User Guide

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TRADE MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS
Taking up where we left off in City Management Concepts, these are the further divisions that result from
trade income (arrow icons): luxuries (goblets), taxes (gold), and science funding (beakers).
Luxuries make your population more content. The availability of luxuries means that some citizens can
enjoy a more pampered existence. Every two goblets make one contented citizen happy. We’ll talk more
about happiness a little later.
Taxes maintain city improvements and add to your treasury. Taxes support basic city services, and
surplus funds accumulate in your treasury. There are plenty of useful ways to spend money in Civilization II,
as we’ll explain in a little while. If funding dries up, your city might be forced to sell off improvements.
Research funding powers your technological research. Each new advance requires the accumulation
of a certain number of beakers to achieve. The Civilization Advances chapter explains the details of the
search for knowledge, but for now, you just need to know that new discoveries often allow you to build new
units and city improvements, and sometimes open up the possibility of building Wonders of the World. In
addition, each discovery leads to further discoveries, creating a chain of progress. If your cities don’t produce
many beakers, your civilization doesn’t progress very fast.
Which of these three is the most important? That varies according to what you want to achieve right now.
To give trade management the most flexibility, Civilization II lets you adjust the proportion of trade income
that is devoted to each of these three areas. The T
AX RATE option on the KINGDOM menu lets you change the
ratio of taxes to science to luxuries by ten percent increments, and also shows you how these rates affect
your funding and the speed at which your knowledge increases.
In City Concepts, we mentioned that the P
OPULATION ROSTER can tell you more than just the number of
citizens in your city. It can also tell you your citizens’ general level of contentment. Citizen icons appear in
three different attitudes: happy, content, and unhappy. When you start building cities, you start with content
citizens. The type of government your civilization develops and the level of difficulty at which you chose to
play affect how rapidly unrest begins to trouble your populations. Unhappy citizens must be balanced by
happy citizens, or your city falls into civil disorder. Not only does civil disorder sound bad, it has all sorts of
nasty consequences, as we’ll explain shortly.
For now, you need to know that you can increase the happiness of your citizens several different ways,
among them: building specific city improvements like Temples and Marketplaces (we’ll explain all about
Improvements shortly), reassigning military units (the dirt about martial law and foreign service effects
appears under Military Units), adjusting the tax rates (as we’ll discuss under Kingdom Menu in Reference:
Screen by Screen), and pulling citizens off production work to make them specialists (see Specialists
for the skinny on this).
Phew! That’s a lot of stuff to digest all at once. Just one more thing — we mentioned types of governments
two paragraphs ago. Discovering new advances encompasses more than just new gadgets to improve
sanitation and military might. The game counts philosophical concepts and theories as “new technologies,”
too. Every civilization starts out as a Despotism, but you can develop new forms of government. These might,
in turn, have a profound effect on the happiness of your citizens and the rate at which your citizens produce
raw materials, food, and trade.
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