The Appian Way

Making Money

Everything in Caesar 3 costs money. In order to successfully complete a city, you will need to spend vast sums on buildings, wages, imports, and festivals. It is also nice to be able to pay yourself a fat salary on top of that. With the exception of the two training levels, the money provided at the start of the mission is never enough to cover all of these substantial expenses. You could run up a large debt, but the consequences of doing that are really rather unpleasant, so the only alternative is to find ways of making money. There are two ways to do that (unless you resort to the well cheat):

• Exports
• Taxes

In the early stages of your city's development, when your housing is at a comparatively low level, tax income will be minimal. In order to survive, you need to trade, and trade in quantity. As detailed in my essay 'The Four Phases of City-Building', my approach to any C3 mission is broadly the same: start with exports, exports, and a few more exports.

On the majority of cities, you will have a choice of trade routes to open at the start of the city, and it is important to open them in the right order. In deciding which trade route to open first, you need to decide which of them offers best value. In addition to the cost of opening the trade route, you need to consider:

• What exports are possible
  A trade route that costs only 100 Dn to open, but that offers no possibility of exports, is clearly useless to you. In reality, the majority of trade partners will buy at least something. You should opt for those trade partners who will purchase the more lucrative products: finished goods (wine, oil, furniture, pottery, weapons), rather than raw materials. The exception to this rule is marble, a very lucrative export since no workshops are required. Exporting food is seldom worthwhile, since, in addition to the low returns, traders will only take food from warehouses, and farms fill up all available granaries before warehouses.
• Land and sea routes
  Remember that a sea trade route requires the additional expense of constructing a dock (and paying its workers). Given a choice of similar land and sea trade routes, it is usually more convenient to opt for the land route.
• Raw materials
  Some cities have few natural resources, and it may be necessary to import raw materials and export finished goods. Where possible, this can be a very lucrative business indeed. If you have a choice of trade partners, and one of them will later be able to sell you something you want, then that partner is to be preferred.

In the early stages of city development, getting the maximum possible trade income is vital to your success. In order to do so, you need to export your maximum possible trade quota. This in turn requires that you maintain an efficient throughput of traders, since you are not permitted more than two traders from each city on the map at any time. To maximise that trade income, you can try the following:

• Keep warehouses loaded with exports, and warehouses accepting imports, near the trader's normal route through the province. For sea trade, build your dock as close as possible to the route between the entry and exit points.
• For sea trade, have warehouses for exports and imports near (preferably across the road from) the dock. Your dock should preferably be disconnected from any other warehouses containing exportable items. When a dock has to be built remote from an industrial centre, have at least two warehouses 'getting' exports near the dock, and ensure that there is no road connection between the dock and the industry. This should allow a fast turnaround of ships at the dock. When a large volume of sea trade is necessary, you will probably want to build more than one dock (I would recommend one for every sea trade route). When you do, make sure they are close together, and connected to the same road system.
• Make sure you produce slightly more than you can export in a year. That way, you are likely to have a warehouse full of the stuff when Caesar decides he wants some.

Once your exports are up and running, you will have a firm financial base from which to expand. However, as your city develops, your wage bill spirals, and you need to import more expensive goods, you may well find that your trade income is no longer sufficient. You then need to turn to your good friend the taxman, and start wringing the denarii out of your populace.

At the start of every mission, I lower my tax rate to 0%, raise my wages two points above Rome, and set my own salary to Citizen. Since I don't have any tax collectors at the start of the level, I see no point in having a tax rate that could negatively affect city mood. You can also afford to go without a salary until your city has some money coming in. Whenever a housing block reaches small casa, it is time for them to start paying their way, so I add a forum. Since around 96% of my population is typically found in my housing blocks, very few people get off scot free. When I place the first forum, I raise taxes to 7%. If I am building patrician housing, I raise taxes to 10-12% when I let the wine loose.

The importance of patrician housing for tax revenue cannot be overstated. The formula for calculating how much tax a house pays is:

Where the tax rate is a number from 1-25 (i.e. NOT a %), and the tax multiplier is an intrinsic property of the house. The values of the tax multipliers for the various housing levels may be found here. Tax multipliers are heavily skewed towards the upper echelons of housing. A luxury palace, for example, pays 16 times as much tax per capita than a small tent. When you take into account the extra population in the luxury palace, you discover that a luxury palace (fully occupied) pays 640 times as much tax as a fully-occupied 1x1 small tent. Much more to the point, it pays 53 times as much tax as a fully occupied 1x1 medium insulae, and about ten times as much as a grand insulae. Another instructive example, is that a small villa, which has less than half the population of a grand insulae, still pays more tax.

The bottom line is, if you want serious tax revenue... bring on the winos!

This website was created by Mark Snow a.k.a. Caesar Alan. Most of the information presented here was gleaned from a number of other websites. Where possible I have credited my sources. You are free to use any of the information here, provided you acknowledge your source!