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You DID use edicts right? Because that low authority and money with edicts is already hard to come by. There are a lot of important reforms in there. Considering you did, you might have nuked your economy.
1) Do not build everything, everywhere. The costs don't justify the means. Chose a border fort city of potential and growth and maybe some strategic ones for full military investments. Keep the others on the "necessity" base for anti-cavalry reserves.
2) Do not build production everywhere. A city that produces NEVER imports. While there is an argument for rank 3 towns to always be producing as internal trade can repay the costs sometimes and the increased exports to other towns, it is best to have one local focus point. Use caravans to supply small border towns from one of the major centers. In general use caravans more sparingly.
3) Do not use armies up to your money limit. Disband them during peace, use fraternity to judge peace times (enemies do not break deals unless they attack your vassals) and use the money to build up, especially mines and basic trade routes for the production centers.
Otherwise, making money is relatively straight forward, though it may seem varied and complex. Population growth is the main thing, exploiting and improving resources with well placed settlements, and establishing a trade system that will bring in a profit are vital. Raiding enemy farms can also be lucrative, along with sacking key enemy cities.
Easier is to try and make fraternity with everyone but deals with Han and Chu. Both have -10 combat and can be run over fairly easily just have to keep others from attacking from north.
The Zhou are not really boxed in. The ones that need to punch early for breath are the Qin in the region and sometimes the Chu, but in theory you should be faster than Han grabbing the southern plains and mountain ores.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1251049903
It's not as detailed as Sanvones, which is the most comprehensive guide on the basic game, but its focussed specifically on trade and money and quite short.
I've got to the point now after 500+ hours of play that I just follow some basic personal rules for maximising my income and avoiding wasted expenditure.
e.g.
1. Every settlement gets a Bazaar and a Pottery Workshop.
2. Mines and Shrines take priority.
3. Never invest in more trade buildings than those above unless External Trade income is high enough to cover the maintenance. e.g. External Trade has to reach 80 gold before I upgrade a bazaar to a market.
It's a but clunky but it works and stops me running my settlements into loss making gold pits.
3) Markets should not be considered on the 12 range income. It will boost it to 18 range. So consider the increased towns in range as well and not flat 80 it.
Looks like I've screwed up a great deal...I'm not sure what to understand in your first statement, yes I did use edicts and my question is : Should I have used them or not ? Seems that most of edicts reduce authority so I'm a bit confused. Also I didn't build any economic building in every towns,just in my capital in order to supply surrounding towns, chose one town to build mainly military buildings, for all the other settlements I'm just keeping building farms and roads and upgrading farms when possible but it takes a lot of time for my population to grow. It took a lot of time before my Authority rose so I wasn't building new settlements for quite a while in order to keep unrest low. I really don't know what I'm doing wrong. Also everytime I'm trying to build a settlement close to ressources, there is no proper spot to do so in order to have the ressources in range and exploit them properly because you can't settle where you want so I'm always stuck in ♥♥♥♥♥♥ locations. Thanks for your help !
Best
There are some edicts you should never touch and some you shouldn't touch too early. There is only ONE edict that reduces authority (the Great Commander edict you got from the start for an extra general). I never use that one. The others are temporary debuffs for deactivating edicts you activated before.
Some edicts like the expert militia (Fubig or so) costs 500 per turn. Do not use it until you can sustain it... or need it desperately in war.
In general you want tax edicts aside of salt tax - that is just for the greedy and due to peasant edicts basically free for hordes as they counter it with free religion etc. To get the second agrarian edict and also boost food and money income in the warring states you also want bureaucracy whne you can pay for it. It unlocks a lot, it is kinda an edict chokepoint.
Do not hire Shi etc. if you can not pay for them.
1) Keep your initial cities in 12 range for bazaar trade UNLESS there is a really good resource to grab. This way your income grows with your population. Also make repeated production cities in 3 distance: Production - Consumer - Consumer - Production. If you got huge cities build them in surrounding rank 2 cities to get a bit internal market and a lot of outgoing trade. If all are big just build them well placed. Making ungrowing cities a producer will yield next to no internal trade and doing so in big cities prevents them from buying it too. It is mostly fine tuning at that point.
2) Use caravans at the border to a major faction to trade with them, but do not build caravans everywhere. If you did, destroy them aside of one central aorta in your empire to collect and funnel resources to everywhere. Not all cities need one, it costs 100! per turn.
3) Do not worry about authority. Settle! Tax in life in the early game. Going over 2-3 authority in the first 20 turns is fine. You research a lot of initial authority by then. You only get unrest once you are ABOVE it anyway. If you stick to your fixed authority (the one not leader dependant as seen in the victory screen), you are safe 95% of the time aside of a succession crisis. Use leader +authority to keep cities during war before handing them to vassals or vassalizing the enemy.
4)You shouldn't care for unrest below 40%, especially if you build food storages. They prevent hunger unrest in cities for a while in crisis events to cut back on work. Also rasing units during crisis to suppress this unrest and continue developing is sometimes more efficient in the long run. A field is tax. Go for: Fertile - Gentle Hills - Steep Hill - Irrigation. Also chop down forests in your field range if you got free workers. At the beginning a town is low on workforce so you have to pick well (food obviously) but later on you can diversify work. Do not be scared to rule with an iron fist. Your people are idiots, they don't know what is good for them. They would revolt building fields in a hunger situation anyway.
5) Resources - especially shrines and mines - can be worked 3 tiles away from your border. This means you can roughly settle them 6 away, sometimes 7, depending how long you are willing to grow the city before exploiting it. While you won't get the 3 rule for non ores, you can use the knowledge of city growth to use resources in LATER stages of a settlement. Getting the Mulberry and making a silk town is fine on rank 2 as well. It doesn't need to be for the rank 1 town.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1602335276
Make sure you're not spending too much on buildings you don't need. Click the money icon at the top of the settlement screen to see a breakdown of your income and costs.
1. Your income is +871 per turn, which actually isn't bad for this early in the game.
2. Your treasury contains 14,956 which is an amazing amount of money to have available.
3. Hardly any of your settlements seem to be building anything, which is a bit odd given how much money you have. Basically the only reason not to be building something in every town is a) you don't have the money, or b) your peasant unrest of over 30%. The fact, you aren't might explain your slow development.
4. You seem to have two trading hubs Gusu and Nanwu, but the trade is one-way. You might want to put a bazaar in the receiving settlements to encourage two-way trade.
How much income are you getting from External Trade in each of your settlements?
I usually let this happen naturally, there is no point wasting money trying to force settlements to trade with each other. Once a settlement is earning 50 gold from External Trade I usually build a Quay, because the income can maintain it. Once that income exceeds 80 gold I build a market because I know the income will pay for it.
I only build Quays once the External income exceeds 50 per turn, and only improve them to Wharfs and Ports once the income has increased to cover their maintenance. Generally they are only worth building if your trade income is suffficient to make them worthwhile.
I use the same principle for all trade buildings so for example the minimum External Trade income I expect before building a Weavers Hut is 20 gold. If its less than that I don't build it because I'll be making a net loss.
Thanks a lot for your comments Didz, they're really appreciated and will help me a lot in my future games, I think I got a little bit confused with all that I've read about trading and got a few things wrong...
If the value of External Trade is high enough to cover the maintenance cost of another trade building then I build it. If not then I don't.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1605304819
What I find tends to happen then is that certain settlements naturally evolve into major trade hubs , which others fail to do so. Once I'm convinced that a settlement is not going to evolve into a trade hub then I begin to invest in military buildings instead of trade and evolve these into fortress settlements that provide troops for my armies.