Income has regular unknown deductions ~10k/15k every in-game month, impossible to save up funds

[Chitinez]

Hello everyone,

In a game I have a positive cashflow, not a great fleet, everything up and running with no anomalies and then all of a sudden I encounter money drops that happening every game month and it is ongoing. It is getting impossible then to save up money and build/research anything. All what is happening is that I have some steady economy income and then sudden drop that costs more than income. Then income again and drop right after. Since the drop is always a larger piece, eventually I have always between 0-20k on hands.
What could be a problem and do you have any recommendations? Is it a bug or a normal game behavior? If the latter, please provide detailed steps on how to fix this.
I am providing the video proof in the attached archive along with the save game file. In the video you can monitor how the cash amount is increasing and then at least twice during recording it drops less ~10k
Here is the link to download: https://files.usergate.com/a0409aae9406

Kind regards,

[MaximKI]

Hello everyone,

In a game I have a positive cashflow, not a great fleet, everything up and running with no anomalies and then all of a sudden I encounter money drops that happening every game month and it is ongoing. It is getting impossible then to save up money and build/research anything. All what is happening is that I have some steady economy income and then sudden drop that costs more than income. Then income again and drop right after. Since the drop is always a larger piece, eventually I have always between 0-20k on hands.
What could be a problem and do you have any recommendations? Is it a bug or a normal game behavior? If the latter, please provide detailed steps on how to fix this.
I am providing the video proof in the attached archive along with the save game file. In the video you can monitor how the cash amount is increasing and then at least twice during recording it drops less ~10k
Here is the link to download: https://files.usergate.com/a0409aae9406

Kind regards,
Anatoly

Thanks, we'll investigate this.

[MaximKI]

Hey, we've taken a look at your save and the economy seems to be working as intended.

There are several reasons why you may be observing occasional drops in cash reserves:
1. Since most of your economic policies are automated, it's highly likely the AI is making construction decisions that you may not necessarily be aware of, for example, troop recruitment
2. Other reasons for witnessing cash reduction can be due to resource trading and maintenance costs.

To help understand cashflow better, we can recommend A) opening and observing the economic screen that shows expenditures and changes to your economy and B) switch all economic policies to manual control and see if that has an impact on your cashflow.

Hope this helps.

[Chitinez]

Hey, we've taken a look at your save and the economy seems to be working as intended.

There are several reasons why you may be observing occasional drops in cash reserves:
1. Since most of your economic policies are automated, it's highly likely the AI is making construction decisions that you may not necessarily be aware of, for example, troop recruitment
2. Other reasons for witnessing cash reduction can be due to resource trading and maintenance costs.

To help understand cashflow better, we can recommend A) opening and observing the economic screen that shows expenditures and changes to your economy and B) switch all economic policies to manual control and see if that has an impact on your cashflow.

Hope this helps.

Hello there,

Sorry but switching between automation and full manual does not help, the drops are consistent in every case.
I have noticed the drops appear to be the difference between current total expenses' value of the current and the last month. This is my observation so far. It goes until the end of the year until it becomes the article of the annual expenses of the previous year in the rightmost graph.
Then the next year begins and the current expenses graph is reset to zero and then during the first month there come the first expenses and drops start appearing too.
I would understand maybe this is somewhat a mechanic of the game but there were not such drops before at first, it only began recently after I continued the game from one of the saves.
Another thing is that my colonies are well developed and I only have one planet with negative income. The cashflow is positive, around 40k. I have several Free trade agreements with other factions. However my economy is suffering from these drops and it is impossible to continue playing.
I cannot save money, I cannot buy things, build fleets and so on and so forth.

Could you please have a deeper investigation to track down an issue? Are we able to see the detailed economy logs? Here is my new save game:
https://files.usergate.com/dbc05be1d334

Thanks

[fruitgnome]

I will test tomorrow. Do you use beta 1.1.6.0 (latest)?

[Chitinez]

I will test tomorrow. Do you use beta 1.1.6.0 (latest)?

Hey,

Yeah, I am on the latest 1.1.6.0. Do you need also the video proof to make my case more evident?

Thanks in advance

[fruitgnome]

I tested it a lot. I think it is the resource buying especially from independent trader.
Tips:
Switch government to way of anciencts, you will not have any money problems after a few months.
Build more construction ships and build the stations where are the resources with the highest production shortages. This I will test now for myself.
Kill all creatures to be able to build everywhere. Fleets on auto is enough, military policy can be manual. Overattack Match I set to 3.

[fruitgnome]

I played with 1.1.6.0.

Your savegame after 5 years with my changes:
https://file.io/1Sg3aABGQPES
Builded two new raid fleets.
Builded a lot construction ships.
Selected most production storage resource location, but this was unecessary. Because I have more resource trading costs and even fuel costs than you. But I have 30 mining stations more and 400k bonus income more than you.
Selected a lot of creatures as targets.

At the end you had to few mining stations.
I even not changed government to way of ancients - if you will make this you will have so much more money.

Here is your savegame after 5 years with no changes.
https://file.io/LvXN8Jia270T

Both games I let run on 4x speed.

You have enough construction ships if you have idle construction Ships.

[Chitinez]

Hello,

Seems that it helped.
I followed your recommendations, I did not switch to the Way of Ancients though but I noticed that I was having the biggest shortage in Caslon as well as other production and construction resources. The Caslon was in the biggest demand. Then there were Nekros Stone, Kasadian Crystal, etc. I issued lots of constructions ships and started building lots of mining stations in the nearby.
I assume that it was Caslon that was in deficit and also was missing on majority of my planets (0 stock) and caused disruption of logistic chains, supply and therefore the small income to my cash reserves while meanwhile the total expenses were stable and cutting my already miserable reserves.
I also increased the mining rate empire-wide by researching more advanced mining tech and building the Mining Academy on one of the planet.
The gameplay would have been better though with some popping-up advisor notes to avoid such economy shortages. I was thinking that having couple of Caslon stations next to each colonized planet would have been enough but we better watch the numbers in shortages section when deciding to build more or less stations.
Eventually we all understand that simply switching between auto and manual economy policy does not help at all. I really appreciate your deep investigation and guiding to the right answer.

Thank you a lot for giving me a hint. And I hope it will help other players too.