I need a Loan

[ToranagaSama]

Dude, FIRST, let me say THANK YOU for the effort, because I am at a true loss to comprehend how RTW's economic systems works! It is the bane of my RTW existence. Bare with me cause I haven't taken a math class, nor dealt with much of it since my Wall St. days, so w/o a calc or a computer I, seriously, can't even add!!! hahaha....

BUT, words and logic are my business!!

OK, using your example, -3247 +1414 = -1833, so you're operating at a loss.

If you exterminate the good folks of Pativium, then you'll still have the income infrastucture, and one would hope the Income dervied from it, particularly, Trade, Mining and Farming.

I'm not sure I've got this at all, but taking your words and my experience:

"If I were to slaughter the population down to the level of Segestica, it would indeed make it appear as if the city is now making a profit,...."

From the above, Pativum would now be making a "profit", correct?

If so, then even if Pativium produced a zero sum profit, then along with Segestica's profit, overall you're in the black with a profit of 1414.

This is MUCH better than being in the red with a net -1833.

Maybe I'm missing something???

The way I see it, is that no matter what the population level, nor the taxes received from that population, if that City operates at a LOSS, its an albatross.

Eliminating that Loss, even if it's just a Zero sum gain, Overall, your Income *should* result in a Net Gain by the amount of the Loss.

The key to all this, I *believe* is in understanding the relationship of Population/Population Loss to Expenditures. It would seem in the experience I described, the population loss (Extermination), consequently reduced Expenditures to a level resultant to Profit, and the consequent overall Net Gain.

Thank you again for your comments.

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

[Kraxis]

ToranagaSama, it seems to me that he meant that those two cities were representatives of the sizes, not that they were the only cities.

[Don Megel]

Well that campain is now a victum of the save corruption bug...yay...

But, it was my understanding that the loss in money came from corruption in over populated cities. Thus, if you drop the pop, corruption lessens and you get more money. I know you'd also loose some tax revenue but I think it evens out..but then again I could be wrong...

[ToranagaSama]

Ahhhh.....isn't *Corruption*, counted as Positive income?
Maybe you mean *Squalor*?

Kraxis, perhaps your correct, in which case, my head hurts. ;)

[Count Fudgula]

I think the Upkeep remains the same no matter what the pop of the cities, it just gets spread around differently, and as it is such a large proportion of the costs you'll be in bigger debt if you cut the population, which in turn reduces taxes and some other stuff (hmm, bit vague here, does population effect trade/farming?). Also, I think wages are for your generals and likewise won't decrease if you cut the pop.

[Don Megel]

Squalar, thats what Im thinking of, if I kill off the troublsom pesants dosent that go down and thus save me money?

[TinCow]

The way I see it, is that no matter what the population level, nor the taxes received from that population, if that City operates at a LOSS, its an albatross.

Eliminating that Loss, even if it's just a Zero sum gain, Overall, your Income *should* result in a Net Gain by the amount of the Loss.

What you're missing is that the upkeep load will shift. While the newly de-populated city will be making a profit, the other cities in your empire will see a decrease in their income. Unless you lost a large number of units in the process, your military upkeep will remain the same. Upkeep is paid by cities in proportion to their population, so think of it like this:

You have two cities, A and B. City A has 75% of your population and City B has 25% of your population. City A has an income from trade, taxes, etc. of 600 and City B has an income of 300. If your overall upkeep is 1000 dinarii, City A will pay for 750 of that (75%) and City B will pay for 250 of that (25%). This means City A will display a loss of 150 dinarii per turn while City B will display a profit of 50 dinarii per turn.

Now, if you exterminate City A such that its population drops to the same as City B, you get the following scenario. Cities A and B now have 50% of the population of your empire each. Thus, they both pay 50% of the upkeep. City A will thus pay 500 and City B will thus pay 500. Since City B has been untouched, its income remains the same at 300 and it will show a loss of 200. Assuming City A keeps the same income, it will now show a profit of 100. As such, even though the numbers make it look like you have 'fixed' City A, you still have the same total income.

However, now take into account the fact that exterimating a city will dramatically reduce its tax income and may destroy some trade buildings, and you see that City A will actually have its income decreased, even if the numbers still 'show' an improvement. When you have a huge empire, this can be particularly hard to spot because the financial 'shift' will be so small for each of your other cities that you probably won't notice the drop. However, the reality is that you have simply shifted the payment burden onto the other cities while reducing the income of the de-populated one.

In simpler terms, income is city specific while upkeep is born by the entire empire. Regardless of how much your city's income changes, the upkeep will remain the same. You can shift it around a bit to make it look prettier, but in the end you still have to pay it.

[therother]

In simpler terms, income is city specific while upkeep is born by the entire empire. Regardless of how much your city's income changes, the upkeep will remain the same. You can shift it around a bit to make it look prettier, but in the end you still have to pay it.

Thank you, I was going to write a more simple post like this one, but you've saved me the effort.

Just to annoy you all, I'm going to now detail a situation where it is very much in your interest to butcher the population. Say you have taken a huge (30,000+), inland city from a rival, which is far away from your capital (let's say a 60% penalty), has a high culture penalty at 60%, has got lots of squalor at 130% - the AI seems strangely adverse to building water supply buildings- has 30% unrest from all the upheaval. To balance all that you've garrisoned an army made up 19 units of Urban Cohorts, are having to hold both daily games and races (+60%), have low taxes (+30%), and you have a good influence governor (say +20% to public order) and even after all that, it's still on the verge of rioting.

Well, then you would be spending: (19* 320) + (4*400) = 7680 denarii to keep the city in not very good order at all. This makes very little sense, especially as you'll probably want those legionaries for other, more taxing, duties than garrison duty.

In this case, as you will probably be getting less than 3000 denarii income - without sea trading you aren't going to get much better - and you may be suffering from residual devastation from the fight to "liberate" the city, as well as the inevitable corruption, which will be a significant proportion of your income as you are in the far flung regions of your empire. In such cases, you may very well be served in leaving it to revolt and going all Dalek on the population. You would then lose much less per turn overall. You can then build the city back up properly, building the water supply (and perhaps growth temple) buildings early and ensuring that squalor doesn’t get as much of a fold hold.

So what I'm saying is that it's not a hard and fast rule: assess the situation individually, gauge how long it will take for those penalties to subside, and the city to return to profitability. Unfortunately you must calculate province "upkeep" yourself by subtracting the upkeep of both the region defence units (mountain passes, bridges, forest ambushers, etc.) & the garrison units in the city itself, and any necessary entertainment and happiness construction costs (such as replacing cultural building and constructing/improving health buildings). Unrest usually goes pretty quickly, whereas you can assist the cultural integration for the locals by replacing their Cultural building (temples and entertainment) with good Roman establishments. So if you deem that you can afford to wait for the city to become profitable again, then I recommend that you do so.

One point to note is, unlike in pervious TW games, there is now a hard limit (20 units of peasants, I suppose, or 19 with a good Governor) to the garrison pubic order bonus. Previously you could pacify any province by moving in gigantic peasant armies. This is no longer so.

Incidentally, I'm currently in the process of collating what I can find out about the financial system into a guide of sorts. It's very much going to be a work in progress, even after it's "finished". Assuming, of course, that I can find the time to complete it, and that it comes up to scratch, i.e. that it doesn't make things even more muddy those not particularly mathematically inclined, you may see it in a few days.

[Don Megel]

THanks for that simplified explanation, I am terrible at math.

My new question, then, is about squalar. How do I prevetn it? Would moveing the population to smaller cities via peasant units help with this? Once it happens how do I fix it? Would I be a bad person for prodding that one city into revolt and killing its people just cuz they have given me so much trouble?

[Inuyasha12]

I beleive that squalor is bad, slum-like living conditions. Building public baths/sewers and acueducts like aforementioned can begin to lower this. Also if a city begins to overpopulate and you haven't made the next goverment building to upgrade it it will begin to get very high squalor. A massacre can of course lower squalor tremendously because youre killing 1/3 of the populace. Also many members have been saying how you can lower squalor from newly conquered cities via peasant units(making them in the city you want to lower squalor in and disbanding them in another). Also a more horrid way has been talked about, sending the plague to a overly populated city via infected general or agent...

Also i think that better farms can also lower squalor?
And there might be a temple bonus too..

Also i want to personally thank Therother and Tincrow for your explainations, they've made many thing clearer to me and i beleive many others.

Thank you.

[therother]

By far the best way to eliminate squalor is forward planning. You want your cities to be as large as possible. So don't allow those cities to develop slums in the first place. Construct water supply buildings for each settlement level before you reach the next city level. If you don't, squalor will become a nightmare. If you do, your cities will eventually level themselves out, as squalor will eventually balance out your growth rate.

Also i think that better farms can also lower squalor?
And there might be a temple bonus too..

Temples, definitely. For example, Juro is the Brutii version, although pantheons bestow a wide range of bonuses, from public health to unit experience. Not sure about farms, perhaps as a 2nd order effect?

Thank you.

Glad to help.

BTW, if anyone’s interested, I'm just getting the hang of the garrison loyalty bonus. It has to do with the ratio of troops to the population. In this case we would have ~1600 troop to 30000 plebs. That's 5.3% of the population. I estimate that should give a garrison bonus of around 35%. The relationship seems to be somewhat linear, but I think it may diverge. The problem is that it's a little clunky, in that it varies in steps of 5%.

Anyway, this is rough and ready to be sure, but it gives you a reasonable guesstimate:

Garrison bonus ~= -2.8 + 701*(garrison strength/population)

So –2.8 + 701*(1600/30000) ~ 35%, which is about right

Health warning: this won't even be remotely accurate as the expression in the brackets approaches 1! I will try to simplify this ASAP.

Edit: These calculations only hold true for large units sizes. The game appears to scale the garrison effect according to the average size of the units in the game. So two units of Hastati have the same relatively effect from small to huge unit sizes. Ergo you need to scale appropriately. Multiple the result of the equation by the following factors to get the right result:

• 4 for small
• 2 for normal
• 0.5 for Huge

[andrewt]

Squalor is all about planning. Unless you're going for huge city (24,000 population), it isn't much of a problem at all. A few public order buildings (temples, arenas, execution squares) would solve the problem. The sewer line raises both public order and population growth so it's mostly for growing the population, not maintaining public order. The increased squalor from increased population will cancel out the public order bonus.

For huge cities, build farm improvements in such a way that you barely get to 24,000. You don't want to exceed 24,000 as you'll just get increased squalor and you'll need a bigger garrison to maintain order. A good trick for factions that have a temple like Ceres' (population growth) is to build it to get to 24,000 then destroy it and replace it after you build the imperial palace.

As for garrisons, use peasants. 100 upkeep for 120 units make them the cheapest for garrison duty.