I need space-welfare...

[johanwanderer]

And attached is my empire summary (insert evil smiley here). Notice that my troop maintenance is only about 1/4 of my ship and bases. I try to keep it around that ratio if I can.

[Airpower]

ORIGINAL: Retreat1970
A Homeworld at 1/4 pop is a disaster.

Agreed. I'm glad you guys are giving me this feedback. I think my wimpy homeworld is the biggest problem in this particular playthrough. I'll play a game tomorrow and try to focus on cultivating a high-pop homeworld.

[Airpower]

Johan, that's a lot of ships. Wow!

I think that if I use Robotic troops as planetary garrisons, and also cut down the number of planets I have, I will come close to approaching your 4:1 ratio of ship:troop costs. And reducing colonization may also help with my emigration problem with my homeworld.

After doing the math, I notice you have a space port at 100% of your colonies. I only have 2 spaceports in this game. One at my homeworld, and one at the captured enemy homeworld (Varunat, in my screenshots). Could I be gimping my spaceport income by doing this?

[johanwanderer]

ORIGINAL: Airpower

Johan, that's a lot of ships. Wow!

Thank you! My ships are small though (Escorts-Frigates-Destroyers) are only ~400 in size. Capital Ships and Carriers are maxed out, though.

After doing the math, I notice you have a space port at 100% of your colonies. I only have 2 spaceports in this game. One at my homeworld, and one at the captured enemy homeworld (Varunat, in my screenshots). Could I be gimping my spaceport income by doing this?

I highly doubt it. I only do that because it feels like it's the "right" thing to do (role-playing wise). Spaceports are a big drain on resources and maintenance, with questionable strategic importance in far-flung colonies. I use them to control pirates more than anything else. They can, however, add to your colony's happiness, which allows you to tax them more (even though corruption will negate most of it.)

The way I look at it, a spaceport costs me about 6K to maintain. If the colony's tax income is not that much, then it's not worth building. However, I try to put at least one spaceport in each system. After all, why settle a system if you don't plan to build infrastucture there? In that game, I have plenty of income to handle the spaceports though, so I build them everywhere.

I believe the private sector is somewhat tied to spaceports as well. It will try to maintain X number of freighters per size of spaceport, and all those suffling of resources may generate extra cash for the economy.

Anyway, it sounds like you're well on your way of solving the problem. Maybe now you can try a few different things and let us know how that work out. For example, it would be interesting to copy your current game save, and continue in two different paths (one with just the 2 spaceports, one with as many as you can afford) and see how the economy compares after a few years.

Cheers!

[DeadlyShoe]

spaceports at a good colony are always desirable EXCEPT that the AI shuffles resources around to each spaceport. What this means is that any individual spaceport may not end up with the resources to construct or upgrade a significant number of ships.

this isnt as much a problem if you are on full automatic ship production as the AI will issue constant low level production orders. However its a problem for players since in my experience we tend to place fewer but much larger production orders which will choke.

[ParagonExile]

1. Do not tax your planets until you hit max population, or you'll bring an axe to the growth. Your home planet is woefully inadequate in that regard.

2. Build fewer troops where you have heavy space defenses.

3. Do not build so many spaceports; the most you should ever place is one per system, with the remaining planets given a smaller and cheaper starbase. This will make your civilization allocate resources more efficiently

4. Get more free trade agreements going with your neighbors.

5. Build more resort bases.

That's what I can offer. I can usually pull off 1 million credits per tick by mid game.

[stormbringer3]

I'm also constantly having money problems. I know that building resort bases will help and I have all these potential locations but can't figure out how to build one.
Thanks for any help.

[Sirian]

Either select the planet / black hole / whatever and use one of the little icons below the image in the lower left corner -
Or use a constructor. Select the constructor and rightlick on the location. In the menu there will be a "build resort base".
Of course, you need a resort base design also.

[stormbringer3]

Thanks Sirian.
You helped me solve the problem. I put off researching Entertainment Systems so the option to build Resort Base never showed.

[Korashy]

For the large amount of colonies you have you have a ridiculously low amount of mining and gas mining station. AFAIK more of those means more private ships being build, meaning more money for you + more trade and GDP to tax. How you are not running out of resources everywhere is a mystery to me.

I generally also never tax my planets until they reach max population and then crank it up to 45% ish. You should also build some more resorts, and tech to increase your economy. People have already mentioned regional capitals.

Your capital planet only has 6B population, and pretty much all of your other population numbers are low. In my current game I had half your entire population on my homeplanet by the time I got colony tech (300k cashflow by itself) and now I have 3 maxed out planets with over 55B on them combined + a bunch of smaller colonies around 10B to 3B. One developed colony can be worth a lot more than 10 non developed. I generally make 3-4 new colonies for every max level planet at the beginning and later on 2-3 new colonies for every max level planet, depending on the situation and the state of my private sector.

[Airpower]

I haven't found a correlation between the number of mining stations and cash income. Mining stations just dictate how fast you gather resources, and for the most part, my resource stockpile was fine. I would rather have a low amount of extremely strong mining stations than a lot of weak ones.

Normally I don't tax low-pop planets either, but I did it out of desperation in this game.

The low pop main planet point has been beaten to death, I think. I know why it happened - I over-expanded, and as those new planets began to increase in development level, all of the population from my homeworld simply migrated away because of the taxation level. So my tax revenue went down. And to compensate for the lower revenue, I cranked up taxes. This caused even more people to leave, putting me in an uncontrollable "death spiral" for homeworld population.

Since this post I have tried some new approaches, including not expanding at all, and only expanding to Quality 90%+ planets that are close by my homeworld. It's very clear to me that over-expanding is punished heavily in this game. Something I didn't know till AFTER I made this thread.

[Korashy]

From what I noticed the more mining stations you build the more freighters are build to pick up/transport the resources. Your private sector also pays for the mining stations, so if they have tons of money there is no reason not to build any more mining stations. Having lots of mining stations also allows you to trade to fill "galactic resource needs" -> more cash.

I made this observation after finishing a couple mining stations and then finding my homeworld building a batch of 30 additional freighters. It may or may not be related, but it wouldn't make sense for the AI not to build more freighters as you have more stuff to transport.

[Shark7]

I see a lot of hidden pirate bases, which are a huge drain on your income. Be sure to eradicate those, since they steal money and increase corruption on those colonies.

[Korashy]

I just checked my game, I have around 250 mining stations (combined) and over 1.5k private ships in freighters alone. That's a gigantic difference to your numbers.

[Airpower]

How many colonies do you have? My understanding was that the number of freighters was related to the number of colonies, not the number of mining stations.

[Korashy]

About 20. You have more than me but a significantly lower amount of ships. The Keskudon empire shown here also has around the same amount of mining stations as I do and a fairly similar amount of private ships, tho he has about 4-5 times the amount of colonies I have.

I'm assuming colonies affect Mining ships, and passenger ships.

[Airpower]

Interesting, I'll test this out. Thanks for the lead!

[Korashy]

If you are building a large private economy, you want to make sure to research fusion reactors at a decent time and switch all private ships to it, so they use Hydrogen, allowing your military to use caslon. Without that split you will quickly run out of fuel for your military.