ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins
xmudder,
I loaded up your save and took a look. In short order, I was able to return you to profitability and I've uploaded a new save starting with "Mudd" to the same FTP location. If you want, you can download it and keep playing. Here's what I did:
1. You had a lot more ships and bases than you needed, particularly with the additional Democracy maintenance penalty. You had nine construction ships, two medium spaceports under construction, a Capital Ship and so on. I started scrapping these (sorry about the Capital Ship, we probably could have kept that one, but it was over 1k maintenance on its own), retiring them at the nearest shipyard where I could. I also scrapped those that were still under construction in areas where you didn't need more. I also scrapped a few of your destroyers in your fleet as you are not currently at war or at serious risk of imminent war. You had two industrial research stations and a monitoring station, I decided we only needed one industrial research station, etc. I used the Ships and Bases screen with the different drop downs combined with the Empire Summary screen to figure out where the money was going and which ships and bases were not necessary.
2. Your private economy probably had more mining stations than it absolutely needed, so its upkeep was fairly high too and profit was low enough that it wasn't ordering many new ships. By slowing down/scrapping future construction and the excess construction ships, I slowed things down on that front to give them a chance to catch up.
3. You hadn't really done much on the diplomacy front. Through technology trading, I was able to convince the race that was positively disposed to you to form a Mutual Defense pact. I then traded for galaxy maps everywhere I could, which revealed a few more races that were amenable to free trade. I continued this until I'd discovered all that I could through this method and had greater knowledge of local resource locations and plenty of free trade agreements.
4. Your troop upkeep was pretty high, so I disbanded troops where there was more than one unit per planet and disbanded half of your "strike force" loaded on your fleet.
5. Your relations were good enough that I trimmed down to one agent, your most skilled one and set that one to counter intelligence. If you have any issues in that area you can recruit up again.
After all this, it didn't take long for things to start turning a profit again. Let me know if this helps.
I'm also curious how much of that was due to your own construction/build decisions and how much was based on AI suggestions or AI automation? If the latter, we may need to make the AI automation more conservative as far as spending goes.
I had 6 agents, I cut it to 3. The AI only used 2 of them at a time anyway. All the agents and ground troops were built by the AI, not me. Everything else was built by the ai, with me saying "yes" except for colony ships. That capital ship was a goodie I found, I hope it turned in some nice tech boost when you retired it.
Looks like I need to be more active on the diplomatic front then.
The AI built 2 high tech and 1 industry base in the same star, putting me over my limit tech wise. And 2 defense starbases that I should have said no to.
How do you disband troops?
How long did you play it? that game went from like -20k to -40k a turn in a few minutes when I was playing it. I'll give it a try.
