Low gold including enemy civs

[pandemonstrosity]

I was playing a game as France. I was doing really well until I noticed that I barely gain any gold even though I have multiple world wonders, trading posts, caravans, etc. Then I checked the other civs and they suspiciously have low gold like less than 300 most of them have negative GPT. Now I have pretty much hundreds of hours in Civ 5 and know how to generate gold. So is this a bug or what?

[BoiledInPilk]

Its pretty normal for enemy civs to have very negative GPT

[I Kinda Fail]

Uh... Can't really know without more details.

- Trading posts don't do a thing unless you have citizens to work them. So if your city is prioritizing food growth or production, your trading posts won't be worked.

- Building a bunch of smaller cities will usually be more expensive, because you'll have to pay for more. (Like 2 gold for a temple, 1 for a shrine, etc.)

- Maybe someone enacted a standing army tax and you didn't notice?

- I assume you didn't get an embargo, but it's possible someone was at war and you didn't notice... Like let's say England is at war with Germany. Germany has 10 trade routes with you. England destroys all the trade ships going your way. England leaves your trade routes to Germany alone, however. So on your end, everything looks normal, when in reality you've just lost 30% of your money.

[pandemonstrosity]

It really felt like a bug to me like a global negative gold per turn. No standing army tax. My cities already prioritizing gold, caravans trading with other civs, my units are enough just to defend against Shaka and the weird thing is every enemy civ has negative gold when in the previous games they have enough gold to do a research agreement. I started to notice this in the Renaissance era like why I barely get 300 gold and 20 GPT when I used to have 2000 gold and 100 GPT? So I played up until Industrial era and then it just got worse. So I decided not to waste more time playing a game that looks like bugged and just start over. In my other games I pretty much overwhelm the enemy even in Immortal difficulty with way too much gold. Years of playing Civ 5 and this was the first time I experienced this kind of bug. Now I like to point out that I'm playing Civ 5 while multitasking so I think this bug has something to do with saving or loading.

[kkeday]

This mod may help:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=266659453

[tinisiyo]

Instead of crying about bugs you can simply check your income and expenses globally and in every city. Pretty easy if you know how gold is generated.

[knighttemplar1960]

The maintenance costs of units increases on turn 20 and turn 50 and every 50 turns after that. If you had enough military to handle Shaka you were spending A LOT on unit maintenance.

https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Mathematics_of_Civilization_V#Unit_maintenance

[Bfloo]

I've had games where my economy has just collapsed out of no where. The same with happiness. I usually recover after a few turns where I focus on my economy. I usually horde gold, so I can sit through the economic depression.

If you went tradition, and moved your military out of your cities, that can cause a massive drop, especially as time goes on. If you captured a bunch of workers during a war, that can take a big bite out of your budget as well.

Almost every game I've played has a least 1 ai civ at negative gold/ turn, the rest never seem to go over 500 total at any point in the game, maybe 1 will horde gold for no reason.