How do I make gold?

[Famix]

I thought building banks would help, but now I'm losing 54 gold per turn, and I think more is being added as I build. They also have red coins next to them in the zoom tab, does that mean they are corrupted?

[[NN]Natmeris]

The main thing that causes shrinking is, over-abundance of units without the economy to support it. In order to support it, you need to have enough cities and population. A government gives a certain amount of free unit support. Despotism gives quite bit per every city, but Monarchy and Republic the governments you switch to rather early, drops significantly in unit support if you are not prepared to handle that. It is best to switch to them as early as possible though. To handle the drop, you need to have enough gold income coming in from rivers and high population cities.

[TheDiaz]

Originally posted by Serpentor:

I thought building banks would help, but now I'm losing 54 gold per turn, and I think more is being added as I build. They also have red coins next to them in the zoom tab, does that mean they are corrupted?

Corruption managemente must be taken into consideration to keep your empire rich. The longer the distance from one city to the capital the more corruption there will be. Some government types have ways to counter this.

I imagine you built a lot of stuff and units, so you don't have the economy to maintain both. Building banks won't be enough if corruption is eating your income. Move expenses, hire tax collectors, improve squres with roads so they give gold.

[Valdar]

In addition to the above recommendations, take into consideration that banks and marketplaces only increase in percentage what your city already generates, AND they require upkeep themselves. You may need to increase your base income first by building roads on 'farmed' squares as mentioned. Also, trade any surplus resources to other civs for added income. Are you familiar with the sliders to adjust how much of your income goes into the coffers compared to how much is spent on happiness and research? You need to adjust that to stop the bleeding.

Also, not to discourage anyone from getting help from this forum, but there is about 16 years of such discussion on the Civ Fanatics site as well. https://forums.civfanatics.com/categories/civilization-iii.4/

[Famix]

How do I hire tax collectors?

[Valdar]

Originally posted by Serpentor:

How do I hire tax collectors?

From the city screen, remove one of your citizens from a producing square by clinking on the square (assuming you currently have no non-working citizens to use). You should see the citizen at the end of the row change to an entertainer. Then click on that entertainer icon to cycle it to the next type of citizen (Tax Collector, Policeman, Scientist, etc) until it’s a Tax collector.

Note the gold income before and after to determine if this is a good move that particular city. The downside is that you lose a producing citizen from the city and you may actually have a net loss in gold production if that square was a gold producing square before. That is why I personally never ‘hire’ tax collectors for a city until it has reached over its maximum production square size of 20 and you have free citizens to spare.

[Famix]

Originally posted by Diaz:

Originally posted by Serpentor:

I thought building banks would help, but now I'm losing 54 gold per turn, and I think more is being added as I build. They also have red coins next to them in the zoom tab, does that mean they are corrupted?

Corruption managemente must be taken into consideration to keep your empire rich. The longer the distance from one city to the capital the more corruption there will be. Some government types have ways to counter this.

I imagine you built a lot of stuff and units, so you don't have the economy to maintain both. Building banks won't be enough if corruption is eating your income. Move expenses, hire tax collectors, improve squres with roads so they give gold.

Okay, I'm going to try to be smaller this current game because that's probably what the problem was. On top of that, I'll try to make relations with my neighbors by building roads to their smaller, closer cities.

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

The red coins next to the banks are the maintenance you pay on them, but as long as the city makes a decent amount of wealth, the benefit of the bank outweighs the cost.

Building a smaller empire probably isn't going to help your economy a lot (and indeed will hurt it if unit support is a problem). The key is to efficiently manage what you have. Try to grow your cities, regardless of how many you have, because more people = more laborers = more resources coming in. Your core cities are also always going to be better than the outliers.

Don't build buildings unless you're sure they will help (i.e. no barracks in low-production cities, no courthouses in low-corruption cities). Build roads where you're working tiles to improve commerce input. Run a republic or democracy w/ small standing army if you're not going to war.

[Famix]

Thanks! :D

I'm very guilty of making cities have things they don't need :/

[Famix]

This game I'm playing Germans, and I have plans to have them be as big as possible, and maybe invade other colonies

[TheDiaz]

Originally posted by Serpentor:

Originally posted by Diaz:

Corruption managemente must be taken into consideration to keep your empire rich. The longer the distance from one city to the capital the more corruption there will be. Some government types have ways to counter this.

I imagine you built a lot of stuff and units, so you don't have the economy to maintain both. Building banks won't be enough if corruption is eating your income. Move expenses, hire tax collectors, improve squres with roads so they give gold.

Okay, I'm going to try to be smaller this current game because that's probably what the problem was. On top of that, I'll try to make relations with my neighbors by building roads to their smaller, closer cities.

You actually want to have a huge empire but specialize your cities. You don't need barracks on every city if some of them won't be producing troops, for example, as an example.