Making Money in the Early Game

An easy to understand guide on how to make money in the early game.

Before reading

There are many ways of making tons of money, but this is just how i do it and works for me.
In this guide i will tell you the basics of making money, there are some other stuff that i haven't included here such as the Civilization Advantages tab, laws etc. I haven't included them since they dont have that much impact and are more complex.

Civilization advantages

First of all, whenever you can spend an advantage point (it will popup in the current situation tab), one of the advantages you can get is the +150/200/300 gold one. Its especially helpful for weak countries or early game.

• Note: there are also other great advantages that you can choose, such as improved tax effficiency and so on. You can look around the advantages tab and look at the other economy related options aswell.

First Buildings

The next thing you should do is build temples in every province of your country.

• Why temples? The temples are not that expensive to build and after being build they increase your monthly income by 0.15, overtime, it stacks up and offers a great benefit if you have a lot of them built.

Tax collectors

After building temples in each province, now its time to build tax collectors in each province.

• Tax collectors are another very affordable yet effective building to build since it increases the tax efficiency of the province its built in by 3,5% and even lowers the cost to increase the tax efficiency. The bonus of lower cost to improve tax efficiency will be important for the next step.

Improving Tax Efficiency and Ecnomy

After building temples and tax collectors now its time to improve the tax efficiency and economy of each province. (you can do it from the Tax Efficiency and Economy tabs on the left)

War

After doing the previous steps i mentioned, now its time to clap some countries. Declare war on a weak/small country and annex it all, after that fix the core construction (you can do that from the core construction tab) and religion if needed. Then after everything is sorted, begin repeating the previous steps (build temples,tax collectors and improve the economy and tax efficiency) of each province.


here as an example i invaded North Macedonia because its a weak country compared to mine, then i started building temples + tax collectors and then improving the economy and tax efficiency of each province.

Civilization Legacy Tab

The Civilization Legacy Tab is very important since it can improve our country's stats. We can increase our money making abilities by improving the contents in Administrative Legacies. (you can open the Civilization Legacy Tab by clicking on the Civilization Legacy currency on the top, it has the icon of a white greek statute or something)

here as an example i improved the Efficient Taxation attribute, i personally think its the best for early game money making but you can play around with the others.

note: you can get Civilization Legacy points by building buildings that produce it monthly

Thanks for reading!

Thank you for reading!

As i said there might be better ways of making tons of money in the beginning but thats the way i do it. Feel free to share your strategies in the comments! Have a nice day/evening!

if this guide helped you, u can give it a like <3

[Q]

what works for me is just attack my weaker neighbors take out a loan the core them then just continue till im rich

[Ethyriel]

yes but for most people it will work since they play the modern scenario where basically all countries have good population but i agree with you

[Nixogan]

Note that building tax collectors is an excellent way to literally burn your money for no reason if the province doesn't have a good population.

Notice the screenshots are year 2000+ where populations everywhere (I assume) are high. If you're playing a nation with a few low population provinces in something like 1440, tax collectors are probably the single worst thing you can build. In fact, you're better off not even acknowledging taxes as a mechanic until you're in a more dominant (and populous) position.

[Ethyriel]

i guess. With what i mentioned in the guide i was able to make tons of money, building an unstoppable army after that, and having no difficulties winning against several strong countries on hard difficulty. As i said there might be better ways of doing it, that works for me perfectly fine, everyone is diffirent and have diffirent approach to things, so its best to just play the game the way you have most fun and enjoyment

[Midnight]

It feels like the guide was written by someone who played for 2 hours. It's more of a guide to the most ineffective economic development. As the person below wrote, it's best to immediately develop your army and go into early aggression to start knocking down aggression points. Zero attention to the specific resources of the region. It's worth developing regions that have the most expensive resource (diamonds, gold, etc.) and developing the region starting with building for this specific resource since it gives the greatest boost. Temple as the first building? Seriously? Any buildings that give gold, and not a percentage of the region's economy or the price of production are just garbage. I advise you to play more hours and rewrite the guide. I apologize for the harsh criticism if it might seem that way.

[Ethyriel]

your monthly income isn't supposed to go down, ur monthly income should be going up after improving your economy/tax efficiency. Perhaps there are some other factors that decrease your monthly income?

[Taktyczn13]

Can you tell me why when i improve in economy and tax efficiency my money is going down?

[Ethyriel]

i agree

[Sammer]

Early game, there's a really good Tech Advantage for weak nations: the one-time +150/200/300 gold. Get that and then build your army with it.

The best source of income in the early game is to conquer more lands. Don't spend your money on economy, spend it on your army. Once you're stuck waiting for your aggressive expansion to go down, that's when you should start thinking about investing in the economy.

Get military legacies, military tech, military tech advantages, get an alliance, and just get more army stats & more regiments by any means. Your income will grow fast, and it will be way more fun than playing walmart cookie clicker

(Had more to say but I reached the character limit)