I mint

[naggy]

I think good rules of thumb for minting are:

1.) Will the money pay itself back?

This expands into: Am I spending the money to either build money-generating improvements, protect myself in a major war, or expand enough to compete in my area?

2.) Am I getting the most out of my minting?

Minting increases based on the percentage of your economy you tap. Thus, you should try to only mint when your economy is in the best shape you can reasonably get it - high stability and maximized trade. Minting at -3 stability is just digging a hole (unless it's your last ditch effort to fend off destruction).

3.) Am I minting money to get myself to the next economic level quicker?

Minting to build workshops, tax assessors, and manufactories are generally considered safe bets.

4.) Did I remember to move the slider from Stability after getting Stability 3?

If those 4 criteria are met, then minting may be better than not minting.

 

[Friedericus Rex]

Government tech lvl 24 in 1820?! LOL, let's see, if you had somehow managed to get to government tech 31, which is dated for the mid 1600s, you could have built tax asessors and would have been able to mint half your monthly income straight to the treasury without incuring any inflation. Also, with those tech levels you wouldn't be able to keep Portugal "in check", if it were still around, much less France. My point is, minting is very necessary, no doubt about that, but keeping an eye on inflation is even more so. What to do is to somehow manage to get through to gov tech 31 and until that time rely on the National Bank, Centralization and Masters of the Mint advisors; for the latter, playing with the advisor mod is helpful. All the while you should always stay at ZERO inflation, except maybe if you were hit by an event. In my current Castille - Spain game I'm the ONLY European nation that has colonies, meaning I colonized every province in the Americas, Africa and Asia, except northern China and Siberia of course, without ever having incurred any inflation, I didn't even have to take a lone. When you read the forum, people aren't so much discouraging minting itself, but in almost all concievable cases you should avoid inflation like the devil does holy water and only if absolutly necessary would it be tolerable to have a modicum of inflation, ie. 5% or less as a rule of thumb.

My 2 cents...

 

[Beerbeard]

I try and keep inflation under control in the early part of the game, using Masters of Mint and the National Bank. Depending on which country I'm playing and how things are going, I will let it get to 5% or so but no higher. Once I get to the point where Government Level 31 is in sight, then I go nuts, building factories and buildings all over the place. Especially if you have a colonial empire, and can pop up 50 Tax Assessors within a couple of years, you can bring any inflation level back under control.

But, as others have said, you had fun, and that's what matters. Try a game where you completely ignore your BadBoy, now that is fun.

BB

 

[aussie]

Minting is a tool--neither good nor bad.

I wouldn't mint like you did, though. There are other ways to finance colonial expansion as Spain. (Okay, one other way: robbing gold-rich pagan countries.)

I mint to achieve short-term objectives, then retire the inflation; I aim to end the game with zero inflation. In my present Byzantine game, in the 1650's, I have the most powerful country by far, and it has been achieved through warfare and economic management. Early on I did mint quite a lot, since I needed a navy powerful enough to beat the Turks.

In the end, warfare is king in the game. Once you learn to win with wars, minting will become something you do when needed, not something you do regularly.

That was my philosophy too. Only I took my minting way too seriously... :rofl:

Given the starting power of Castille-Spain, there is nothing whatsoever unusual about your achievements for an experienced player, except for you racking up a very high inflation and crippling your research. As such, I am damn sure that as you gain more experience with the game, you will find that you can consistently achieve more with less.

Don't take that as an argument against minting, though - mass minting can be incredibly fun (and that's what it is all ultimately about and what you seem to have had ), and the EU forums do need a reminder every few years that minting, though often a suboptimal strategy (and certainly when carried out to this degree), is not something that will cripple a game.* There are and have always been way too many players who let themselves be intimidated into being 0%-inflation huggers because of the advice of players who want to play it safe rather than experiment.

I agree. By the 1700s mass minting became a kind of experiment for me. I wanted to see if it was really that bad. It limited my choices but I still had lots of fun. Mind you, an extra 100 years could have proved fatal.

Government tech lvl 24 in 1820?! LOL, let's see, if you had somehow managed to get to government tech 31, which is dated for the mid 1600s, you could have built tax asessors and would have been able to mint half your monthly income straight to the treasury without incuring any inflation. Also, with those tech levels you wouldn't be able to keep Portugal "in check", if it were still around, much less France. My point is, minting is very necessary, no doubt about that, but keeping an eye on inflation is even more so. What to do is to somehow manage to get through to gov tech 31 and until that time rely on the National Bank, Centralization and Masters of the Mint advisors; for the latter, playing with the advisor mod is helpful.

I was aiming for 31 precisely to build tax assessors, but never made it.

As I said before, I was still able to beat France in a war and take four provinces off them while having 160% inflation and being 12 land tech levels below. This is largely because I had crippled their expansion early on (just the same as I made Portugal disappear by 1405). Admittely my army was five times France's, but it was all about picking the right moment to attack (France's WE was huge at that moment, and they had stab -3). After that they never attacked again, even though I had several French cores in southern France.

The Master of Mint is a great way to control inflation. If only you could get one. For long periods of time I was there at the beginning of every month, waiting for new advisors to turn up, but there was seldom a MM. In fact, I only ever saw two level 1 MMs. I found the first one at the beginning of the game, when I still cared; and the second turned up in one of my provinces in 1795, when my inflation was already 200%. I know you can trick the game files to make that sort of thing happen, but first, I don't know how to do it, and second, I feel that's cheating.

form Spain and inheriting Castile's old inflation level

Precisely.

I mint a little when I need to balance the books and I have National Bank/a Master of Mint. Apart from that, nada. I try to keep inflation at 0. In my first game I hit 75 inflation before noticing it existed, there should really be a prompt or something...

Nice one. That's the strategy I'm trying now in a new game as Bavaria. I'll keep you posted.

I think good rules of thumb for minting are:

1.) Will the money pay itself back?

This expands into: Am I spending the money to either build money-generating improvements, protect myself in a major war, or expand enough to compete in my area?

2.) Am I getting the most out of my minting?

Minting increases based on the percentage of your economy you tap. Thus, you should try to only mint when your economy is in the best shape you can reasonably get it - high stability and maximized trade. Minting at -3 stability is just digging a hole (unless it's your last ditch effort to fend off destruction).

3.) Am I minting money to get myself to the next economic level quicker?

Minting to build workshops, tax assessors, and manufactories are generally considered safe bets.

4.) Did I remember to move the slider from Stability after getting Stability 3?

If those 4 criteria are met, then minting may be better than not minting.

You know, those are extremely interesting pointers for the future. I took this game as a learning experience, so I'm not sure I had enough knowledge about game mechanics to answer some of those questions correctly. Still, I'll bear them in mind from now on.