Gold Mines: How Much is Too Much?

[Dino Banino]

Relatively new player here!

So, it's 1470, I'm playing as Bosnia, and I just diplo-vassalized Serbia. Serbia's got a juicy gold mine with development of 3/3/2.

I have 2 questions:

1) How much Diplomatic Power should the average player invest into a gold mine to maximize gold income without wasting too much Diplo Power in order to save for Diplo Tech and Ideas?

2) At what point of development should I stop developing gold mines because of "depleting gold reserves" which result in "halving production"? I know that if I develop my mine to Level 4, it says that I have a 0.07% chance of depleting the mine for the year, but a 0.07% chance is a joke, right? I mean, that's not even 1%. At what percent should I be worried about mine depletion?

P.S. I have all the DLC except for El Dorado.

[epicpantsryummy]

Diplo points are useless. (Unless you like trade) Invest every spare point into that gold mind, and watch as your mercs crawl over the Otooblobs.

[tinisiyo]

Invest up to 9-11 production. there will be around 1% chance for depletion. And the chance will rise much faster with each next production increasing.

[Ficelle]

Also, take into account inflation.

Too much gold compared to other incomes will lead to inflation which will slowly eat up all benefits of a gold mine...if not costing money.
Can be decreased, but cost ADM or a specific advisor.

Agree on the around 10 treshold at first.

[Slimane]

Originally posted by ColonelPants:

Diplo points are useless. (Unless you like trade) Invest every spare point into that gold mind, and watch as your mercs crawl over the Otooblobs.

Diplo point are not useless until you've at least completed your first idea group. It should almost always be a diplomatic one first because you use administrative to unlock the idea group+coring and you need military for early generals and making sure you keep up military tech wise.

Plus personally I consider money useless in the first 50 years. One game as Austria I prevented the shadow kingdom, beat France/Aragon/Burgundy's respective butts and forced union on Hungary. All the while having almost full land force limits and over twice my naval limit.

By 1500 I had over 10 loans but I could finaly take a breather and repay all of them. My point is to priotize winning wars and monarch points in the early game. You can fix your economy after getting a really strong power base.

[erneiz]

http://www.eu4wiki.com/Trade_goods#Gold_mine_depletion

TL;DR 10 production for the first 200 years (so before 1621), 15 for the last 200 years.

[tiberiansun371alexw]

If you have to put a single adm point to fight ifnlation, it's too much

[wakey wakey]

I never go over 6-7 if it's my own mine. If the mine is owned by a colonial nation of your own and you're able to set your main trade node somewhere which is not connected with your colony I would rise it to 10+. With tarrifs a 10 ducat colony mine can actually give you 20+ ducats per month without any inflation.

You won't recive treasure fleets if your trade node where you collect can't be reached from your colonies which instead will give you the gold as tarrifs and this means you can get 100%+ extra gold from it without inflation.(Your colony nations will never pay more than 50% of their income in tarrifs, all that's beyond 50%+ will created out of nowhere and is not capped)

[Oscar]

In my Britain campaign, I controlled most of Africa, and it had a lot of gold mines.
With the money I earned, I used to buy inflatin reduction advisers. So I didn't have to waste ADM points + I gained adm points

[tiberiansun371alexw]

Treasure fleets are BAAADDD unless you're a small or meidum nation. For a big nation, the ifnlation is a headache

[wakey wakey]

Originally posted by tiberiansun371alexw:

Treasure fleets are BAAADDD unless you're a small or meidum nation. For a big nation, the ifnlation is a headache

That's why I wrote the thing about tariffs. If you are in a position to snipe cuba/mexico or california, you can make way more money with tariffs than you could ever make via trade. Mexicos goldmines alone can give you ~400 ducats by 155x in tariffs(no inflation at all). You just have to move your main trade collecting point to an area which is not connected to your colonies in any way. This way treasure fleets gets disabled and you reap all that money directly via tariffs and it get increased by your tariff value with no inflation as I said before.

Trading is kinda useless if you figure this system out because you make double or even triple the ducats from tariffs instead of trading while your colonies never pay more than 50% of their income. Even if you get 400 ducats per month out of mexico(because of +xxx% tariffs) and they only gain 200 ducats a month, they never lose more than 100 ducats at all(50%) while all that money is magically created out of nothing.

So you get rid of inflation from treasure fleets while actualy double or even triple(with the right ideas) your income from colonies.

Cuba has no goldmines but can be still very lucrative because of their trade goods. I think in my lazy granada achievement run I was at around ~80 ducats alone from cuba(tariffs) in around 151x.

[tiberiansun371alexw]

Making money though trade control with colnies isn't bad. Still, grabbing new Found land, Missipi, and Cuba for the tariffs is also very luctative and in those palces the trade is just on the cherry on top.

[wakey wakey]

Originally posted by tiberiansun371alexw:

Making money though trade control with colnies isn't bad. Still, grabbing new Found land, Missipi, and Cuba for the tariffs is also very luctative and in those palces the trade is just on the cherry on top.

No Trade will actually cripple your income if your able to pull the things off I described above. Even Portugal/Spain/France will make less ducats(not even half the amount) via trade than with tariffs. This is ofc only true if you have exploration ideas for at least the first 200 years and if you have a way to switch your main collect point to a node which is not connected to your colonies.

Trade is in this case completly useless and will earn you waaay less than tariffs even if you don't invest min max them in any way( you can get up to 240% If I remember right but that's unrealistic if you're not playing as portugal so ~140-160% is kinda reachable for everyone).

Why should I collect minor profits from trade when I can get 140%+ of that value from tariffs without getting inflation and don't have to care about pirates/trade sniping at all?

[wakey wakey]

Just to give you an example what tariffs can actually do:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/82592888808495579/245D7EFB43CCC970214A220AC672985EE40136AA/

And this was with a really bad nation to pull this off.(granada) With Spain/Portugal/France or even Mali I would be way sooner in the new world and would have more points to spent on improving goldmines. Not to mention the autonomy. ;>