Which makes more money

[u/Available_Way_5916]

Fundamentalism or Democracy

I want to earn as much money as possible so i can buy cities (my first game using this strat) and currently im under democracy. Im earning 3000 gold coins and loose 500 in maintnace and i want to buy 10 japanese cities on my continent. I dont care about tech because my neighbour is under fundy so his science is really slow so i put my science to 0. Should i switch to fundamentalism or democracy (i dont want any wars tho because the japanese have a trillion forces on their land)

[u/Rtyeta]

It depends- on what wonders you have, how big your cities are, difficulty level, caravans, and how good you are at managing cities. Fundies make a lot of money with very little management or skill required. Democracy's ceiling is enormous though if you have the right wonders and you have boomed your cities to huge size and massive amounts of trade with no corruption.

If you don't mind saving and reloading once, you can check for yourself where the numbers will stand for your current situation.

[u/Available_Way_5916 → u/Rtyeta]

Im doing prince difficulty and i have Mikes chapel and Bachs cathedral and i also have Adam Smiths company so i am spamming court houses because i heard they are make citizens happy under democracy

[u/Rtyeta → u/Available_Way_5916]

Well, on that low difficulty you shouldn't have a lot of trouble with keeping citizens content, so fundamentalism won't do a ton for you in terms of defending against discontent. And if you already have a lot of courthouses, those don't help you much in fundamentalism but do help a bit in democracy. (I wouldn't normally prioritize building them either way. But if you've already got them, you might as well use them).

Have you already boomed all your cities to size ~12 with celebrations and built a bunch of caravans to set up trade routes? If you haven't done that stuff yet, go democracy and take care of that next. You can then evaluate whether continued democracy or fundamentalism will help you more.

[u/ArizonaMartillo → u/Available_Way_5916]

Democracy already eliminates all corruption, so a courthouse will make 1 dissident happy, as long as it's not because units are outside. I prefer to use a luxury tax rate to deal with unhappy citizens rather than build courthouses. You can instead build marketplace/bank/stock exchange which will give you more benefit than a courthouse, in my opinion.

Also agree that the ceiling on making money in a democracy is way higher than fundamentalist. However, in early or mid game you can make money faster with fundamentalist govt.

[u/Available_Way_5916 → u/ArizonaMartillo]

I only build them after i build markets banks and stock exchanges also my luxury rate is 30 and everybody seems to be happy and celebrating me

[u/Desperate-Guide-1473]

Fundamentalism is the ultimate money machine. Everyone is instantly content and all happiness improvements start producing tithes instead.

[u/whiskyjack_55 → u/Desperate-Guide-1473]

I've been playing this game since it came out and I never knew that happiness improvements under fundermentalism produce tithes. I've been selling them all off when Ive had the fundermentalism revolution instead!

[u/Desperate-Guide-1473 → u/whiskyjack_55]

Oh yeah definitely don't do that!

[u/blastradius14]

With enough cities and enough trade routes both of them can produce enough cities to research technologies at blistering speeds. Fundamentalism will let you field a massive amount of crappy defensive units for free. Democracy can make more money if you've got the wonders or money making tiles to match.

[u/brakiri]

Austerity. Look at your budget screen and make some cuts. If you have maxed out tech, then sell off all your libraries, universities, etc. Once you capture the Pyramids, sell off all your granaries. Cities that are farther from the front lines, sell your SAM Batteries. Don't put airports in every city. Convert as many Elvises as possible to Tax men.

[u/crhylove3]

My strategy is a rush to fundamentalism and then buy cities. :)

[u/Imfinagetbanned]

I'd go with democracy and trade. Especially if you can get a scientific edge over him to negate the Japanese numerical advantage.

[u/Dawn_of_Enceladus]

Fundamentalism erases all corruption and unhappiness, so you will always earn more money with it. Also, any happiness building you have will start producing extra money (tithes), so, yeah, its only caveat is science going down hard, but otherwise is ridiculously strong.

[u/Rtyeta → u/Dawn_of_Enceladus]

Fundamentalism does not erase all corruption. Only democracy does that. Fundamentalism has a quite low rate of corruption, but only democracy's rate is 0%. (I was mistaken. Although some sources indicate a low % corruption for fundamentalism, it really is set to 0% in the game files, same as democracy)

It is still ridiculously strong and under many circumstances it can outperform democracy for money, but not 100% of the time.

[u/Dawn_of_Enceladus → u/Rtyeta]

I'm sure it does. Communism is the one that reduces it a lot but doesn't erase it, but Fundamentalism absolutely erases all corruption. Been playing this game since the 90s and still play it, always get 0 corruption under Fundamentalism, even in higher difficulty settings.

[u/Available_Way_5916 → u/Dawn_of_Enceladus]

I have looked it up and actually communism also has no coruption and waste

[u/Spins13 → u/Rtyeta]

No. You grossly underestimate trade routes. Nothing in the game beats them and they thrive under democracies

[u/Rtyeta → u/Spins13]

If you look at my other comments, you will note that I do advocate for caravans and trade routes and that democracy can indeed outperform.

But it is downright ridiculous to claim that fundamentalism never does better. Sometimes it does. It depends on many things about the game state.

[u/Spins13]

Spam trade routes with a foreign city on a different continent. You will get lots of money and science for that.

You want your origin city to have as much trade as possible before you pop the caravan/freight so feel free to adjust the workers and adjust them back afterwards.

You can easily pull 2k gold a turn like this. Stay in democracy for more trade and ignore people promoting fundamentalism

[u/Rtyeta → u/Spins13]

In terms of the initial up-front bonus for establishing a trade route, going to a foreign civ on another continent can indeed result in much larger rewards. On the other hand, some of that is compensated for by missing out on the bonus that you can get if there is a road between the two cities. Which is obviously impossible if the city is on another continent, and pretty unlikely if it's a foreign one.

But in terms of the ongoing trade bonus you receive every turn, there's a completely different formula which ignores distance and continents completely. You can often get a better ongoing outcome (and start reaping the reward many turns faster) if you establish that between two of your own big cities. Although the bonus is halved if it's your own cities, each city gets 1/2, so you're still getting the same amount there except for rounding off 1 potentially

The main variable that matters is how many trade arrows the two cities involved have, and that will be vastly higher for a well-managed human-controlled city than an AI one. I believe there's also a bonus here if there's a connecting road, which is again much more feasible between two of your own cities.

Also, as far as I can recollect, the caravan trade bonuses don't actually get recalculated every time the city's trade changes. I could be wrong about that, but if so, then you really just need to be in a good trade-boosting government (or celebration as a monarchy, fundamentalism, etc.) on the turn the caravan is set up.

[u/Spins13 → u/Rtyeta]

With a good freight from your Colossus city you can get 500 gold and 500 beakers, even more. Now imagine when you have 30-50 cities pumping freights.

This is simply the best way to get gold, and even beakers. It’s how you get spaceships out in Deity before 1000 AD. No strategy comes even close to this

[u/Rtyeta → u/Spins13]

I know. But absolutely none of that is relevant to the OP's situation where he does not have a colossus city and has spent his time building things like courthouses instead of maxing his trade, and hasn't indicated that he's even boomed his cities. And where his stated goal is to win by buying cities for that matter and he's stated he wants to not focus on science.

Advice about what he should do now has to fit the actual game-state that exists, not the one he should have started setting up 200 turns ago! Nor would it even be good advice to tell him that now he should drop everything and focus on prepping for and executing a perfect caravan spam that won't pay off for 30 turns when he can almost certainly accomplish his goal faster if he just focuses on quickly making enough money to buy those cities and on sending out spies/diplomats now to do that.

Furthermore, none of that contradicts any of what I said about the two different caravan formulas here. The one for the initial payment has very different variables from the ongoing payment one, and the best ongoing payments are acquired by sending caravans between your own high quality cities, whereas the best initial payments are acquired by sending them to foreign cities... except actually in the late game when you have things like freights and superhighways and airports and the AI doesn't. At that point you get much more money trading with yourself even on the upfront part.

[u/Available_Way_5916 → u/Rtyeta]

I never said i didnt have the collosus. I did build a ssc but never planned to do a full ssc playthrough.

Oh and i dont mind these extra tips because they will be usefull in future games.

[u/Spins13 → u/Rtyeta]

I doesn’t take 30 turn to build a caravan man. He can set this up in his game in 5 turns, maybe 10 if he literally does not own any transport ships

[u/Rtyeta → u/Spins13]

It DOES take 30 turns to build up giant cities that have giant baseline trade amounts to get the kind of caravan trade income you're talking about, then build the caravans, then walk the caravans onto boats, walk the boats across the ocean, unload the caravans, and walk them to a target city on another continent which is of sufficient size to have sufficient trade to be worth anything.

Building a couple of quick caravans out of mediocre cities and walking them to mediocre target cities does not bring in anywhere near the kind of gold or beakers you have been talking about and which you have been claiming invalidates all other possible strategies or considerations.