With the reporting of the Civ4 game done, this report now turns to the other part of the game - burning through 5,000,000 gold coins.
The above is a graph of my per-turn expenses (red-ish line - left axis) from T80 through to T160. I am also showing my city count (purple line - right axis) as well as when I was at war with Egypt (yellow bars down the bottom). You can see some fairly stable organic city count growth in the early sections followed by some rapid city growth when I was really out to kill Egypt (the last war around T140) and Egypt just happened to have located a city on my pre-ordained city 'grid'.
You can also see the step changes in my expenses when my city count increases. Apart from the step changes, there is a fairly constant upwards trend in the expenses. I am not sure what happened at T120 - maybe a large, expensive city celebrated 'We Love The Ruff' day and I didn't have to pay its maintenance for that turn.
Here is the same graph for T140 through to T200. Fairly organic city growth when not at war - rapid city growth during the Carthage war. You can also see the single city that Tokugawa took when he declared on me.
The expenses are fairly stable with an upwards trend. There is some volatility in the middle of the Japanese War that is probably savings through war attrition. You can also see a marked uptick in the expenses at T200 approaches - again, probably unit costs increasing as I start to churn units to counter Japan.
What happened at T187? Expenses went from the 550 mark to just under 1600 in a single turn?