Gold!

[Lou Wigman]

A bit of background first. I reach a point in my games where all my cities are losing money. Clearly I am misunderstanding how gold is calculated. When a building gives 10% gold is this 10% of the NET gold or 10% of the BASE gold. In trying to figure this out I went back to basics.

At the start of the game my income looks like this
Tyranny - gold coeff .75
Science Tax 50%

Collected 34
Crime 1
Wages 5

This leads to
Science 12
Savings 9

Again

Collected 31
Crime1
Wages 5

This leads to
Science 10
Wages 8

How on earth are these figures arrived at?

[Martin Gühmann]

The question is what mod you are playing. For example you shouldn't have any problem with gold income in ApolytonPack, but in MedPack2 you have really work to get a positive gold income. To achieve this you should build commerce tile improvemenzs arount your city like Ports, Trading Posts, Shopping Malls, Nature Preserves and Drilling Platforms. Additional you should use Merchants, to raise your gold income. At least this helped me in MedPack2, unfortunatly you have to keep an eye on it.

-Martin

[Immortal Wombat]

How much population do you have?

[child of Thor]

you know compared to say Civ1 or Civ2 it does seem that sometimes you need to be an accountant to work out EXACTLY how money works in CTP2, especially when you start trading(but luckily, usually if you have a few good ones then money never seems to be a real problem). I tried once with a friend to get it all on paper, but we never worked it out to our satisfaction and just gave up in the end.So now if i'm starting to struggle with money i just get as many trade routes up as i can.

[Lou Wigman]

The issue here is that knowing the income that is being produced by the surrounding tiles (and trade, structures etc) how do you calculate how much gold you actually get. Thus in the example above I know that 34 gold is collected collected but due to the governement type, science, wages, crime and maintenance I am not going to get all of this amount. In this simple example all these are KNOWN quantities and the answer must lie with these. When the city manager is fired up it shows just how much is left after all these deductions. But where does this number come from exactly. With the figures I quoted above there appears to be no permutation or combination of calculations that can give the answer. So how does CTP2 work this out?

Ths is of critical importance. I want to build a 'City Clock' in Cradle. This gives 10% gold but costs 5 gold in maintenance. Question is 10% of what? When I actually built a city clock in a size 28 city my net gold actually went DOWN. So how do you know whether to build it or not? Unfortunately the city manager appears to be of no use here since it doesn't give a complete breakdown of that city's finances. This makes sensible decisions about what to build completely impossible.

In an earlier incarnation the various improvements gave a gold/citizen amount. This has the virtue of being extremely simple and it is instantly recognisable whether the structure should be built or not. Unless and until this issue can be resolved I respectfully suggest that mod makers revert to using gold/citizen rather than % increases.

[Lou Wigman]

OK, here's another baffling example.

Dynasty, gold coeff 1, knowledge coeff 1.25
City size 8 - i.e. all surrounding squares fully worked.

This gives gross commerce of 80

crime 17% -> 14
leaves 66

science 60% -> 40 but city manager says 34
savings 40% -> 26
wages -> 32 (8x4)
maintenance -> 2 (shrine,ziggurat)

leaves -> -8 but city manager says 15.

There are other ways to perform these calcultaions but NONE of them come even close to what is actually displayed in the city manager.

Should I build a Bazaar here or not? (15% gold - maintenance 1). I did this but it had no effect on the final figure. I did determine that any gold from trade does NOT have the 15% modifier applied even though this amount is added to the net gold in the city manager.

This is all way, way to complicated to base any sensible decisions on!

[centrifuge]

Sounds like a cluster F@#k to me. Sorry for not being of any help.