Colonies with negative GDP

[Apheirox]

What causes this?

[ASHBERY76]

Low quality.

[Bingeling]

What are the expenses for a colony? Some invisible maintenance cost? Without expenses it should not go negative.

[Data]

They are not explicitly stated anywhere but maitenance is the only one that could account for this. From what I see it's the same mechanism like in MOO2 with maintenance on every planet and more penalties for low quality ones, ergo the negative gdp. I think in the pedia somewhere it says that development will offset this eventually but it will take some time.

[lordxorn]

Low Culture as well.

[frugaldude]

Ashbury is correct.

From the galactopedia:

Planet Quality
Note that each planet and moon has a Quality rating that indicates how habitable it is. The highest quality planets are 100%. These should be prime targets for colonization.

However any planet or moon with a quality below 50% should be avoided. These planets will be a net drain on your empire’s economy if you colonize them. They will cost more to support than they produce in revenue. There may be rare situations where you choose to colonize a planet with quality less than 50% (e.g. has special resources), but beware of the negative affect on your empire revenue.

[Apheirox]

Cheers for replies!

Another question along the same lines: Can you actually hurt your economy by expanding too much due to these new colonies driving up empire wide corruption (a system much like Civilization where expanding too fast could drain the economy due to maintenance/social policy costs)? Or will settling a new planet always produce a net gain?

[Data]

on corruption experiences vary with each of us, I saw with other players that it can become a problem altough I play with the highest setting for it and never had problems
you will not get high gdp from new colonies for a long time, therefore the taxes are also insignifiant.....in the end the benefit comes here from the civ ships ordered for the new colonies. As long as the new colonies are not low quality, there are no costs for this; the infrastructure you'll need for them will cost you (spaceports and such).