(January 31st, 2014, 02:06)NobleHelium Wrote: Why is your economy so bad again?
Good question! It's one I've asked myself several times over. I don't think there's just one easy answer, so let's take a look at the culprits.
1. We're one of only two non-Fin teams. This has made it really difficult to keep up with all the other teams' research capacity. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is. We're working tons of cottages, but since riverside isn't available everywhere, that has meant working a bunch of crappy 2-0-1 tiles. We've also been running a fair number of scientists and went for an early Academy in the capital. But maybe this hybrid economy has actually been hurting us, and we should have decided either on a CE or a SE long ago?
2. Our Academy capital is really not that commerce-heavy. It only has a few river tiles, and a bunch of lake tiles that will never get more than two coins. We have put up some non-river cottages, but we've been focusing on hammers a lot in the cap for workers, units and settlers.
3. Maintenance costs have been killing us. We over-expanded too quickly and the toroidal maintenance has been worse than anticipated. Some of our early cities started out with 4+ maintenance costs and quickly skyrocketed to 9+. We beelined CoL and have been whipping out courthouses to try to deal with this.
4. Rome is our neighbor. When they first got IW, we sacrificed some infra to rush out a bunch of axes. Then, when we got Construction just now, we again are delaying important infra builds to get out a bunch of cats. If we did not have silent, Agg Rome as our neighbor, we could have put more focus on our economy and run the farmer's gambit that a lot of the leading teams are running (SuttOxy, Cat Burglars and Arkipeller)
5. I'm not that good at Civ. Our northern neighbors, DMOC/Teddy, have all these same factors working against them, yet they have a significantly better economy. I'm sure there are lots of things I could have done better, but I'm just not sure what they are. If global lurkers want to post suggestions in the lurker thread, I will happily read about and hopefully improve from my stoner moves in this game. Even better, if our dedlurkers have any suggestions on what we can change right now to improve our economic situation, I'm all ears!