Balance: A look at Gold

Gold income is rediculous in the early game (and not in a positive sense). Seriously there needs to be a base ammount of gold earned by each city/empire/square of land owned/something! in order to support the infastructure and defenses of cities in the early game. It feels like gold is restricted purposely to slow down the early game. Unforunately that doesn't mesh well with champions trouncing around the map and selling loot for rediculous gold.

In the event anyone did not notice units now consume an ammount of gold equal to their production cost. This was done to make constructed units have more variety? I'm not sure how I feel about this really. I probably wouldn't care so much if early game I could produce enough income to support more than 1 unit per city other than peasants. What blows my mind is that though the cost to support units has drastically increased the income from cities hasn't changed. In fact now that merchants are a level up option only it has decreased! Sure I can tech up to build units in a decent ammount of time, but if I can't support the cost to use them, what is the point?

As a side note I recieved a bow with +6 peirce + 6 fire from... the noble delivery quest! Worth around 480 gold. About 10 turns in! Balanced!

In any case here is my suggestion:

At tax rates low/moderate/high your -empire- should produce 2/5/8. This ammount is not modified by buildings etc.

and

A: At tax rates low/moderate/high/brutal/oppressive your -cities- should produce 1/2/3/4/5. This ammount is modified by buildings etc and is a supplement to the taxes you normally recieve.

or

B: Double current city tax rates 

Doing this should both 1: Remove the no brainer decision to drop taxes to zero at the start and 2: provide players the means to support troops at the start of the game. As a side note if production determines the cost of units... do the gildar and yithril cheaper unit traits reduce support costs too? I should really check that out..

Hahaha damn that bow is worth 480g huh. I got that quest and decided to turn in the noblewoman just to see what happened and the bandits paid me 200g. I r a sucka!

Interesting that Markets are moved to a city-upgrade-option. At turn 40 I hadn't any size 2 cities so I didn't know.

I suppose I don't mind this, but taxes need to be increased in effectiveness.

I think current taxes should be doubled. (normal taxes being 6% instead of 3%, etc)

Increasing the ammount earned per citizen would be a good idea for the middle->late game too. Could replace the set bonuses from cities (I'll add that). The empire still needs some start up gold per turn though. Otherwise you'll have tech and no way to use it.

Oh, are markets removed for empire? ... I'm playing Empire because you can't have a Quendar 'Kingdom'

-> Or do u mean base gold?

If you mean base gold ... then people needing gold can always just choose 'market' for their city level-ups.

(I can see how the Devs might not want +X gold buildings in order to limit early growth ... but I think a few more sources of +10% gold in the early game wouldn't hurt)

I dunno. I'd almost prefer the techs increasing the $$$ you get from cities rather than monkeying around with the taxes. That way, players are making a choice.

As the game gets more balanced, I think you'll see that some people may want to turn down the difficulty (we're probably going to have Easy be the default instead of Normal) since a lot of users are used to gold just spilling everywhere.

There is also the question of whether the game should be set up so that players are always having to have their cities do something.  I'd personally prefer to see more improvements that give a benefit to cities that aren't building or training.

I actually think its going in the right direction.  I didn't have many problems with gold in the early / midgame on a small map, even though my empire ran on about -4 gold a turn, killing trash mobs more than made up for it.  I couldn't hire more than a few champions and I didn't buy too much at the store, but that to me is good.  Even had enough to rush build a bit as needed, and if I had to, I had about 6k in items I could have sold.

By the lategame I had thousands in store.  I mostly went food per grain upgrades (garden, etc) in my capitol, and that ended up with a lot of good tax benefits.  My secondary cities I grabbed merchants, but beyond that didn't focus on gold.  I didn't have a lot of heavy troop defenses, due to my map layout, so that might have helped a good bit (perhaps a dozen or so normal troops and 3 champs).

If I had to balance based on a kneejerk I'd say drop taxes from conquered cities to about 1/3 of current, bump taxes on your own cities by a touch, and increase populations on higher level cities so that those big high prestige level 4/5 cities are gold mountains in and of themselves.  Also perhaps cutting a bit of the upkeep on normal troops by a touch.  But at least on my game and playstyle it felt *good* I made choices, didn't hire everyone, sometimes held back from things due to gold lack.  Will have to see how more games go before I say anything, but so far its been really good for me.

And this is fine. I just don't see enough of these types of improvements in the early game ... which is where the largest problem of "running out of stuff to build" comes in ... where you either do absolutely nothing or unit spam.

Back in 0.77 there was no reason to build such buildings, but now I think there could be. Especially with gold, would 'indirectly' increase taxes, and by increasing taxes would have more reason to use the 'economy' as a source of gold. (as opposed to conquest, questing, and items)

-> I love questing though, please don't nerf questing ... its a good space/time alternative to rushing.

Easy solution: make a"trade gods"type option for when the build queue is empty. While we're at it, how about housing as well? These mechanics always work well in 4x games. That way you can make more gold and not waste with an empty queue.

I also think this is what we need. The gold in this game I'm playing feels tight but I think that's a good thing. I'm making due by selling items from mobs which I think is pretty cool.

Right now I have like 4 build queues empty and that is kinda inneficient, though I may have over expanded. Maybe i would be making more money if I had not made all those extra cities?

I think the balance is almost there but like Frogboy said, I feel that making the techs increase money should be a choice the player should take.

I just had another idea.

Reduce the upkeep of units while stationed inside cities. Maybe increase/unlock with a tech tree. It could even be in the military tree tacked on to logistics or something .

Not to steal from MOM, but allowing the player to choose housing (growth) or trade goods (gildar) is a pretty solid mechanic for empty build queues. Hell, you could even allow worship or something to create additional mana. To provide more choices, you could allow focus on whatever resource is tied to the city. For example, if the town has a mine allow focus on metal or crystals or diplomatic capital even if the city has that resource.

Now there's still the issue of resource excesses. So what happens if you have a ton of gildar but no mana? Unsure if you removed alchemy from the game but MOM would give the player choice by turning excess A into some B (for a cost of course).

The values of items for sale and purchase do seem out of whack compared to the economies of cities. You could probably reduce the value of all items for sale or purchase to scale better with current city incomes. The idea that I could find a 1000g magic item, walk to one of my cities or even outpost zoc, and sell it for 500g (who the hell just bought it for 500g?) and then finance my kingdom's deficit for tens or hundreds of turns doesn't seem right.

The alternative would be to increase the revenue incomes of cities to scale better with the value of items. I like former approach rather than the latter.

With all that said I'm glad the 0.85 build reduced the normal unit upkeep rates - along with all the other improvements. Keep kicking ass.

Hmm ... having "bonus growth" and "bonus gold" as alternate build ques is certainly a good idea

-> I can see how the 'growth' part might disrupt the pacing balance the devs have been working on (not to mention making +growth buildings obsolete) .. but at least the 'gold' part would be nice.

No! why did I build the production facilities in the city then???

This is a conflicting mechanic. you should always have something to do with your production. Even during peace time. MOM and many other games have this part RIGHT.

You should check a late FE game with many cities. you just build more units and nothing else. Excess production should either:

1. provide money

2. provide pop growth (housing)

3. get shipped to another city.

Buildings that "work better" when the city is doing nothing is really an inflexible HIDDEN 4rth option in the list above.

Moving the Merchant to a citylevelup bonus is a great idea. But now it needs to be +3 or +4 per turn. City spam is very well under control. There is no need to worry about this being taken advantage of. We need to be able to compensate for not getting any gold mines. People who already have a good economy can choose other options. But leave the option open to reward players with direct gold. Some cities will only get to that level. 

I also think that the gold needs to flow a little more free in Act II and especially Act III. I need gold to equip heroes, but the costs have thus far prevented me from even buying one piece of armor for my heroes. There is a commonly agreed disconnect between city gold revenues and the cost of researched and then crafted items. I am not saying that I should get them free, but I need to be able to outfit at lest one hero at a reasonable price. 

Maybe I was misunderstood. But what I was thinking was techs doing something like Civ 4, where you research Currency and that allows you to produce wealth.

This produced "wealth" could be made more efficient with techs deeper in the tree.

People generally don't like their cities doing nothing.  What's needed I think in this regard is more great projects like the Great Mill, especially earlier in the game.

I can see where you're coming from with your design philosophy, but I can see folks saying it's dull.  People love to hit buttons.

Well, a massive surplus of Gold is rarely a good sign... if you have a surplus, lower the taxes, fuel that tech and get the research flowing for more and better units and armies. Or buy your way up in a city, this works nicely in 4X4.

Once the gold is balanced better, I do like the idea that we have to chose between hero equipment and science funding. 

IMO Markets should give +X gold per city (per market) or +X% trade route bonus between cities with markets, or some reasonable combination of both.  Point being, they should do little on their own, but when connected to other markets, they flourish.

Maybe +3 gildar and +1 gildar per market connected by roads. I like that. 

If buildings are supposed to scale with the city instead of having to build multiple copies as in WoM, then perhaps the cost should scale as well.  A combination of fixed and percentage cost to operate the building would level the income a bit, increasing early income and reducing late game income.

Apart from that, I think the best idea is to reduce troop cost when stationed in a city.  Reducing stationed troop costs would make garrisons cheaper and more interresting than the automatic militia units, reduce steamrolling, and give you something more to do with your build queue.

I see Frogboy's point that buildings that give +X when the queue is empty allow you to get something when the queue is empty, and customize what that is.  Building several different kinds could give you multiple bonuses when the queue is empty.  The problem is that most of those buildings are city upgrade bonuses, so you make the decision once and can't change your mind later when situations change.  Those buildings are also costing you money just to have, even when the queue is full, so they are pointless to build until you are basically ready to abandon the city's queue.  Maybe if they only cost maintenance when the queue is empty, or did something when the queue is full?

The alternative is to have techs or even city level bonuses that allow you to build Trade Goods, etc.  This alternative allows you to change your strategy as your needs change without having to rip/replace buildings.  The down side is that you would only get one bonus at a time per city, but distributed over multiple cities, you could diversify your empty cities if needed.  It would also require a little more work in queue management, but less work in planning empty queue bonuses for cities by building.  The bonuses you get from empty queue buildings isn't all that visible.  Maybe this is more of a UI issue.

I got a market i think on level up and whenever the queue is empty it gives me like plus 20% income, takes my income from 13 a turn to 21 a turn so its a big boost. I have two cities and not having much trouble with gold. No gold mines too. I don't have a huge army though. I have 4 units defending my 2 cities and 2 heroes and 5 units in my army (4 of those being 5 man groups and one just the normal 3 man)

Market is +2 gold. There are other tax percentage improvements. 

A 20% increase won't make your income go from 13 to 21.

Instead your Income went from 40 to 48, and your expenses remained at 27.

Therefore it was your Profit that increased from 13 to 21

and what a nice increase! 61% jump in profits!