Guide to Economy Basics
There are two “layers” to the Old World economy. The primary layer is resource-based. When you send a worker out to build a mine, farm, quarry, camp, etc., doing so will generate either food, iron, stone, wood, ormoney.In addition to the fact that all of the tile improvements your workers build cost some number of the above resources, most buildings and units also have a per turn upkeep that will require you to keep growing these resource totals throughout the game, so you can support more advanced buildings, construct wonders, support more units, and the like.
It also bears mentioning here that Population Food/Iron/Wood/Stone costs are now scaled with city culture increases.
On top of that, the economy also runs on a number of secondary resources. These include:
- Civics (used for building city projects, conducting diplomacy, and the like).
- Training Points (used by cities for training new troops, or used by you to upgrade existing troops, conduct special field maneuvers if you have certain types of military leaders, handle promotions, etc.).
- Science (researching new techs).
Orders too, can be seen as a kind of economic resource, and the glue that binds it all together.
Finally, there are also luxuries. Luxuries make managing relationships easier. You can use them to boost relations with your vassal families or with rival nations and tribes, or you can use them to reduce discontent in selected cities.
Before you gain access to a luxury, however, you must first build an improvement on the luxury tile (worker action), then train a specialist to work that tile (from the city management screen).
Note that recent changes to the gameintroduce the concept of “off map” luxuries. Normally, luxuries are tiles on the map, but now, certain events can give you special projects in a city, which grant access to certain luxury items that don’t exist on the map.
These come from “beyond,” andare considered exotic special resources. They include:
- Perfume.
- Porcelain.
- Exotic Fur.
- Ebony.
- Ivory.
- Tea.
- Spices.
- Exotic Animals.
- Silphium.
- Jade.
Moving back to the topic of the “secondary layer” of resources, these are generated via a number of different sources, including:
- Your cities themselves.
- Your Royal court.
- Urban improvements.
- Specialists.
Again, we’ll go into much more detail later on, butfor now, it’s important to at least mention that cities don’t grow because you have lots of food.
A big surplus of food can help you in other ways (fielding more units of certain types and giving you a resource you can sell on the open market to get resources you may be lacking in), but the thing that drives city growth is the growth RATE, which can be increased by using your workers to improve food-related special tiles (and/or by building Granaries, which provide a modest boost to growth).
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