What do gold and silver mines actually do? As far as I can see they don't increase the income at all but increase happiness and that's it?
Just playing a practice game at the moment and have 3 gold mines and 2 silver mines next to my towns but they don't seem to do anything. Iron mines let you build troops, etc but I would have thought gold would give you gold coins or something but I dont think they do?
1: Yes they do:
A plains gold tile usually produces 2 hammers and 1 commerce, add a gold mine and it's 3 hammer and 7 commerce for that tile. Likewise for silver but 6 or 5 commerce instead of 7...
2:
Having a mine plus the resources linked increases your happiness cap by 1 in your cities. Having multiple of 1 resource doesn't help in this aspect though.
3:
They create commerce, not gold, there's a slight difference ( I'm sure you recall from civ2):
Gold is like the name says, gold, It's money which transfers into your funds. Gold is used (primarily) to pay maintenance, supply, etc for your cities and soldiers. See you financial advisor on your empire wide expenses... Early-mid game on, also used for upgrading obsolete units into newer ones when possible and to trade with other civs for other things. In the modern age you can also hurry (buy) things ( by that I mean city production) with gold eg. you want a tank done in 1 turn so you hurry it with gold, but there's a condition, you need to run a specific civic for that.
Commerce is a resource, that changes into gold or research ( or later on, also culture and also espionage if you have BTS) depending on your research slider. The research slider is at 100% at the start of the game but you can always adjust it. Basically, you set it up how much % you want your commerce to go to research, espionage, gold and culture. A good idea is keeping your research as high as possible without a net flow loss ( early on, gold is only used for maintanance, later on you get more things to do with gold but early in game it's definitely a good idea to only keep a small surplus eg. 100-150 gold and try to break even ( eg. +0 gold per turn) and spend as much as possible on research. Espionage is optional, I haven't ever done more than 30%, usually only keep it at 10%. And culture ( every 10% culture means + 1 ( or more depending on buildings) happiness) only realistically used for happiness during war time and war weariness.
Make sure to read the civilopedia dude or grab the beginners guide from civfanatics.
think they played over that himatchi lan thing rather than properly online tho, co-op maybe? not sure...
