Hello all
I am not entirely sure about what the value of currency is. It allows gold trading which is GREAT but often people talk about currency as being a bit of a life saver regarding economies that are crashing. I don't really see how.
If I have, say, 5 cities when I get currency thats +5 trade routes right? Which worse case scenario is +5 gold when I'm at 0%? That's not great really is it seeing as I can trade a cow for that now?
Even at the upper end, You're looking at maybe +10 to +15 gold (Which would be great) with foreign trade routes. So is this the assumption people are making?
Thanks in advance!
The trade routes help most when your economy is under more stress. If you are doing a good job of balancing your expenses gaining a trade route per city doesn't seem like much. When you are in the middle of economy-wrecking war or have REXed so hard you are hemorrhaging gold even at 0% slider, every little bit helps. The effect is also more pronounced when you have more cities, as each of your own cities can route to each other without a limit unlike foreign cities, though foreign cities give more.
As rah stated in the immediate reply, it's actually the ability to build wealth that helps you most to alleviate economic pressure. It can be difficult to have enough developed cottages in the early game stages to offset expenses of a large army or massive maintenance, but being able to also throw any hammers the city generates from its tiles directly into gold at a 1:1 ratio (commerce is only 1:1 at 0% slider) helps a ton when it
supplements your taxed commerce income. Really it's similar to using wonders for fail-gold, but you can do it constantly instead of banking for a payoff later. This is an extreme simplification of fail-gold abuse, but the idea is the same: avoid going broke by turning hammers into gold (not commerce). The trade routes are mostly icing on top of that, minor but nice.
If you are going to war or running heavily in the red trying to score a particular tech, the option to trade off techs for a lump sum can also be a lifesaver to prevent strike. You can go to war heavily in deficit at 0% and use conquest gold and selling tech to keep up the momentum, or you can blast at 100% slider to secure something you really need (ex. Construction or HBR before going on an elepult push). The advantage to this is, if you have the tech to sell off, you can essentially focus on building other things with your hammers (like military, or wonders you actually want to complete) and simply pick up gold when other civs come into money. They are always picking up cash from failing to build wonders or warring with each other, and you can snag it to fuel your economy with trading chips. Very handy.
The resource trading for GP is something I don't do a whole lot since you generally need a good chunk of land to have resources beyond what you can trade for other ones you need, but along with the +1 trade routes, every little bit helps in a stressed economy. If you have the surplus resources and they have the GPT, you might as well take it, right?. It will also eventually give you up to +2 diplo bonus with them if you maintain it long enough and they don't have to have a resource you don't have to take advantage of this. In times of less hardship, there is also an aggressive trading strategy you can use to artificially increase the amount they'll pay for a resource if you have the spare income and 10 turns to spare subsidizing them GPT. It always seems way too involved for me to bother though.
Currency is a very important tech indeed. It comes along right about the time your economy is likely to be most stressed and helps you dig out. Surviving or avoiding a crash is key to allowing you get what you want done instead of sitting there losing units to strike and working water tiles waiting for your cottages/pop to catch up. It's so important I agonize in most of my games about whether to go tech/bulb Alpha first or Math> Currency then tech/trade for Alpha after Writing.
from religious techs etc. You also have much more room to expand and currency helps in that a lot. I think currency is one of the best techs to Oracle, if you can pull it off.
