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I've had some troubles managing the early economy and looking at my income there's one thing I don't understand: what does mining income represents? Smuggling is supposedly ressources I sell through smuggling missions, so what's about mining? Does the game converts mined ressources into virtual money (ie I don't have effectively money but ressources still stand as the equivalent of funds)? Does it takes into account mining stations and/or mining ships? Or is there some "hidden" trade going in my mining stations, with foreign freighters buying from there?

I'm a bit confused because apparently I'm buying ressources automatically (no smuggling missions), so could it be that there's always on-going trade but that smuggling missions only add an extra income from supplying a given location? Obviously it also serves to supply my space port in builing ships but the ballet of all those freighters suggests there might be more to this.

Back in distant worlds after not touching it for a few years so I'm still confused with a few things...

Not sure about pirates and smuggling income... but for Empires, 90% of income comes from taxes on colonies.

Target large, very high quality planets (90% or higher) and get the population to max. Watch the GDP and corruption. Build regional capitols to squash corruption.

Best strategy is to capture by invasion enemy home planets with already high GDP.

I have always been rather fine managing economy as an Empire. Actually, I found out what was wrong: I had setup pirate strength to very weak. I don't know what it exactly do, but at least I did note that it affects ship maintenance cost. With weak, pirates have roughly to pay twice the maintenance of the very strong pirate setting (with very hard difficulty; I don't know what it affects either). With very weak pirates, I was bankrupting just from ship maintenance; only one time I succeeded in doing a few things was by having 4 empires paying protection almost from start.

I did now set pirate strength to weak and I'm doing quite fine although it seems a waste trying to build hidden bases; I fail to prevent the AI from raiding it from time to time even with a large fleet parked there and end up loosing those. I'm still unsure about mining income though; I build a few mines and freighters and hope it does more good than wrong with the extra civil maintenance cost for pirates.