Too much money?

[Demetrios_of_Messene]

In my games, I always end up with huge amount of annual income (I always expand to at least 10 provinces). What is your take on this? I would propose the following:

- Buildings should also require some money for maintenance in addition to infrastructure. Keep the buildings in Capital region (and maybe province?) free of such burden to help small states.

- Unit maintenance in money should be increased a bit. Give capital province discounted money maintenance for let's say up to 20 units stationed there to help small states build up their forces.
OR increase the cost of additional standard units (similar to provincial units but not so steep increase) after a certain number, let's say minimum 8 per unit type have normal cost and any additional units have increasing cost.

[LDiCesare]

I usually bathe in money until there's a war. At that point, I buy a lot of units, thinking I have a lot of money, and then it soon hurts and I micromanage all my regions from culture to money till I am positive again.
If anything, the somewhat obscure factor about bureaucracy could be explained and increased, in order to penalise large empires (and there's already an option to turn it off if you don't like it).

[loki100]

I thnk there is a particularly Greek/Hellene issue here.

by the time you are regularly building tier II commerce buildings the Stoa is just too much. Here's one from my current game -

2019-08-13_115806.jpg (74.8 KiB) Viewed 2329 times

team that with a market and a couple of those clothing/weaving buildings and you can be producing 1500+ gold from a region with no population assigned to commerce.

not sure what is feasible, but I'd suggest the Stoa should be no more than one per province or something like that (& drop into tier III)?

[jimwinsor]

Judean Merchant District is like a Stoa too. I guess the issue here is that the 5% faction-wide bonuses stack? They probably shouldn’t stack.

Carthage can wallow in cash too, without Stoas/JMDs. My just completed stream game had a Carthage income of 16,000 +.

[LDiCesare]

Even with Dacia I'm full of money.
But it's even worse with metal. I always have a lot of it, and sell some for money from time to time. Also, I get rid of manpower for money because manpower tends to be very plentiful mid- and late-game. At least during war or for some decisions, I spend my money.

[WG]

Are all of you spending money on diplomacy? The expense for diplomacy seems to scale up with size.

[loki100]

yes, am handing 10-12,000 gold every few turns to my favoured allies, the ones with mercenary centres actually make decent use of it, fighting some wars for me

[elxaime]

In reality, especially in the era before the modern state, banking, bureaucracy and record keeping, several things would mitigate the money issue:

- inflation
- corruption/bribery
- weak taxation systems
- consumer demand issues

The game probably needs more work on these. But again, the consequence might be to add factors that make the game less "fun" as people realize there are limits to their various schemes imposed by external factors.

[Wulfburk]

Corruption needs to be a lot bigger, giving more use to the specific set of lawful buildings (such as court and what not)

[Demetrios_of_Messene]

Are all of you spending money on diplomacy? The expense for diplomacy seems to scale up with size.

This is what I also end up doing.

In reality, especially in the era before the modern state, banking, bureaucracy and record keeping, several things would mitigate the money issue:

- inflation
- corruption/bribery
- weak taxation systems
- consumer demand issues

The game probably needs more work on these. But again, the consequence might be to add factors that make the game less "fun" as people realize there are limits to their various schemes imposed by external factors.

All valid points, I would also add that campaigns outside your borders were much more expensive than the already costly maintenance of large standing armies (like Roman and Hellenistic ones).

Corruption needs to be a lot bigger, giving more use to the specific set of lawful buildings (such as court and what not)

Agreed. Currently such buildings may help with decadence, which is usually related to corruption in real life, but in-game they are irrelevant to income and administrative burden as far as I can understand.

[Soar]

Decadence reduction buildings feed into the CDR equation, and old or decadent nations get major income penalties reflecting a state of rampant corruption. There's also the frequent 'corrupt governor' event that gives a tax penalty to regions, but tax usually makes up only a small portion of income compared to other sources, so it's largely irrelevant.

[vakarr]

I remember thinking I had too much money and what use is it anyway... until I had a rebellion or another state attacked me, and then I was offered a decision that cost 17,000 gold. Now I have 27,000 and I'm wondering what decision will be offered to me that costs that much! I have a large empire and need all that extra cash for the armies guarding my borders and the ones repressing the peasants

[sage3]

In general, I think that there is too much metal, manpower, equipment and money... Resources should just be more scarce.

[Ancient One]

In general, I think that there is too much metal, manpower, equipment and money... Resources should just be more scarce.

Agreed.

[vakarr]

All I have to do, is build a few units - to find myself short of metal again, probably as I don't worry too much about the size of my armies so I'm only increasing metal by 180 per turn. I remember on my first try at playing this game that metal figures did go through the roof so perhaps it depends if you have a tribal nation or not? Manpower - that was a problem for a long time at least until my first king died - he had a 20% manpower penalty, but now I would say that with a manpower total of more than 10,000 (initially during the beta this large number couldn't even show) I wish there was more I could do with the manpower than the occasional convert to metal or money for a few of them. Equipment - hard to tell, when you have to take more than one turn to build a unit, was that due to equipment shortages? Yes I have had to do that on occasion but I think I have plenty now and only build the equipment buildings so I can get the higher level military buildings.

[LDiCesare]

I think manpower could maybe be changed so that creating a lot of units actually costs population. Or takes from the food stockpile points of population. And maybe remove manpower altogether. This way, we would only have to avoid snowballing money and metal.
Lack of metal is usually easy to circumvent, since you can buy mercenaries instead of metal-hungry units, but except in the early game, I've never been short on metal or manpower.