[3C][Gameplay]No gold income

You can build a merchant as soon as you have some materials.

Game is playable again!

Win!

+1 for 1gpt/city

There's always gold to be taken from huts, so its kind of a moot point. 

First thing I do is build a workshop..

I think with the new gold upkeep, we suddenly have another limiting factor on growth.  Your 5th city costs more in maintenance alone than an entire gold mine.  Between food and gold requirements, players will find themselves tapering off in power relatively quickly. 

The feeling I'm trying to get is my Sovereign slowly bringing a wasteland back to life.  The artificial "end of the line" just gets on my nerves.  If I took every territory in the world except one, I'd still peter out of food+gold well before I finished that goal. 

Yes, I'm a Civ-series fan.  I admit it.  I want to see cities grow up to be self-sufficient at some (perhaps high) cost.  I want to know that adding a city won't be a game-losing mistake in the long-run.  If I wanted just 12 cities on a large map over the course of the game, the new upkeep totals 78gold.  Unless I have several gold-specialists cities of those 12, I would end up painfully in the red.  I glitched a duplicate wonder (+100% gold) in a city with a goldmine and all gold bonuses and only ended up with 21gold/turn.

When I thought we were going to balance at fewer cities than Civ, I didn't realize half of them would be paying the gold upkeep on them with the other half paying a food upkeep.  I'd still need 8-10 food resources and 8-10 gold mines, even then, to maintain a weak economy.

Yes, but the net effect is to slow down the early game a lot, and there's nothing gained out of it.

Providing revenue from the initial city would solve the problem, wouldn't unablance anything (you can even restrict it to the capital if you're afraid of city spam side effects) and speed up the early game a little.

dunno

in all my games i reach 5 10 k gold no problem

I'd have to say I'm in favor of this as well... a small bonus to your capital city, maybe 1 or 2 gold per turn. Just to kick-start the first ten minutes of the game. Adventure and such should still be a huge part, and will be.

How many cities?  At what income?  What does adding cities do to your overall economy?

Four perfectly placed cities, right now, seem to be the ideal for gold. The gains for other resources are almost certain to increase slower than the costs in gold (to the point that you must decide on a balance).

You can't get more than 2-3gold per town without resources.  Maybe 6 materials or so?  It really diminishes returns when resources are all taken and you try to add cities.

Around 7 or 8 cities, it's not worth building specifically for gold mines because the city costs more than the mines... I'm not fond of that.

It's similar with food.  I'm still hoping for a long-term way to enable virtually unlimited food (perhaps at a high but not permanent essence-level cost), while I'm 100% for the food-grab early in the game.

This part doesn't bother me and it is I think deliberate - they want the focus to be on the resources, and not just planting cities anywhere there's an open spot with some grasslands like in Civ4, and the current system seems to achieve this.

But I agree that this is a problem.. it's why I was against some artificial maintenance cap. Massive city-spamming empires shouldn't be easy to create, and they certainly shouldn't be the best/only way to play a-la-Civ4, but it should at least be a possibility. Perhaps a less-than-ideal possibility so that we don't see these every game, if that's the tone they want to set for Elemental, but not impossible.. this stacking maintenance cost makes it a certainty that, at some point, one more city is frankly impossible no matter what resources it's near or how strong your economy is.

If we must have a maintenance cost, I think a better system would be a percent maintenance that increases multiplicatively as you get more cities; say each additional city costs you 20% of your (current) income, such that 1 city = 100% gold generation, 2 = 80%, 3 = 64%, 4 = 51%, and so on. As you get more cities this formula asymptotically approaches 0% income; this means your income gradually gets closer to 0, but never goes negative. So you can technically make your empire as big as you want, you just eventually get to a point where you can't afford to buy new stuff or military maintenance. But still it's never impossible to continue growing your empire due to negative income, just impractical.

[By the way, the 20% formula above would put the point of diminishing returns at about 5 cities - if each city produces about the same income (obviously not the case, but assume it for the sake of argument) then 4 or 5 cities have nearly identical income, making the 5th city not worth the cost to build, with a 6th city actually lowering your income even once it's built up - the point is that you can still build a 6th city next to a gold mine if you really want to, without your income going into negatives, you'll just be making less gold than before - it's impractical, not impossible. I think the ideal empire being 4-5 cities is a good number, but by adjusting the percent you can make it any number you want.]

Starcraft sucks. You have to mine resources to get stuff. You should just get stuff...

Unless they are were put on the chopping block - I'm pretty sure that the gold costs are to encourage creation of vassal states

You just reminded me of Kohan with that.  You also REALLY reminded me how badly I'd love to see you guys make a Kohan-like game.  Too bad it won't happen for at least 10 years.

I don't like negative feedback loops.  Generally if you're steamrolling in a game like this, you should be able to finish the game pretty quickly.  Dragging things out isn't fun.

5-10k gold is easy. Just build caravans. You get them in the first research of the diplomacy tree. I think you can send them to allied towns too, though I haven't been able to test it yet. Caravans are super overpowered...

And also.. you're an idiot. 5 gold from a gold mine.. what if your city has two? What if it's a gold production city? You can pretty easily get a tier 2 city for +20% gold production, what about pubs and inns and markets, and god forbid you actually build that palace! Not to mention the other percentage bonus buildings for gold.. I already have a single city ramming out 47 some odd gold, without caravan routes. 47 gold is enough to support 9 cities by itself along with 20 units for defense. The other 9 cities can ram out gold buildings themselves. Don't forget treaties.. lord man. The start of the game is meant for exploring, where you wander around looking for purses and dragon bones (100g is probably too much for a level 1 adventure place by the way), not immediately having a fully operational city. And I always build the mill first too..

47 gold takes max *everything*.  Something you can't do very well in more than one city.  You're not going to get 2 like that.  In most maps, you can't even find 1 location flanked with 2 gold mines.  And you say it's enough to upkeep 9 cities?  Sure.  With no extra cash.  Even with another gold mine, you're in the negative if you build a 10th.

I don't know the story with caravans and exactly what they give.  I still haven't figured that part out.

With Caravan routes it's producing 178... I have two other cities that are also ramming out some high end gold. I'm absolutely certain that the cost for additional settlements is an easy decision to build as long as you have a city or 2 that is producing lots of gold, as the caravan from high production cities carry more. I'm not sure what the exact number is, but you need x gold cities per expansion city to be able to perpetually expand. As each new city you build will be another trade route for ALL your cities.

Right now there's no point building your city before you've explored and earned a lot of gold. Since the starting position has been cheated into a position with lots of resources (fertile land, mines, horses, whatever), it's a bit awkward.

First, let's remember balancing isn't completely done.

Second, I mostly disagree with the OP. Yeah gold is scarce in 3c at the beginning of the game, but it should be. I (like ddd888) ended up with 30-40K+ gildars and taking over the entire (large) map in two of my games...my gildar income was around 150/turn by game's end with 10-12 cities.

Of course balancing isn't done, that's why I provide feedback

Gold is a big issue to me.

Early on, there's no point building a city because it can't produce gold.

So you are reduced to ONE option, NO choice: Explore and pop goody huts. I like huts, but having no choice is not fun.

Later on, I find myself conquering a few cities and suddenly I drop to negative gold. I built 4 cities, only built food, pop and gold improvements, have very few units, built caravans to establish trade routes within my cities and with my neighbour.

Still, I find myself with <0 gold for some reason, which I don't understand.

I don't think getting into negative gold should be allowed. I know credit exists IRL, but here, who's going to lend us money?

IF we get into negative gold, we should be warned.

We should get an explanation how we dropped there, right now there is none.

In the Kingdom report, I can read the income:

+16.6, spending = 16.6. But then Caravans/traders income does not appear, which means the figures shown there are false. I actually have positive income, and yet managed to get far into negatives. How is it possible? It should not.

Also, 'Admin Cost' is not explained. I'm pretty sure it's linked to the number of cities or something like that, but it's not explained anywhere.

Worse, cities can't be disbanded or razed. I mean, I just conquered a city of Fallen, I might want to rase it to the ground, but I don't have the option.

In general, the Kingodm Report window should be changed by providing contextual info and explanations when you hover/right-click/click/select/pick your preferred interaction on information.

Wages are also weird. All my units cost 0.2 wage, be it a peasant (cost 3) or an armoured axeman (cost 55).

Also, why can't you build caravans when you have no gold? It's penalising you by removing one tool to remedy the problem.

@Brad

Wow the whining is finally getting to you eh... So you don't have infinite patience after all.

Can't say that I blame you.

In the game I played I had so much gold I didn't know what to do with it all.

I had 5 cities, an income of 50+ gold per turn and 90% of that income game from one city (Level 4, Specialized in Gold production with lots of gold bonus improvements and 2 gold mines.)

To me this is a non-issue and a text book case of "grass is greener" syndrome.

Its perfectly possible to have plenty of cities and a strong economy if you develop them wisely and place them wisely.

Oooh but there is that word again... "Wisely".

Let me remind you that this is a "Strategy" game. Which requires, imagine that, Strategical placement of your cities.

  Yeah in my current game I have 8 cities and a gold production of 45 per turn.   Course if someone really has a problem with it they could just mod some changes till they're happy.  I think it does all boils down to patience. Some people want to expand and build things non stop, anything that slows them down is just in the way. RTS games spoiled them

  I'm old school, I like a game that makes me think. I'm not just churning out the same units over, and over with no thought of supply , or upkeep. I for see in multiplayer games huge fights over who controls the resources.  Over extend yourself and you could find yourself in a really bad position.

I first also thougt gold is a problem, and in fact it is. However that Problem is covered by another unbalancingg fact: The quadratic growth [2 * (N-1) * (N-1)] of the caravan network with the number of cities. I think we need serious rebalancing of caravans. 

Err the wages for units actually makes sense, with the exception of elites perhaps. The reason being that the peasant you hired to fight for you didn't purchase the equipment himself, you bought all that stuff for him, and thus he BENEFITS from having better equipment rather than a shitty spear. The same could be said for real armies. You don't pay the guy manning the machine gun more than the guy with the rifle.

Perhaps you are confusing wages with equipment upkeep (which the game doesn't do)

I don't get how you can be wise by being so bad. I'm really sofry, but you can't reach a high gold income in this game right now. You should have won before.

Right now, the ai is not in. I can just build up my sovereign, buy him some weapon and cheap armor, increase his strength, and conquer all the opponents with him alone. When I've done that, I have a total income that lets me buy maybe one decent soldier every 4 turns.

I'm not saying you must gain gold by doing nothing, I'm saying early on, you havee zero choice and zero indication about what you should do, so there is no wisdom or strategy involved. You MUST build a workshop to build a merchant to get gold. There's zero intelligence required, you just have to go through the moves.

Also, the Kingdom report doesn't provide useful information on what your costs are and what's the formula for it, so you're going to have to guess and learn by trial and error, which is not the funniest thing.

Err.. I usually build a research building before the merchant.. in fact I often skip the merchant altogether for my first few cities, as I find enough gold from adventure points. Those dragon bones give 100g each, which would be a gruelling 100 turns with a single merchant, which is simply not worth the wait in my opinion.

I agree however that the information could be better displayed, as I have no idea what my caravans are pulling in, nor can I tell what that '10%' from trade applies to in the city screen, and whether or not it's exponential (which it seems to be). As far as pacing is concerned.. it might be true that you obtain too little gold at the start and too much at the end.. but without that curve, it's doubtful you could ever afford those 800g items for your champions, so I'm not entirely convinced there is anything wrong with it.