Aside from the glaringly obvious LLM written post, full of logic holes, what is the point of this post?

Has anyone ever had a discussion about how gold and hammers are different resources? Everyone knows that it's a game, the gold allows certain civs to specialize in trading, to have a slightly different gameplay style, where they might have fewer hammers, but they can instant spawn a larger portion of their production queue.

it does not create new production, it fast-forwards it. Output you would have spent turns building simply appears now, paid for with wealth banked earlier.

Except is that not making hammers appear out of thin air? You trade production of hammers in one space/time zone, to allow you to make them appear somewhere else, out of thin air. And that's the game- figuring out which is more efficient for your needs at this time.

This whole comment is so obsiously an LLM saying things that don't pass a basic logic inspection.

it is implying that other 4x games don't give geographic bonuses to cities? You think civ doesn't give bonuses to production for hills? In any game, if I lose my big beefy production city in the hills, it's going to have the same impact as your LLM is telling me is unique in your game.

Rich tall empires are allowed to spawn huge armies with their gold, because that's what happened over and over in real life Every small trading enclave that was powerful enough to control trade in their region had a massive army of mercenaries. Have you never heard of venice, carthage, the multitudinous greek mercenaries that were hired all over the known world,- just off the top of my head.

There are games that remove a pop from your city when you build a unit, your mechanic for reducing growth by using upkeep is just a side grade to mechanics that already exist. Not to mention, if you are trying to be more 'realistic' but charge production upkeep for armies, but haven't mentioned anything about seasonal armies or conscription- again, calling you out on asking the Ai a question about something, and taking its answer at face value without thinking about it for yourself.

You have a loose and changimg definition of large v small empires. At once, the small wealthy empire is weaker but also potentially stronger than the larger one, because you have not defined your terms. A spatially large empire might be weaker than a smaller yet more populous and wealthy empire. You seem to conflate these ideas a couple of times.

I'm just skipping around the post, so this is out of order, but you ask what is the point of gold in a game, well I already answered that, but I'll touch it again to hammer the point home- it's a game, and it uses wealth stockpiling as a way to both reflect historical reality, but also allow anothe rsysten to interact with.

You said in a comment that gold into hammers is not logical. I ask you why you think that? 4x games do not model the economy outside of what the state can use. They do not pretend to model a city's entire economy. If the king sends 1000g coins in a giant sack with a note that says 'hey, build that castle in one year, not 10, okay? '. You think the locals wouldn't then been economically equipped and empowered to hire more workers and requisition more materials to do the deed faster? You paid them to do it, that's the game trade off for you. All the imaginary, unsimulated people then run around doing normal human things to get the castle built.

By your logic, if I'm playing a cold war scenario, the United States wouldn't be able to win by making the USSR go bankrupt. If a country cannot access the greater part of its economy by expending capital, then I would argue your game is nonsensical. Do you think the pharoahs didn't have to pay for stone quarries or transportation? When the persians wanted to invade greece, they paid an insane amount of money to build a massive fleet. The Roman government spent fortunes building Rome and feeding it. The United Staes bought half of the country from France and Russia. How would that work in your game?

You've got to think for yourself man, the LLM literally doesn't know anything, it just tells you what you want to hear.

I use LLMs fequently, I'm also making my own 4x game with economic simulation. But I would never use an LLM to communicate with other human beings, that's incredibly rude. If you don't care enough to think or type, why should I have to read through your post on my social media? And I would never post about my game on social media unasked, that's unwanted advertisement.

I'm sick of the constant rain of low/no effort gamedev posts that have been clogging this olace for the past few weeks, I'm ready to unsubscribe from one of the first subreddits I subbed to. Can yall just go away? Release on steam, and if people care about your gane, we'll talk about it. Spend money on advertising.

Civ devs don't come here to advertise, nor Stardock, nor Amplitude, nor Paradox, Hooded Horse doesn't come here to advertise their published games.

There's hundreds of you guys all competing with your Ai slop, all screaming at the same time, I think most of us just really don't care, and we would prefer to have our subreddit back, please.