User Guide

City Maintenance
Just above the Trade Income List is the City Maintenance dis-
play. In a nutshell, this tells you how much it costs your civi-
lization to maintain this city.Your capital city starts out with a
maintenance cost of 0, but as you found more cities they will
begin costing your civilization gold. Maintenance costs arise
from two different sources: the distance of the city from the
capital and the total number of cities in your civilization. [Roll
over] the City Maintenance display to see what is driving this
city’s maintenance costs.
There are several ways to deal with city maintenance costs.
One of the best is to build courthouses in most cities. Each
courthouse reduces its city’s maintenance costs by 50%.
Building enough courthouses will also allow your civilization
to build the Forbidden Palace, which acts as a second capital
and helps control the maintenance costs created by your cities’
distance from the capital.
Finally, the State Property civic removes all maintenance costs
caused by distance from the capital.
Note that courthouses and State Property are not easily acces-
sible during the early game, and you always should be careful
of growing your civilization beyond its means. Expanding too
far too fast will drain your treasury of gold and reduce the rate
at which your civilization conducts research.
Investment Percentages
In the top left corner of the City
Screen are the investment per-
centages, one for research, one for
gold, (and later on) one for culture.These are the same invest-
ment percentages that appear on the Main Screen (they can be
adjusted here on the City Screen as well as on the Main
Screen). The City Screen shows exactly how many research
points, gold, and culture are being generated in this particular
city using the current investment percentages.The percentages
dictate how much of the city’s total commerce is going into
each category.
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As usual, [roll over] each investment percentage to get a more
detailed breakdown of how the city’s commerce is being spent.
For example, let’s say a city has 30 total commerce, running
80% science and 20% wealth, with a library (+25% research)
and one scientist specialist (+3 research points). [Rolling over]
the investment percentages will inform you that the city is pro-
ducing 6 gold each turn (20% of 30 = 6) and producing 24
base research points (80% of 30 = 24), with a total of 34
research points after the scientist and library are factored in
((24 + 3) x 1.25 = 33.75).
Increasing the amount that your civilization invests in culture
adds 1 happy face to each of your cities, more if the cities con-
tain theatres, broadcast towers, or coliseums.
City Map
The large map that
takes up most of the
center of the screen
is the City Map.
Here you can manu-
ally pick which tiles
of the city’s land that
you want its popula-
tion to be working.
Careful management
of what tiles your
cities are working can be of huge benefit to the growth and
development of your civilization. For every population point
that the city possesses, you can pick one tile for its people to
work (you can also assign specialists if desired, see above).
Working tiles are indicated by large white circles.
Every tile produces a certain amount of food, production, and
commerce. More food will let your city grow faster, more pro-
duction lets it build things faster, more commerce speeds along
research – it is up to you to decide which is most important at
any one point in time.
Remember that you aren’t required to manually assign your
populace to work tiles; the city governor does that for you
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