The Best Ways to Increase Income in Civilization 7

You get a lot of perks by being the richest nation in Civilization 7. You can produce troops and buildings instantly and cover your army’s maintenance costs with room to spare. Every civilization needs a reliable way to generate income or gold.

So here are the best ways to generate gold in Civilization 7.

The Best Ways to Get Gold in Civilization 7

Before getting to the best gold-generating methods, you must learn how to read your global yields. You can open the Global Yields Breakdown by pressing any icon on any resource value on the top panel of your screen. This opens the Global Yields Breakdown window containing your Gold, Food, Happiness, Culture, Science, Influence, and Production incomes.

Don’t Overproduce Cities

While every settlement may be converted to cities using gold, having more cities than towns isn’t a good idea. Maintaining cities and turning them into a thriving community takes time and resources, and you can’t focus well enough if you have too many. Since all of the production made in the city may turn to other resources like Culture or Science, it doesn’t have enough gold generation compared to a town.

A town converts its entire production directly into gold, making it a good source of income, especially if it also has some unique trading resources to export.

Related: How to Fix and Prevent Revolts in Civilization 7

Build Income-Generating Structures

Under the production tab in each settlement, a gold icon shows up in structures that generate gold. Building high-income structures should give players decent income, but building “Ageless” structures that generate gold is even better. Ageless structures last throughout ages, so they’ll consistently provide gold for your civilization, making it almost mandatory to build in small towns.

However, keep track of other resources, too. You might lose in other aspects like Science and Culture against other leaders.

Manage Your Maintenance Costs

Gold covers the cost of maintenance on units and buildings. If you don’t build enough gold-generating buildings, your cities could have a negative net income, which can be seen in the Global Yields Breakdown window. Apart from these buildings, troops also eat up a big chunk of your income. Those soldiers existing alone can put you at a negative income overall.

If you prepare for war, you should act fast in production and execution. You don’t want those troops to survive for long. If you have a pacifist playstyle, a few troops should keep your civilization well-defended as long as you capitalize on using the fortification feature. Troops in fortifications win against other troops even when outnumbered.

Implement Gold-Generating Social Policies

Implementing social policies greatly helps you sustain whatever resources your civilization is lacking. Whether it is increasing Happiness, Culture, Science, or Gold, you want policies that synergize with one another. There’s an amazing social policy combo available to all leaders since they aren’t locked through specific leader-based policies or traditions: Tariffs and Laissez-Faire.

• Tariffs – +50% Trade Income, but -3 Happiness in cities.
• Laissez-Faire – +2 Gold and +1 Happiness for every imported Resource.

Aim to create numerous trade routes with other settlements and get as many unique trade resources as possible, like camels, silk, whales, and everything you can import. Each imported resource gives you more gold and happiness, and having more resources also gives you more trade income since you are also actively exporting resources.

Capitalize on Merchants and Trade Routes

Piggybacking on the previous method, establishing trade routes should be mandatory because it is almost like free money. You must research the required tech to unlock the merchant for the age and start producing merchants. Look for unique resources you don’t have and try to import those resources to your civilization by creating a trade route using the merchant.

However, you cannot trade with other unfriendly or hostile leaders, so improving relationships should also be one of your goals.