Civ 5 economic-gs

I think that wealth leads to power both in the real world and in Civ 5. In the real world, everything costs money. So it's all about the money. You want to build new towns in your city? You need money. You want tanks? You need money. In Civ 5 it's less useful, but can come in handy for building things quickly.

But now I ask myself where does the economic power come from? In my game we have a lot of gold, but I have never thought about how we got so much. I think that my Civ's place on the map is helping me because not only do we have pearls, but we also have ivory. Ivory is a luxury resource which means it gives your Civ happiness. This leads to all the A.I. Civs to try and trade with me so they could get this resource. Since I had this resource 3 times, I traded it every time I could (because they don't stack). This gave me from 500 to 1000 pieces of gold per deal. This is similar to real life. In real life some resources are really wanted and sell for more money. For example, a barrel of gas costs about $54. This is a lot because an oil barrel is only 42 gallons and that a car gas tank holds an average of 15 gallons, so it basically costs $54 for a little less than three tanks of gas, without factoring the profit margin. Like Ivory in Civ,  gas in the real world is a resource that can give you a good economy if you own it.

I think that my Civ's religion helped too. My religion which is named Dwainisum is Useful to get food and gold. Today we are going to focus on gold. My religion gives use 100 gold every time a city converts to my religion. My strategy is to build missionary which is easy to do since we produce a lot of religion. Then we go from city to city converting everyone. This gives us not only a religion bonus, but also the 100 gold since the city just converted. This is an easy and fast way to build up religious pressure and gold at the same time. This is not like the real world so much because religion is not used to make money, but I guess that if your religion is spread around the world you could get money by soft power.

You can also gain money with some world wonders. In my game I do not have one of the wonders that give you money. But for example the mausoleum gives you +2 gold per source of stone and marble and +100 gold for all great people expended. This is like in real life if you have wonders you can get more tourists, which will give you money.

Now let's talk about how it affects power. First and mostly it affects your military and city level. For example, you could buy any military unit to make your army stronger without wasting the turns waiting for the production to finish. You could also do the same with any building. You could also use it to buy tiles. This can give you anything you need from happiness to food or science. An example of this,  in my game I built a catapult which gave us a great advantage to destroy barbarian encampments. This gave me gold and friendship with the city states. This could not have been possible if I would not have used gold, because the other A. I Civs were going for it too, and the fact that I had a catapult which as a really good range made it possible to destroy it before the others.

This is how your wealth brings your power in Civ 5.