Some economic tips...

[idgar]

ORIGINAL: Hard Sarge

(build a resort at a interesting place, a ring planet is interesting, but, you can't build one at the planet, but you got to build it away from the planet, so, what, every 150 years, when the planet's Obit comes back around, you may get some people to show up ?)

Make sure you right click directly on the planet/moon with the rings with a constructor selected and choose the "Build at Planet/Moon xxx" option when you order the build. My resorts follow the planets around just fine.

Edit:
If there's already a resort base at the planet you can't build another one so the option won't appear. I'm guessing the same applies to asteroids but not sure about the black holes and neutron stars.

[Interesting]

For Black Holes and Neutron Stars you just need to build it inside the "circle".

Zoom in or out untill you see the circle around the Black Holes.

Not the circle you see when you select the Black Hole!

Never right click a Black Hole and select "Build at BlackHole xxx" your ship will get sucked in and destroyed.  Just build inside the circle, but far away from the BlackHole selection circle.

[Xenoform21]

This is true, but i think i found an exploit to avoid having a ship sucked into a black hole.

A construction i manually ordered to build at a black hole ventured too close to the event horizon, and it was slowly drifting towards the centre of the hole. I thought, heck, lets try to at least do something to save all those components and that expensive ship.

Long story short, if you see a ship getting pulled into a black hole, order it to warp a short distance away. So long as it's not too close to the centre it should hyper-jump to safety.

[BigWolfChris]

Only really an exploit if the game is supposed to prevent hyper-jumping when in the event-horizon of blackholes (Which would technically make it a bug I suppose lol)

[shalis]

I've played several games soo far on 1.03 and ya i noticed the same patterns.
 
Seems to be a combination of things. During your initial colonization expansion you have to keep in mind that each planet you colonize will be recruiting troops. Also increase in colonies affects the need for more private sector ships which puts a drain on strategic resources (at the beginning this can mean a big drain on cash flow since you don't have those resources), AI also likes to construct plenty of mining bases and (in 1.02 it happened haven't checked in 1.03) sometimes misplaces them so they end up being a useless massive drain on your cash flow (1k maint a pop).
 
just my 2 cents on why the economy keeps going to the red even when i have a displayed positive cash flow of 40k- 80k.