Where is all my money going?

[Xmudder]

I am running a profit of 20-40k plus 20-40k in bonus income, in the early mid game, yet I can't get my cash reserves above 10k. Every time I do, I go into the red. I am not buying anything, I can't bribe minor powers, pay off pirates, or build colony ships. I was able to track this down to auto-upgrades of my fleets, especially when I shifted from small to medium hulls (exploration, construction, troop transport, fuel tankers), which I spotted when I turned on the announcements for state ships upgraded.

Given that medium exploration and construction ships are no better at their jobs than the small version, fuel tankers are useless, and I don't have enough planets to fill my small troop transports with troops, this is annoying. Its taken me a while to manipulate screens to put a stop to the auto upgrades / retrofits and the games obsession with upgrading every ship every time you research a new tech.

My suggestions to fix this:

1) A ledger showing what the game spent my money on so I know the AI is not spending all my money on hookers and blow. There is a line item lump sum spent on ship construction, which apparently includes upgrades, but no breakdown. Would make things a lot easier to figure out.

2) Better automation. Instead of auto upgrading everything, prompt the player to upgrade ships / bases and tell me how much it costs. Also allow the player the same options to control upgrades and retrofits as they do for other type of spending: Automated / Suggest and Execute / Suggest / Manual.

3) Allow us to set a minimum cash balance before we are prompted to spend or autospend spend any money. It seems to default to about 10k. I'd like to see options for 37.5k (diplomacy), 50k (wonders and colony ships), and 75k (limited terraforming). I'd likely choose the last, as that is in the range of diplomatic expenses to bribe a minor followed by building a colony ship to colonize them. It would also make diplomacy more interesting as the AIs would have more money on hand to trade with.

[MaximKI]

What are your construction and economic policies set to?

[ChrisGb]

My suggestions to fix this:
1) A ledger showing what the game spent my money on so I know the AI is not spending all my money on hookers and blow. There is a line item lump sum spent on ship construction, which apparently includes upgrades, but no breakdown. Would make things a lot easier to figure out.

Just switch off Automatic Hull Upgrade in Ship Builder and put Retrofit on Auto - this will swap new components without going to a Star-Port (but they must be same component only higher version (v1, v2, v3)
In Policy screen set manual ships upgrade, retrofit to off and you good to go.

To retrofit to new components you now have to click on the ship retrofit button.

2) Better automation. Instead of auto upgrading everything, prompt the player to upgrade ships / bases and tell me how much it costs. Also allow the player the same options to control upgrades and retrofits as they do for other type of spending: Automated / Suggest and Execute / Suggest / Manual.

we try to get rid of the message spam and not increase it
you not need all this, srlsy.

3) Allow us to set a minimum cash balance before we are prompted to spend or autospend spend any money. It seems to default to about 10k. I'd like to see options for 37.5k (diplomacy), 50k (wonders and colony ships), and 75k (limited terraforming). I'd likely choose the last, as that is in the range of diplomatic expenses to bribe a minor followed by building a colony ship to colonize them. It would also make diplomacy more interesting as the AIs would have more money on hand to trade with.

for that oyu have to set the budget to manual then you can set all this but its wonky as the income goes up and down dynamically as plagues etc happen

Just make sure you upgrade your merchant fleets and civil ships so they spend their cash on upgrading their feelt and it goes into your state funds.
I often run on a negative budget and still my overall account goes up like nuts because of civil ships building/retrofitting, turism, trade and fuel sales.

[Xmudder]

What are your construction and economic policies set to?

Most everything is manual in terms of construction and ship design. Colonies and tax rates are automated. I'm still losing money, and I don't know where it is going,

Hmm.... I just found a bunch of troops being constructed, so I turned that to manual as well.

Again, a ledger would be nice.

[Xmudder]

Frustrating to point of being unplayable. I have turned off everything I can find, but the game keeps wasting my money on unnecessary auto upgrades. 75k so far this yeah, twice that total last year. I need the money for diplomacy, damnit! HOW DO I MAKE IT STOP!?!?!?!?

[Buio]

In my last game I played the AI starting burning all my money after winning the pirates over. The game started autobuilding ships like mad to fill up fleets getting all the separate pirate ships.It was nearly impossible to build any high cost facilities as the game never saved enough money to do it. It also took a very long time in-game before the AI was satisfied and stopped burning money. After it was over I had a bunch of powerful fleets so it wasn't all bad, just that it sort of took over the game some time. Ran close to default game settings. I already know I can turn off automatisation, just telling what happened with close to default settings.

[ChrisGb]

Frustrating to point of being unplayable. I have turned off everything I can find, but the game keeps wasting my money on unnecessary auto upgrades. 75k so far this yeah, twice that total last year. I need the money for diplomacy, damnit! HOW DO I MAKE IT STOP!?!?!?!?

without knowing your exact settings nobody will be able to say something on the matter but its clear that either you have something on auto or you have too much stuff and pay too much mainteance and support overall or you not have enough income in general.
Population policies matter, also researching and building next level administration centers, trade bazar and other facilities that help with economy.

[Omnius]

Better to manually control tax rates and ship construction. The pathetic automation just does such a poor job of running the economics. A shame the devs won't invest time in improving the pathetic automation instead of wasting time with meaningless pirate garbage.

[thegreybetween]

Better to manually control tax rates and ship construction. The pathetic automation just does such a poor job of running the economics. A shame the devs won't invest time in improving the pathetic automation instead of wasting time with meaningless pirate garbage.

Dude. Chill.

1) The AI is regularly being improved and has come a loooong way since 1.0
2) It is a complex system that takes time and iteration. Fixes and improvements happen with every patch.
3) The pirate stuff is one of the most frequently requested new features, and is not a waste of dev time, nor garbage
4) While it is a small team and there is a lot of overlap, much of the AI and systemic improvements are handled by a different team than new content development. Devs are working on game fixes and new content simultaneously

I get that you had a game disrupted by "absolute ignorance", and it is good that you posted a thread about it to make the devs and community aware of your opinion on how the game should run. I'm sure that feedback is being taken into consideration, and you will likely see improvements moving forward. Will they drop everything, profusely apologize for inconveniencing you, and prioritize your pet issue? Probably not. But if you want to improve the odds:
- Don't insult the devs or their creation. While far from perfect, the AI is not "pathetic" and no time is "wasted" on "garbage" (aka continued development).
- Piling on other threads about different automation issues doesn't draw the kind of attention you want to your own concerns
- Be specific about the issues you think are bugged. "Here's an isolated anecdote about suboptimal AI performance, 'too many bugs to count', and a rant about ignorant game design" is pretty hard to constructively address.
- Provide a save file showing your issue(s). Yes, they are too big to attach to a forum post. Solutions to this are well documented in the support forums.
- Has your issue already been discussed in the support forums? When colonies or objects are placed as a result of story-specific triggers, certain combinations of game settings and other scripted events occasionally create weird situations like the distant colony that set you back so far. You may find helpful commentary elsewhere in the forums. This "absolutely ignorant" situation may just be an extremely uncommon confluence of factors that you just happened to unfortunately roll in your game. Try another start. Odds are, it will happen again so rarely that it isn't the galaxy-shattering issue it seems.

I'm generally not too big on White Knighting, and I respect your idea of what this game should/could be. And it is great that you're reaching out to the community to discuss it rather than just quietly review-bombing the game before disappearing forever. But constructive criticism these diatribes are not, and it is pretty dismissive to ignore the steady and genuine improvements regularly made to this game because you had a bad game once or twice. Constructive feedback and mutual respect do more for feature improvements than tirades. They are also better to (repeatedly) read.

Best wishes on the improvements you seek. Truly. The better the game gets for everyone, the more we all win. Cheers.

[OrnluWolfjarl]

0) manually save your game to restore your empire back to this point

1) set all policies to manual, turn off advisor doing things on their own. Keep only direct colony-related taxation and spending adjustments on auto

2) for each ship design, set autoupgrade and autoretrofit to manual

3) set all fleets, ships and stations on manual

4) cancel all current ship/station

5) turn on automations one by one back to your previous settings until you figure what is actually causing your issue.

6) let the game run for a month or so for each automation you turn on, and monitor your cash flow

7) report back with your observations so we can actually help you

You can set policies to advisor asking you before they do anything, so you can control spending. Be aware this will cause massive message spam if you set the setting it too liberally.

The budget shows expected income/expenses for the year. That is maintenance, research, taxation, etc. Bonus income is unexpected, like extra trade, ship build orders by private sector, events, etc. Likewise there's bonus expenses, shich is what seems to cause your issue. The most common causes for inflated expenses are:

* autobuild/autoretrofit of ships/stations every time you research a new component (turn off automation and manually upgrade every tech level instead) or overzealoys manual retrofit/upgrade

* automated colony troop recruitment (turn off automation and only produce troops you'll actually need, until your overall cash flow becomes high enough to support their maintenance) or overzealous manual troop recruitment

* shortage of basic resources causing increased constructiion costs whenever you trade for those resources with other empires or independents (secure sufficient resources)

* overzealous and rapid colonizing. New colonies cost money for a long while, before becoming profitable

* automation of building construction (set to manual or advisor suggestion, and only build things in important and populous colonies)

* terraforming multiple planets simultaneously. Terraforming is slow and terraforming facilities cost a lot of money

* running too many automated oversized fleets, which keep topping up, repairing or retrofitting

The AI automations are decent. You dont like them because they get in the way of your plans, but understand that if you have some automation turned on then the AI will FIRST PRIORITIZE your empire's survival, and then its expansion. If the AI is building ships, it means you need them more than a new colony ship. Your automations have the same AI as enemy empires. If your AI is building ships, that means other AI Empires view you as weak militarily and WILL. be declaring war possibly. Just an example, but it applies everywhere

[Parrius]

Agreed! I'm also looking forward to the Pirate expansion and all the features that will come with it! TAKE MY MONEY!

[maggiecow]

Again, a ledger would be nice.

Been saying this since a few days after launch when the first mysterious money sinks got noticed, which WERE bugs and the discussion around that would have been a lot simpler with a ledger. Plenty of people on here "explaining" why it wasn't a bug and go check X or Y when it was the code that needed fixed.

Also, have a pirate DLC but make anything it "adds" optional, because if we're going back to that facility infestation bullshit I am done with this game.

I am amazed anyone who played the DW:U version of pirates has any enthusiasm for more of that nonsense.

But maybe it'll be good. Maybe it'll add nomadic vagrant pirate fleets operating out of vast shady starbases with their own pirate council and stock market which they will use to buy up empty offices in the colonies of AI and Player empires, staffed with a dark-suited business types with parrots on their shoulders and thick gold rings in their ear... it's that facility infestation bullshit again, isn't it!?!?!