Economy... bug?

[Skywalker]

Hello everyone, i am in a bit of a jam here.
Long story short - biggest galaxy, uber expencive research, crazy neighbors and so on. Game is pretty hard and filled with tough pirates.

Itsa setup i've been running for a while now and usualy I end up with negative income, whatever i do. Yesterday i started another game. Had like 50-90k income and its been fluctuating a bit. Suddenly, out of the blue it drops to -98000 !!! Just like that. No massive buildups, no loss of half the mines, nothing of sorts.

Only event i noticed was that one of my new colonies (it was allready populated by my species) suddenly got hidden pirate base and almost immediately income went down. But what kind of a pirate action can siphon almost 200 000 creds nonstop? And when i busted it - income never returned to it former numbers.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Bingeling]

It could be that you had some ultra rare on the more valuable colonies that disappears. The reduction in development level (ultra rares is a bonus of 30) has a significant impact on revenue (and tax).

I assume you "Income" is cashflow. Is troop recruitment automated (did you or the AI get more of them)? Do you use pirate smuggling (I guess it can be expensive)? You need to figure out if it was income that dropped or expenses that increased. If you have lots of ships and retrofit them all to a larger design, this could have a large impact on maintenance (and cashflow), for instance.

[SirHoraceHarkness]

I'm not entirely sure the ai takes into consideration the increased upkeep of ships after they are retrofitted to a larger size. Many times after finishing a manufacturing skill that increases build size and the fleets start auto retrofitting is when I notice a sharp decrease in income or even a negative. This is most prevalent with capital ships as their cost can skyrocket with a single upgrade to the next larger size and why the bulk of my fleets are cruisers as even with endgame tech they stay manageable on cost. I usually run 77% cruisers with 20% caps and 1% each on escorts, frigates and destroyers so the ai has something to play with when it wants to do it's send a single ship to escort a colony or construction ship etc.

[Skywalker]

Didn't have any massive retrofits just before cashflow plummeted back then and very few resources were lacking.

[Hattori Hanzo]

do you check pirate smugglers ?

[RemoteLeg]

I would start by examining the Empire Summary Screen (F6).
It gives a high-level breakdown of your income and expenditure so you can at least use it to target where the money is going.