Economy, am I missing something?

[Janster]

My empire, despite having a ton of planets, nice tech and solid amount of people, is totally bankrupt all the time.
I can barely afford to buy ships, let alone keep any amount of them (10-20 ships tops), but also the structures, upkeep on police and happiness building is like 250 a piece!!

This leads to being totally unable to deal with unrest as the colonies cannot sustain anything, I tried to remedy this with dropping some marines, but even 5 of them did nothing.

I end up having to spam turns earning 2-300 per round for ages just to build a single thing somewhere, this isn't right. Given I'm playing on hard, but I'd prefer to wrestle with the enemy rather than my own colonies?

Also unrest is pretty hard to deal with in general, and the 'unhappy' negative -5 is pretty heavy considering my +200 buck police and stuff gives what.. +2?.

[Zakhal]

Unrest was common in Total War hard-level. I used to think that micromanagering unrest is the only "challenging" thing about the game since I never lost even a single battle.

Armada I have played on normal only and so far I havent seen any unrest.

[Janster]

Well, I changed from the pesky humies with unrest penalties and to the more warlike uhm K something...
However, I did notice something JUST now that has changed my strategy...normally I'm used to rich planets being well rich and getting stuff done faster...but here its not done faster, but cheaper...

Pay attention to this when you build ships, your default starting planet is NOT a good place to build your ships, find a rich planet instead.

[Iceman]

The quality of the starting homesystem is actually random. It might be Normal, but it also might happen to be Rich or Poor.
Rich systems give you bonuses to taxes and mining income and decrease construction costs. Very Rich systems have higher bonuses.
Poor systems have lower taxes, cannot build surface mines and increase construction costs by +80% !

Check the tooltips in the upper left system image in the Colony tab.

[Ironpaw]

I think one of the main issues is Pollution, I have not found anything to combat the pollution, and thus a fully mined planet generates around a -7, this translates directly to unrest and rioting. Without a cost effective way to deal with unrest or pollution, you really have to be super careful with your economy.

[Iceman]

That's intended.
You can increase Happiness\Environment though with Weather Controllers and Terraformers. Icy can get +5 Habitability from them, and Dead and Irradiated +6 (strange that D/I gets more than Icy, but that's how it works). Ideal can get to 11 Hab and Habitable to 9.

[Star Ranger]

Yeah - this game is way to heavy on economic penalties - they should focus more of those on the harder levels. What this lends itself to is a "one way" to play certain races - which to me in a 4 x game misses the point.

Moo 2 had the right balance - economy was there - but you never sweated the economy - you focused on strategy , ships, tech, etc.

I really thought this would be more of a true 4 x game - but in reality - its total war in space.

[PDiFolco]

TW in space ? Not for me! TW focused on the battles, it's not really the case here, and the focus is on strategy, techs and global fleet management.
Economy needs a bit of thinking, try to be at peace if your race suffers form war weariness, or play with a warlike race, or play on easy... don't charge the game with your low economic skill (don't worry, most ppl are like that, look at the RL economy) ! [:D]!

[Iceman]

I think some of the modifiers need some tweaking. Happiness/Popularity/Security modifiers I mean. They don't seem "proportional" to me.
For example, Security. You can get say +10 to +15 for stuff like Ground Units, Recent Transfer or Recent Conquest, and only +2 for the Security Center. Granted, some are temporary, but the scale just doesn't seem right.
Popularity, +5 for Frontier Spirit, -2 for High Taxes.
Etc.
Maybe they'll become moddable in the future.

[Flaviusx]

Security centers definitely are a poor return on investment. Hugely expensive to build and a whopping 250 credit upkeep cost. That's equal to the upkeep cost of 25 marines, and nowhere near as effective.
 
I sometimes build them on newly conquered alien worlds when marines run short, but frankly, the economics of the game strongly encourage you to just glass the freaking planet and build it up fresh with your own guys. (Unless you play the Walden. Then you've got to keep the miserable ingrates alive.)
 
 
 
 
 

[Iceman]

A 2-edged sword [;)]

[Richard III]

The default Human Economy penalties are far too restrictive and IMO a poor design balance implementation that hurts the gameplay.

I want to be the Emperor Warlord of the Universe, not minister of fine tuning of spending and building. Anyway to edit the amount of start-up gold for humans please ?

Thanks

R.

[Rosseau]

Very easy. Open the "Factions" xml file in the XML folder. I changed humans to 40k in this example. Can also customize race attributes, facility bonuses, etc. in several other xmls:

<!--&nbsp; Primary Factions For Each Race -->
&nbsp; <Faction Name="The Human Union" Generic="true">
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <Names ShortName="The Humans" Adjective="Human" GenericBase="Humans"/>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <Data Race="Human" Symbol="10" NameSet="Bronze Age Greek"/>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <Type Elimination ="NoPopulation" RebelFaction ="The Human Rebels"/>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <VictoryPoints Area="TotalHappyPopulation" Multiplier="8"/>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <VictoryPoints Area="Glory" Multiplier="5"/>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <Strategy Name="Colonizer"/>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <StartingCash Amount ="40000"/>

[Aroddo]

exchange the human traits with the klurgu and call that faction "Space Nazis".

[Rosseau]

Exactly, which is why I'm liking this game. So easy to create a badass xeno AI to play against, troop transports that carry fighters and missiles, or a super mining facility that detects incoming spacecraft. Basically, a 4x construction set with a nice interface. You can even mod a scenario in the middle of playing it.