knows?

 

[Cymsdale]

The maintenance cost of units appears to make supply a fairly meaningless mechanic. If it was removed from the game, I doubt it would cause any issues.

 

[Williscwm]

Like I said the game reveals the cap, which is usually difficult to afford to field an army that size, gold wise, or resource wise.

I've noticed the manta. Cost not being clear in the game is a huge issue with a lot of players, and something I hope firaxis, addresses in a patch or even a post.

 

[jtwood]

I'd realy like more information on units individual maitnenance cost. Anyway to find them?

Building are listed in the civilopedia but not units.

The 'pedia officially states that you can see unit maintenance cost on the unit page...

...and that's noticeably missing from the unit page.

Have I mentioned that I really don't like V's 'pedia. I loathe it. I really do.

 

[Ayestes]

Seeing as how in my two games Unit Maintenance was half of my expenses I do see a reason that it is in the game. Or else my armies would even be larger and I'd feel no need to manage its' size. I could road a whole lot more, build buildings without regard to expense, or the gold in the game would have to be modified to match it.

I'm really starting to believe that Unit Maintenance is exponential in growth. You really gotta cut Workers after a certain point to support an army which can rival an opponent equal in tech.

 

[Ahriman]

Seeing as how in my two games Unit Maintenance was half of my expenses I do see a reason that it is in the game

You're confusing two mechanics.

There is unit maintenance, in gold cost.

There is also the "supply limit", which is a hardcap on the number of units you can build.

No-one is saying the former is unimportant. But the latter really never binds unless you have a huuuge army, so people would not tend to notice if it was removed.

I think it would be very weird if the maintenance cost of unit A depended on how many other units you had.

More speculation: maybe unit maintenance depends on how many units you have *relative to your supply limit*??
So maybe you pay X gold up to 20% of your supply limit, Y gold for 21-40% of your supply limit, Z gold for 41-60% of your supply limit, and so forth. Z > Y > X.
And so supply limit does really matter?

 

[jtwood]

The 'pedia officially states that you can see unit maintenance cost on the unit page...

...and that's noticeably missing from the unit page.

Have I mentioned that I really don't like V's 'pedia. I loathe it. I really do.

I hate this manual, too:

Unit and Building Maintenance

Units and buildings both have “maintenance costs” that must be paid every turn. See the individual entries on the units and buildings for specific amounts. (Note that these maintenance costs are dependent upon the difficulty level at which you’re playing.)

Nary a unit shows its maintenance cost in the manual or 'pedia.

 

[Jaybe]

There is also "inflation" involved in the xml files.

While I wholeheartedly agree that unit maintenance is a useful mechanic for limiting military unit numbers, I eagerly await greater transparency. Is it based on purely number of units, or is there something involved with how costly or advanced a unit is? Gimme some numbers, dangit!!

 

[jtwood]

From the home page...

There has been a small bug-fix pushed-out for Civilization V. Not sure if its live in steam yet, but will be very soon.

Issues fixed include:

1. Game now runs if user path includes special characters.
2. AI will now make gold per turn deals in amounts other than 5 GPT.
3. Open borders is canceled immediately if war is declared and troops in enemy lands displaced.
4. AI valuation of cities in trades and peace deals improved.
5. Unit maintenance now scales appropriately in Time Limit games.
6. Various crash fixes.

 

[Celevin]

4. AI valuation of cities in trades and peace deals improved.

AW, but I like seeing the AI gift me 8 cities for peace!

 

[Iberian]

Seriously frustrating not having the formulas. I hope in a week we will have a thread with all known formulas stickied to the top...

Anyway here is what I know: It doesn't matter which unit it cost the same. I delete a worker I get the same cost reduction as I do for a trebuchet. The other funny thing is it works in pairs. If I delete one unit i get a cost reduction (it is like 12 gold iirc) if I delete another I get nothing other than the gold from deleting it. On the third unit deleted I get the +12 gpt.

Generally I eliminate captured workers first, they don't pay 12gpt very well. Armies are never garrisoned because it cost too much. Keep them in the field. Always war seems to work fine in CiV.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Why did they have to do inflation.......
Having the individual units cost different amounts of gold would have been SO much better.
(just have it be 1 gold/20 production round down.... 1/50 for civilian units)

 

[Jaybe]

Why did they have to do inflation.......
Having the individual units cost different amounts of gold would have been SO much better.
(just have it be 1 gold/20 production round down.... 1/50 for civilian units)

BTW, I didn't specify how inflation is applied, just that it is used in the game. I saw it in the gamespeed xml where it is adjusted to the different ... game speeds.

So yeah, I would SUSPECT it also applies to unit maintenance, but ....

 

[kurtkage]

Unit costs not being transparent is seriously annoying, doubly so because even Without Building a single new unit in centuries my unit maint costs have doubled... I was thinking it was tied to the unit cap somehow and therefore tied to population, but I could swear that I had a turn where I had no pop growth, no new units, did not move any units, and Still my maint went up 3gold.

Please find the formula or put the info in the game! Military overview should show each units cost.

 

[Daniel D]

Here's what *might* be the relevant parts of the difficulty settings from the game data, but I still don't know how inflation comes into play. Inflation is only referenced in the game speed and handicap info data, but I don't have any clear idea about how it is applied in game.

EDIT: Please note that this is from pre-patch data.

Difficulty / Production Free Units / Production Free Units Population Percent / Inflation Percent
Settler / 10 / 50 / 60
Chieftrain / 7 / 50 / 70
Warlord / 7 / 50 / 80
Prince / 5 / 50 / 90
King / 5 / 50 / 100
Emperor / 5 / 50 / 100
Immortal / 5 / 50 / 100
Deity / 5 / 50 / 100

And this is from Gamespeed data:

Speed / Inflation Percent / Inflation Offset
Marathon / 10 / -270
Epic / 20 / -135
Standard / 30 / -90
Quick / 45 / -60

 

[Spatzimaus]

This is one of the most annoying parts of Civ5. On difficulty 2 I had a surplus of hundreds of gold per turn; on difficulty 4 I'm actually running in the red, mainly because of unit maintenance. It's over half my expenses in my current modern-era game; granted, I just blitzkreiged Napoleon, so my army's a bit larger than I really need, but it's still excessive.

This wouldn't be so bad, except it leads to a really bad strategy to encourage: no standing army. Don't keep ANY units on hand, just rush-buy whatever you need once a war starts and spend the peacetime turn building up a massive cash base. Sure, you might hold onto your highly-upgraded guy, or one roving cavalry to deal with barbarians, but that's the exception.

The other problem is Wealth. Other games (Master of Magic, for instance) had a similar problem with empires running at basically zero income in the late game, but all you needed to do was have a few cities go Wealth and it'd be all right.
But in Civ5? Wealth is Prod/10, meaning my size 16 capital gets MAYBE 7 gold per turn extra if it goes Wealth. It needs to be like Research, at Prod/4, and that's the first thing I plan to mod. (Second thing: I want the Palace to act like a toned-down Himeji Castle, giving +10% to all combats within your territory. Just enough to slow down early wars and Barbarians.)

 

[Spatzimaus]

After some thinking, I've come up with a couple possible solutions to this issue. Feedback? (Eventually I'll make a thread in the modding forums.)

1> Currently, there are three +XP buildings for land units: the Barracks, Armory, and Military Academy. The Academy is insanely expensive, so I never bother. So, I was thinking: instead of just +XP, the Academy could also increase the number of "free" units your empire can support by 1. A few of these would apparently go a LONG way towards offsetting this problem.
In fact, I kind of wonder whether this wasn't the original idea for this building. It's just SO expensive that it kind of stands out.

2> Currently, there doesn't seem to be any benefit to some strategic resources once they're outdated, mainly Iron and Horses. So I was thinking: pay each player a token amount per unused unit (1 or 2 gold per), with the exact amount depending on era, resource, game length, map size, etc.; not enough to make up for not building a Factory/power plant, but enough to keep you making a profit.
(Or, I was thinking of creating a new Industrial building, the Steel Mill, that required Iron but added building production like the Workshop, to encourage people to use up their excess. The Stable could be changed the same way for Horses: once you're in the Modern era and no longer have mounted units to make, the building now consumes one unit of Horses and adds, say, 5 gold. It'd be easy enough to create a second building that requires the Stable but has this effect, say, the Racetrack.)