Hmm, I keep going broke

[Vendayn]

Maybe I'm building too fast, but for some reason I keep going broke? What is a good build strategy for the beggining of the game?

Thanks :)

[Keith]

Don't spend it all and get some export trade going early.

[Daego]

While everyone should obviously set up a food chain (farms -> granary -> markets) right at the start, you should also set up a trade export industry, too.

I usually pick the easiest one to produce that also helps my local economy. Try to pick basic goods over luxury goods since those same basic goods will help your pleb homes evolve so you don't have to sprawl out a ton of tiny pleb homes. Pottery is just as good. I try to avoid clothing because it takes a lot more space and takes a lot of time to start production (pottery takes least, olives are quick too, but sheep pens take a long time to start producing wool).

Exports of raw material are great, too, if you have them!
________
MARK II BLIT (http://www.toyota-wiki.com/wiki/Toyota_Mark_II_Blit)

[ZiRo]

A good tip I can offer to compliment the above post:

If you create other industries aswell as pottery to start off - mothball them.
This channels employment to pottery production and therefore lets your houses evolve with the basic good, then your pleb houses can house more plebs, to be employed in the other industries that you can un-mothball.

This is much more efficient starting off than trying to employ all industry at once..

[Kuplo]

Build SLOW! And let the houses evolve. I was going broke many times when I first played because I was placing insulaes all over the place trying to staff all of my jobs in the city only to finally realize that I was building too many of them and not allowing the time it took for the houses to evolve and provide me more plebes.

So for me I found that I needed to build slower and let everything evolve up so that I didnt have extra workers that were not doing anything for me but sitting around. It became a snowball effect in that I played constant catch up until I started to build slow and let things evolve, because I would build masses of insulaes to staff the jobs that I created and then when the houses evolved I had mass unemployement so I would then build more jobs, then I wouldn't have enough workers, and it kept rolling like this. Now when I build and let things evolve I find that I can place down fewer buildings which means that I pay less for construction which in my games seems to be the biggest expenditure of my city.

And of course check the empire map and see if there are any trade routes of cities that are willing to buy what you can produce and then try to balance the amount of production facilities of the product they will buy with how many they will buy (which still eludes me to try and get it balanced out properly).

Oh and make sure that you limit your imports to a reasonable amount just enough to satisfy your citizens, it seems to me that imports are far more pricey than my exports are, but Im sure that it depends on the products involved. I had one game where I was importing Pottery only to find out that I had put out a couple thousand denarii on buying pottery because I didnt set the limiter of how many I wanted so I then noted that I had pottery overflowing but by then I was already in debt and it would have been too hard to recover so I gave up to try again another day.

My two denariis.

[Daego]

Oh and make sure that you limit your imports to a reasonable amount just enough to satisfy your citizens.

LOL! Yes, that happened to me too, although with Exotic goods. My villas started requesting exotic goods so me, being the good governor, went to my various trade depots and stupidly turned every exotic import on. Without limiting them.

A few months later I had burned through about 14,000 denarii!

Thank god for autosaves!
________
Portable Vaporizer (http://vaporizer.org/portable)

[Vendayn]

I'm negative almost 2k now cause I opened trade with that million people map (forgot what its called) and traded with africa...wow, bad idea to open trade so early...

[Vendayn]

Well went negative 6k and rome attacked me...

Stupid trade was worthless, pottery for ivory and it cost me too much...why do you people suggest trade so early...

[Grumpus]

Well went negative 6k and rome attacked me...

Stupid trade was worthless, pottery for ivory and it cost me too much...why do you people suggest trade so early...

You don't have to buy anything from them. Just sell!

[Daego]

... You don't have to import. You can just export. You should only be importing Ivory if you have mid-level villas that start requesting exotic goods.

We suggest trade because you cannot survive on sales tax alone. Even property tax isn't enough since it requires so much initial cost and sustained industries to support high level villas.

If you're opening your first trade route at -2,000dn, you're building far, far too much to start before you opened your trade route.
________
WEED MAPS (http://dispensaries.org/)

[Vendayn]

... You don't have to import. You can just export. You should only be importing Ivory if you have mid-level villas that start requesting exotic goods.

We suggest trade because you cannot survive on sales tax alone. Even property tax isn't enough since it requires so much initial cost and sustained industries to support high level villas.

If you're opening your first trade route at -2,000dn, you're building far, far too much to start before you opened your trade route.

easier said then done...I dont want some god was mad at me like they have been my past games and destroying all my stuff, so had to build shrines which meant I needed equisites which meant I needed other stuff...

Also health kept being a problem..so needed clinics...need equisites...and then I had to build even more...

So how do I not build so much with all these problems?

[Vendayn]

http://www.caesarivonline.com/empire/city/39/

Here is my city with what buildings I have. I keep having to build new stuff or the gods/health problems arise. Thats why I have to build so much. I have trade with Africa, but it keeps crashing when I open the trade up, but the current game as it open and I'm about to build a trade post.

[Grumpus]

One build order for the first year:

10 Insula, 6 domus, prefect, engineer Water pump, acqueduct, reservoir, fountains Odeum, clinic, school. (encourages immigration)


Jupiter shrine.



Now, you're ready to start trade. Do not open trade route yet. If you're going to sell pottery, find out how much they will buy and divide that number by 20. Build that many clay diggers camps near the pits. When clay starts being dug, build one pottery factory for every two camps you have. Wait until the factories have some finished product, and then open the trade route and place the trading post or port. At the same time plump down a basic goods market near your housing. Put tax collector next door.


3 farms and a food market If you can produce either iron, timber, wine, or jewelry get one factory going - set up luxury market






Don't build Patrician housing until you have a dependable supply of food, basic and luxury goods.
Don't build walls, or forts during the first year. If you can sell weapons, do so.

[Vendayn]

thanks, I'll try that :)

[Grumpus]

It's TWO factories for every ONE clay pit.

[Zamolxes]

Actually i recomend NOT to upgrade your housing, ESPECIALLY if u can sell any of the basic goods. Keep building and building, more insulaes. A medium insulae hosts 110 people, that's 50 more than a regular one, but also eats your export items. A insulae is what 45 Dn to plop? But eats 1 pottery which is 70 Dn, EVERY YEAR. SO with the price of maintaining a lvl 2 insulae, i can get 2 basic insulaes, EVERY YEAR!
Myself i keep building, giving people only food,and maximize exports as priority. When u reach to the point u can completely sellout all your trade parteners, and have your warehouses full at end of year, u can slowly turn on basic goods, and then luxury goods.
Also, u'll have to evict some of your plebs. As the houses evolve more come to town, and u can end up very quickly with 1000 unemplyed plebs and some 300 equites. If u have the cash, u can start your patrician complex, and remeber to make more food, way more food. U should prolly double your food production BEFORE u start laying patrician block, and diversify it too.
After you doubled your food production, balance out plebs, u wont need any more of them, since patrician block only needs equites(except markets, engineers ans prefects). If u have lots of evicted insulaes, might consider demolishing them and get domuses instead.
A large patrician block needs a LOT of equites, all those coliseum and circus, requires a LOT of them.

[Cybren]

Actually i recomend NOT to upgrade your housing, ESPECIALLY if u can sell any of the basic goods. Keep building and building, more insulaes. A medium insulae hosts 110 people, that's 50 more than a regular one, but also eats your export items. A insulae is what 45 Dn to plop? But eats 1 pottery which is 70 Dn, EVERY YEAR. SO with the price of maintaining a lvl 2 insulae, i can get 2 basic insulaes, EVERY YEAR!
Myself i keep building, giving people only food,and maximize exports as priority. When u reach to the point u can completely sellout all your trade parteners, and have your warehouses full at end of year, u can slowly turn on basic goods, and then luxury goods.
Also, u'll have to evict some of your plebs. As the houses evolve more come to town, and u can end up very quickly with 1000 unemplyed plebs and some 300 equites. If u have the cash, u can start your patrician complex, and remeber to make more food, way more food. U should prolly double your food production BEFORE u start laying patrician block, and diversify it too.
After you doubled your food production, balance out plebs, u wont need any more of them, since patrician block only needs equites(except markets, engineers ans prefects). If u have lots of evicted insulaes, might consider demolishing them and get domuses instead.
A large patrician block needs a LOT of equites, all those coliseum and circus, requires a LOT of them.
Space is limited, and if those insulae happen to "accidentally" upgrade, your whole pleb-population goes out of whack. Best not to leave room for error in my opinion.

[Barbara]

Thank you Grumpus and Zalmoxes! These tips will help me greatly! I kept going broke in the tutorials and never had enough goods. I am starting my first Republic Campaign Scenario. I chose Syracuse. Opportunities for export are grain, wool and clothing. I am thinking that since I need to export basic goods to make money I will try Zalmoxes ideas, first. But I am betting Grumpus tips will come in really handy in other scenarios.

[Daego]

Not upgrading is an awful idea in my opinion! It will drastically hurt your prosperity rating since the lower insulae have a lower prosperity rating AND having to use extra housing units decreases your average prosperity.

Giving your people extra stuff makes them happy. If you just leave everyone at Content, they are much more prone to rioting if you run out of food. I keep everyone at as happy as I can... if Caesar requests something, I can let them run low on resources and have a long, long time before they even get pissed at me, let alone riot.

You can quickly max out most export industries anyway...
________
EASY VAPE REVIEW (http://vaporizer.org/)

[vic_4]

Actually i recomend NOT to upgrade your housing, ESPECIALLY if u can sell any of the basic goods. Keep building and building, more insulaes. A medium insulae hosts 110 people, that's 50 more than a regular one, but also eats your export items. A insulae is what 45 Dn to plop? But eats 1 pottery which is 70 Dn, EVERY YEAR. SO with the price of maintaining a lvl 2 insulae, i can get 2 basic insulaes, EVERY YEAR!
Myself i keep building, giving people only food,and maximize exports as priority. When u reach to the point u can completely sellout all your trade parteners, and have your warehouses full at end of year, u can slowly turn on basic goods, and then luxury goods.
Also, u'll have to evict some of your plebs. As the houses evolve more come to town, and u can end up very quickly with 1000 unemplyed plebs and some 300 equites. If u have the cash, u can start your patrician complex, and remeber to make more food, way more food. U should prolly double your food production BEFORE u start laying patrician block, and diversify it too.
After you doubled your food production, balance out plebs, u wont need any more of them, since patrician block only needs equites(except markets, engineers ans prefects). If u have lots of evicted insulaes, might consider demolishing them and get domuses instead.
A large patrician block needs a LOT of equites, all those coliseum and circus, requires a LOT of them.

I don't agree at all: I like to evolve plebs as soon as possible for two reasons: first space, which is often limited and anyway the more compact is your house block, the more efficient are your services, export problem does not exist since it is enough to build two factories to serve12-24 insulae with the good and to permit export; second reason is double upgraded insulae have some prosperity , but anyway they always keep it low, so the less insulae with a certain population, the better.

[Vendayn]

This is somewhat a bump cause this thread is really useful. Also an update...

I have about 4k people in my city now with a very stable income :) I did have a problem where all the Plebs and Equisites were leaving but they have come back now. No screenshots yet, except...

http://www.caesarivonline.com/empire/city/39/

Thats my city :)

[MarkDuffy]

I have purposely stayed outta this thread, cuz the answer is very complex.

Duh (sorry) :o

Money is what makes the world go around. Your plan should be different in different Scenarios. It starts with how much you begin with. It continues by looking at the Scenario Goals. Then it continues with what you can produce in your city w/o importing. Then it continues with what you will absolutely need to import. Then it continues with the map itself. Where are your resources & where is the room to build your City. Finally, do you expect to have LOTS of Favor by filling Requests/Demands from Caesar?

You never want to import unless you have to. If you need Military, you must allow for this expense & this means Weapons, Armor, Grain & SPACE also!

If you can export a lot, then you should go for that. High-priced Finished goods. Check the Sell Price on your Resource Advisor. However, remember that your people need food & goods to be Healthy & Happy. So make 'em & Sales Tax 'em. Equites buy a LOT. Many different types. Sales Tax the hell outta them!

Sales taxes increase with better Markets.

I say do both! Start by opening Trade Routes so you get them open before you run outta money.

You really need to go for both Exports & Sales Taxes, but which is more important will depend on each Scenario.

Gods help with money. Taxes, exports, production, Cartpusher capacity & much more.

Never, ever, go into debt. :)

EDIT: Whoops ~ I left out the evolution point. I start my cities with LOTS of low evolved residences. I overbuild, so I have room for growth. I may leave empty spaces in my blocks for later, but they are predesigned to exactly fit the proper residence. I want to allow them to evolve later & not have to build more. I can evict any that I have too many of & keep their residences available. You control Pleb & Equite evolution by the goods you allow them to have. You can shut off any single food/good from each market you wish to control evolution with. I can export all the Utensils (for example) by turning them off in my Lux Markets. Two birds with one stone (Exports AND evolution). :)

PS ~ I am still a C4 Noob. This philosophy could change in a heartbeat! ;) The game will teach me! :)

[Kuplo]

Along the lines of imports and exports, does anybody know how much the empire cities are paying for each unit of each product?

// I attempted to go buy the strategy guide for just such information but no retailers have it around here right now. Of course I have no idea if the guide even contains something like this.

The reason I'd like to know is that I'd like to know what kind of individual profit (or loss) could be made through trading on a individual per unit basis.

Does anybody have this information available anywhere?

And I agree the strategy does change with each scenario and what that scenario contains as Mark has stated.

Thanks,

[Daego]

It's available under your Resource advisor. Click the button on the bottom left of the screen -- it will show you what you will pay per import unit and what you get paid per export unit.

It isn't constant during a scenario, supposedly it can fluctuate a little.
________
Volcano vaporizer review (http://vaporizer.org/reviews/volcano)

[Kuplo]

It's available under your Resource advisor. Click the button on the bottom left of the screen -- it will show you what you will pay per import unit and what you get paid per export unit.

It isn't constant during a scenario, supposedly it can fluctuate a little.

Thank you, I'll check it out in a few moments, is there also somewhere in the game that breaks down the costs of per item of a product that I make in the game so that basically it might tell me that each pottery unit Im making me is costing me xx denarii or something like that?

Also I've been trying to figure out if there is a way of telling how much each unit of a product will cost me when before I open the trade route so that I know roughly how much he is going to sell me each ivory unit for and how much he will pay me for each unit of grain.

Thanks again,

[JuliaSet]

Hi Kuplo,

I found that the import controls to be rather "basic" on the port settings, but if you change the values in the Resources, (second page / button) you can set it to import ONLY one or two, which is at times all I can afford.

I use that page quite often to save myself from instant poverty when a trading partner dumps in five of something and I cant afford it.

[MxM]

I don't agree at all: I like to evolve plebs as soon as possible for two reasons: first space, which is often limited and anyway the more compact is your house block, the more efficient are your services, export problem does not exist since it is enough to build two factories to serve12-24 insulae with the good and to permit export; second reason is double upgraded insulae have some prosperity , but anyway they always keep it low, so the less insulae with a certain population, the better.
Well he is saying it for the beginning of the game. In the game beginning prosperity does not matter at all! You need prosperity only to achieve the mission goal, i.e. at the end of the scenario. The space is also available in the beginning. I find this strategy quite interesting. However, I do foresee the difficulty of upgrading them later to higher level, because you have to delete some of the building, and that makes the population unhappy. Plus the space planning is a bit tricky - you have to relay on the fact that you will delete some of the buildings later.

[vic_4]

Well he is saying it for the beginning of the game. In the game beginning prosperity does not matter at all! You need prosperity only to achieve the mission goal, i.e. at the end of the scenario. The space is also available in the beginning. I find this strategy quite interesting. However, I do foresee the difficulty of upgrading them later to higher level, because you have to delete some of the building, and that makes the population unhappy. Plus the space planning is a bit tricky - you have to relay on the fact that you will delete some of the buildings later.
On the contrary, keeping the number of houses at the minimum you leave free space to expand service and I have not yet deleted a house.
Behaviour is different about plebs and equites: for plebs one approximatly knows how many farms, factories, markets etc. he needs, so I usually plan that number for fully evoluted plebs houses. Then I build a first round of production buildings to get my city started and making money. At this point I give plebs one basic good and while arriving new people I expand pleb services. At this point I am producing almost everything I can but not to maximal levels. When city is stabilized I evolve equites with at least one luxury good and prepare services for patricians, I add needed equites and place patricians.
At this point I complete plebs evolution with a second basic good and build whatever else I need. I begin to build walls (if not a military scenary I put military and gates on low priority, so they make buffer between unemploiment and workers needed for important tasks), when walls are completed I proceed to evolve as much as possible patricians adding equites houses according to needs.
For equites as I begin to build my city I immediately place reservoir, pump house and fountain, Juppiter shrine, tax office, may be a clinic and an odeon. Other services I add later.

[Barbara]

I decided to follow Grumpus' and others' suggestion and fully evolve my plebs. My equites evolved up once. I made sure to have plenty of food, basic goods and a supply of luxuries on hand before adding patricians to the city. This scheme worked and I had little green faces in all my houses. I stayed treading water for a long time before I could put in the patricians but I didn't go broke.

This was the Republic 1 - Syracuse Scenario. No walls were needed to evolve my housing - just services and goods.