Its the Ecomony.

[incbob]

Okay. I have started up three times and three times now I have been on pretty much full automation just stepping in here and there. Three times now I have got my economy running into trouble with -14k (per month?) debt. This usually happens when I get between 7-12 colonies.

#1 I take my home world tax and put it at 37% so it brings in 89K. I change nothing and the population does not change, but in a couple of minutes it is down to 85K? Why?

#2 I see a block on the empire screen called Space Port income. How do make money on this. I see my space ports have a commerce component, but I am never getting any income from my spaceports.

#3 If the private (civilian) sector ships are ran by them why am I paying maintenance? What is the affect of me disbanding their ships?

#4 If I disband a ship at a spaceport do I get any bonus for it or is it the same as disbanding in the middle of no where?

#5 I have been watching my resources and have seen the situation where I have a demand of (example) 0.3K, but there are no resources available for me to mine? Is this just bad luck?


#4 If the private (civilian) sector ships are ran by them why am I paying maintaniance

I have read about luxory(sp) resources. Som

[Webbco]

#5 I just picked up on this myself. A demand for luxury goods but I have no way to provide my citizens with it since I have not discovered a planet with the commodity on it yet.

It's either that or I DO have the commodity but I'm not harvesting enough of it to meet demand. [:(]

[Baleur]

Maby the initial homeworld has a "cargo" of every resource at start, then when it runs out you're screwed if you havent found that resource yet? [:'(]

[Webbco]

Can you scrap mining bases that you don't need? I can't right click and scrap any ships owned by the private sector

If your empire has a demand of 2.3k for lets say, 'Rephidium ale' and you are supplying 1.9k from 1 colony that has 95% resource value of that, but NO other colonies have it, are you screwed?

[ussugu]

I am having trouble too. I don't see what to do to fix it. I am playing on the easiest settings with "few" pirates and I have only 9 colonies. I have -30k cash now with -18k income. I have let the game run at x4 speed and just waited to see if it will adjust. At this point, with allowing the game to basically run itself and be minimal with what I "allow" to be built, the game is running itself into the ground financially. If this isn't a bug, then I don't know how NOT to have this happen as it is the AI that is basically doing it.

I will park this game for a couple days and wait to see if this is addressed better in the forums. I hope it is a bug that is patched... if not... please tell me how to have it not happen. Please!!!

[Webbco]

I know, it's effectively unplayable at the moment if you are having this problem.

I carefully adjusted my tax rates of my 10 or so colonies over about 1/2 an hour and I managed to get them up to about 20% (it's irrelevant as I was in the red at this point). I then let the AI take over just to see how it would react and guess what happened...? It reduced the tax on ALL colonies (except my homeworld) to 1%!!!

[Erik Rutins]

Hi Webbco, et. al.,

I would like to stress that I'm able to start a game and play it to completion without any economic problems, but I'm an experience player and only use automation to a limited degree and expand more carefully. From what I'm seeing so far in the saves I've reviewed, there are two issues going on:

1. Overbuilding (this seems to be aided by the automation AI, which is making decent recommendations overall, but doesn't seem to be predicting #2 below). This is easily fixed though, per the economy tips I posted in the War Room.

2. Addition of many new colonies leads to luxury resource shortage on home world. This seems to be the cause of the rest of it, as the resulting decrease in homeworld development hits the overall revenue base just before the new colonies have really started to contribute to revenues. This is also recoverable, but takes long enough that it causes some serious distress.

I think if we tweak #2, it will likely also resolve most of #1, but this is a working theory right now and I need Elliot to also check this to confirm what I'm seeing. Thanks also to Jim Burns for his suggestion that I check the luxury resources on the home world.

[ussugu]

Thank you, Erik, for being on top of this issue. I think you have an advantage over us in that, 1) you've played the game (A LOT) and 2) you know the working mechanics of it.

I think I read somewhere a couple weeks ago that the AI opponents in this game won't "cheat". I think a lot of us salty 4x players have it ingrained in our heads that if we don't expand rapidly and grab up all we can, we will be overrun by the computer players that will have expanded further and faster that we have.

If the computer players have the same constraints as the players and are growing slowly due to cash flow issues too, then I will just put the brakes on my growth and see how that goes. My only concern is, if I know that the AI, when running my economy, will go into such a huge amount of debt, is it doing that for the AI opponents too? If that is the case, then it puts us back to square one.

[Erik Rutins]

The AI players, in my experience with the saves I've seen, are generally doing ok. I think this is more related to the human player's pace of expansion.

[Webbco]

Thanks for your help Erik. It will be interesting to see what elliot says too. It's probably just a lack of experience on our part, knowing how to accumulate luxury goods in the correct way at the correct time. Will keep trying to employ your tips but in a new game but looking forward to getting to the bottom of this.

P.s. I'm assuming you never had the issue with not having the ability to 'mine' luxury goods to fulfill the demand of your empire? I find it strange that civilians want something that doesn't exist on any other worlds!

[impact]

In the beginning, try to colonize only planets that have luxury resources. Preferably those the expansion planner tells you you need most. I've just spent 3 hours playing one of the insectoid races and my economy is fine.
Well, was...until I met two other neighboring races. When I saw their military score compared to mine, I had to kick my shipyards into action. Now we are more or less even in military score, but my economy has suffered greatly due to the upkeep costs.
It might be an issue with my strategy, but the following seems to be the case:
Tax rate doesn't seem to affect colony revenue that greatly. Or it takes a while to kick in. What usually drives you into debt is that when you don't have enough luxury goods to go around or if you stop expanding for too long, your civilian population will stop buying ships (because transport routes are already established or there isn't enough to transport to go around).
If you look at your budget, you usually get a decent amount of monthly income from your space stations. That's the money you get from civilians trading there and buying new ships. Now, if the above scenario kicks in (too few luxury resources or you stop expanding for too long), the market for ships will be satiated and trade at your space stations will go down, thus reducing that income bracket suddenly to 0.
This is what usually causes your income to drop into the red numbers from one second to the next.
The following strategies might help:

1. Colonize more planets
Prefer those with luxury resources. This will give your empire another economic boost, as civilians will start buying ships to establish new trade routes to your freshly established colonies.
However, you will have to keep expanding to keep your economy up that way. And the higher your maintenance costs rise, the faster you will need to expand. Even in a large galaxy this strategy will stop working after a few hours.

2. Upgrade the designs for freighters
Freighters are the ships civilians want and buy. If you stop getting income in your space stations, redesigning the freighters and declaring the former designs as obsolete should cause your civilians to upgrade their ships, meaning they should either retrofit or buy new ones.
I haven't tried this yet, but it might work. However, this too is rarely a way to keep your economy up permanently.

3. Build Resorts
This will give you small amounts of income over time, but the bigger your colonies get and the more resorts you have around, the more it should help you sustain your empire.
Keep in mind that resorts only generate money when they are close to your established colonies. According to the ingame-help, tourists that visit resorts are being generated by larger colonies and are rarely willing to travel too far.
And don't try going for black holes until you have decent engine tech. Cost me quite a few constructors until I figured that out.

4. Trade Agreements
Absolutely worth the trouble and the easiest and most efficient way to make money, especially if you have 10+ colonies and have an over-supply of one or more luxury goods.
However, when playing unfriendly races, the diplomacy you need to do to establish such an agreement with another empire is hard or even impossible.
The reason for this is that friendly races won't like you, causing your relationship with them to drop constantly until they really despise you, and no other race likes having a powerful empire nearby (and a warfare-oriented empire with a stable economy gets powerful VERY quickly!).

Hmm...I think that's pretty much all the economy advice I have for now. It usually helps to stop the AI from building stuff for you. It tends to overrecruit troops on new colonies, thus causing appalling maintenance costs, so you might want to take a close look at your spending too.

[incbob]

Thanks for all the responses.
I am not saying there is a bug, I don't know. It probably is just me (user error) I just don't know how to fix it and considering that I am letting the computer pretty much runs things is why I am surprised at my economic problems.

I think I am going to start a game where I control more and see how it goes.

[Webbco]

Thanks Impact for more help on this.

What caught my eye was when you said 'colonize only planets that have luxury resources, preferably those the expansion planner tells you you need most.'

This is something I need to understand better. On Exp. planner screen at the top I can see the supply and demand of various luxury goods. Many of the figures are quite low for luxury goods, e.g. for one commodity: 1.3K is supply, 1.8K in demand.

Firstly, does this difference have a big effect on my colonies?

Secondly, if I try and satisfy the demand by searching for a planet that has this commodity (or a place where I can mine the resource) sometimes there simply aren't any locations yet discovered that have it! I have about 8-10 exploration ships but maybe I need more to find these places quicker? Is there a big difference between colonising a planet where the resource is on and building a mining base there?

Can the luxury goods that are in demand be replaced by another luxury good that I can get access to, or are the citizens real fussy and need their alien bear fur or whatever it is?

Lastly, how do I make luxury goods flow quicker/more frequently across my empire?

I know I've misunderstood something along the way, I'm just not sure what.

Thanks for your patience guys.

[impact]

Hm, let's see...
As far as my experience goes, it appears that luxury goods have "trends". I sometimes notice how the demands for certain goods change rather rapidly, but it could be that I just got a shipment in or something, I am not entirely sure about that.
The effect it has on your colonies is that if you cannot fulfill that demand, the development level of more established colonies might drop over time. As they all seem to share their goods, they all start balancing out at a certain level (mine are mostly around 50% at the moment).
Less development level = less tax money, so depending on your development so far, your homeworld will probably give you less and less taxes, while your younger colonies will start generating more.
As for exploration ships: the first thing I do in a new game before doing anything else is building three additional exploration ships. So right from the start you have 4 of those going, which should be enough until you have about 10 or more colonies.
If a luxury good is in high demand and it is so rare that you just can't get access to it (which just happened to me, and my empire is rather vast), then sometimes you just have to swallow the bitter pill. Your colonies don't depend on a single luxury good however, so as long as the other demands can be filled, it shouldn't hit you that hard.
Transportation of any kind of goods is usually done by civilian ships. If you build a lot of ships in your space port and there are rarely free building slots, civilian ships won't be produced and your logistics and civilian economy will start to shrink or just stop growing. So if you just have to build so many ships over a long time that you know you won't have free production slots at your space port, the time may have come to build another one.
Also, when a resource is mined, it will usually be transported and stored in the next spaceport as I understand it. Thus the lines on the galaxy map: they are the supply routes your civilian ships take most of the time. You will notice that they all lead from outlying colonies to your spaceports (especially noticeable if you have only one spaceport).
If your empire is stretched somewhat, you might want to consider building additional spaceports at the far away colonies. This will result in nearby civilian transports dropping off their cargo there instead of going all the way back to your homeplanet, resulting in less travel time, resulting in faster throughput if that's your problem. As I said: at least that's how I understand it right now.
As for building mines: at the moment I only build them if absolutely necessary. Mines cost maintenance and maintenance is evil
Colonies are much better, as they will generate revenue for you at some point instead of costing you money all the time. Most planets with luxury goods have a few strategic resources you will need as well, so if you stick to colonies on planets with luxury goods (and later on ruins too), you should be fine.
Keep an eye on the gases you need though. You won't find them on normal planets, so you will have to build mines for those. But don't overdo it. Except for materials with a very high demand, one or two sources for strategic resources will fill your needs. You mostly use them when constructing ships, and you can't do that all the time anyway because the upkeep would kill your economy.
If you give construction orders and the ships take incredibly long to finish, take a look at the construction yard to see if it has been halted. If that is so, you are short on resources and might want to tap an additional source somewhere near the construction yard (if available).

[Rosseau]

Also remember that if you're way in the red in a scenario you want to keep playing, you can always cheat. Open up the editor, hit the edit empires button at the bottom and give yourself some dough to get along with for a while.

It's a lot easier than editing save game files!

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

The AI players, in my experience with the saves I've seen, are generally doing ok. I think this is more related to the human player's pace of expansion.

Sounds like it is wise to fight the urge to expand as quickly as possible. Perhaps colonizing one system, then fully developing its resources before moving on to the next might be the best course of action?

[Hyfrydle]

I started a game and just let it run without any input from me and the economy got into the red the cash reached -250,000 with and income of -52,000 and I thought well that's the end of this game. At this point some of the AI's declared war and somehow we managed to survived. I managed to get peace at the cost of at least one colony I then let the game run at max speed just to see what would happen. I was amazed to see that my colonys started to increase in revenue and before long the income was positive and the empire started to develop again.

The only problem was the other empires had not had this problem and where much bigger so I thought things would not go well. Again I left it on max speed and the recovery continued and the income increased to +72,000 and on checking the graphs our empire was slowly creeping up the scales.

I think expanding too quickly is the problem and I left all the expansion to the AI so it's not a player based thing the only way the player affects things is by spending cash on building before the colonys are fully established.

Hope this makes sense but the AI is definately able to recover given time.

[Erikem]

I was having economy problems too until I read Erik's post about maintenance.  I had ship building on auto and just clicked yes to everything it suggested.  I ended up with 4 huge fleets that broke the bank.  I was busily getting rid of them when I discovered the government type, "Way of the Ancients!!"  -20% maintenance among other things.  I didn't have to worry about getting rid of any more ships after that

[theonlystd]

la sigh.

I thought i had figured out the problem with my running in the red.. So i made sure to go after luxury resources.. I have 8 or 9.. And things were going fine for awhile..

But now my capital has no luxury resouces besides the one it produces even tho i have sources on 8 others.. So its devlopment is dropping like a rock and im on the way to being broke again..  I havnt really over expanded .. Couple of the Ai have double the amount of colonies i have and the rest are right around me....

Bleh

[Hyfrydle]

Just tried another game and again the same problem happened I checked and we had no supply of luxury resources when I checked the constructor ships they didn't have luxury resource extractors. So what seems to be happening is the colony's don't develop due to a lack of luxury resources. I'm now in the red so I can't queue up any colony ships or constructors to harvest the required resources.

How do you guys get around this problem?