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What do you guys do to help balance the budget? I always seem to be in a weird situation of sitting on a lot of credits, but it's going down fast every turn, and the only way to replenish the stack is sell off rare minerals or some other commodity I'd rather keep.

Everyone looks to see if I’m dropping some tips then they leave... [:D]

Early game sell rares, just gotta suck it up.

Later it depends on what your doing. Commerce gives huge amounts of sales tax once inawhile, and works really well with Tariffs. Enforcement lets you farm lots of money from Efficiency Drive as your Administrative Level increases. With Government you can safely increase your income tax to like 50%.

I find that increasing Income/Service tax with stratagems is important. Then timing Rare Metal and Food sell-offs with how much your economy is gorging Is important. Make it become second nature.

Otherwise two cities that are increasingly developing and paying taxes seems to be the natural way.

Seriously though, watch how come you spend in Public Investment unless you intentionally know how much you're going to lose every turn. Then dont increase Leader and Worker salaries much a all even in newly conquered cities.

Mothballs everything in newly taken cities so migration doesnt go haywire because that's all it is then game is doing which h will impede you significantly. Raise Ideal Workforce versus what you're going to Activate and build for the future.

Lastly, honestly I do just fine selling Rare Metals and Hi-Tech resources 99% Rares for the first 100 turns. They're an early-bird resource determinee by your technology score in what is demanded in the private economy. Just sell Rare Metals when it hits between 8-10 a piece every 6-10 turns and you're set.

Sell rare metals every few turns when the price is decent and generally you shouldn't have money problems as long as you are producing a decent amount.

Ok if everyone sells commodities to stay afloat I guess I’m doing ok.

ORIGINAL: shabowie

Ok if everyone sells commodities to stay afloat I guess I’m doing ok.

It won't help late game, because the market can't soak up the amount of rare metal you can pump out late game and you're going to be super short on HiTech.

Founding the interior council and raising taxes to 50% sales and 30-50% income tax does the trick for me. I always go commerce.

But then I have people protesting the high taxes.

Really? I go meri - commerce - mind, later changing to democracy and the people never protest.

Maybe I am just lucky.

ORIGINAL: Maerchen

Founding the interior council and raising taxes to 50% sales and 30-50% income tax does the trick for me. I always go commerce.

All that interior council taxes does is give you tax increasing strategems. That wont really do much if anything unless you have a really big population.

ORIGINAL: Maerchen

Really? I go meri - commerce - mind, later changing to democracy and the people never protest.

Maybe I am just lucky.

People protesting is fine, you can get autocracy and deomcracy points that way (autocracy basically for free, and democracy does cost some credits iirc).

Its revolts that you want to avoid, and i find heart works wonders for that.

Emergency tax stratagem - you can get thousands if not tens of thousands pretty early in the game. There's another one also I cant recall at the moment.

ORIGINAL: Sieppo

Emergency tax stratagem - you can get thousands if not tens of thousands pretty early in the game. There's another one also I cant recall at the moment.

In my current game I'm in the middle of a vicious war with the other superpower major on the planet and this is the ONLY thing keeping me afloat.

I can't balance the books in this game worth crap. Working as designed I'm sure (in real life a war like this would involve rationing, conscription, recycling and war bond drives, etc., it's getting ugly), it's just a brutal unforgiving system.

Efficiency Drive gives thousands at the higher Admin levels too. Its not as obscenely powerful as Emergency Tax, but it also doesn't reduce loyalty/piss off the population.

ORIGINAL: shabowie

ORIGINAL: Sieppo

Emergency tax stratagem - you can get thousands if not tens of thousands pretty early in the game. There's another one also I cant recall at the moment.

In my current game I'm in the middle of a vicious war with the other superpower major on the planet and this is the ONLY thing keeping me afloat.

I can't balance the books in this game worth crap. Working as designed I'm sure (in real life a war like this would involve rationing, conscription, recycling and war bond drives, etc., it's getting ugly), it's just a brutal unforgiving system.

I don't even try to understand it anymore. In some earlier games last year I sometimes managed to get some surplus but now it seems pretty impossible even with trying to encourage the private sector, high commerce profile, increasing taxes until people start to riot or not paying soldiers anything etc. I just use whatever gives me some moneyyyy [:D]. Dunno if the extreme-difficulty setting has something to do with it.

ORIGINAL: shabowie

What do you guys do to help balance the budget? I always seem to be in a weird situation of sitting on a lot of credits, but it's going down fast every turn, and the only way to replenish the stack is sell off rare minerals or some other commodity I'd rather keep.

I just sat on 20% income tax and 25% sales tax for a while until things just turned around somehow. It required selling rare metals and other surplus stuff frequently for a while but eventually my income began to massively outpace my expenditures.
Stuff I did notice though:

- Trade agreements with other majors and Tariffs on those trades helped a fair bit
- If you have excess production of certain goods (Food/fuel) and your SHQ runs out of storage space then the SHQ will sell the excess on the open market, but only if there's demand for it. You can check whether excess stuff got sold by having a look at the treasury report, or mousing over the particular resource in the SHQ inventory on the left.
- Can also shave some expenses by keeping soldier/worker wages low (0.02 and 0.05 default respectively for me). Workers will complain if private industry wages exceed theirs, but that only happens if your private economy is running at or near full employment. Bring in some more citizens or reduce the productivity of some of your public assets and watch those wages drop.

Edit: Private economy wages might depend more on the ratio of private to public jobs? I don't even know anymore, all I know is that private income is high in 2 cities that have mostly full private industries and more private jobs than public, and low in a bunch of other cities that are much more developed.

ORIGINAL: Mina

ORIGINAL: shabowie

What do you guys do to help balance the budget? I always seem to be in a weird situation of sitting on a lot of credits, but it's going down fast every turn, and the only way to replenish the stack is sell off rare minerals or some other commodity I'd rather keep.

I just sat on 20% income tax and 25% sales tax for a while until things just turned around somehow. It required selling rare metals and other surplus stuff frequently for a while but eventually my income began to massively outpace my expenditures.
Stuff I did notice though:

- Trade agreements with other majors and Tariffs on those trades helped a fair bit
- If you have excess production of certain goods (Food/fuel) and your SHQ runs out of storage space then the SHQ will sell the excess on the open market, but only if there's demand for it. You can check whether excess stuff got sold by having a look at the treasury report, or mousing over the particular resource in the SHQ inventory on the left.
- Can also shave some expenses by keeping soldier/worker wages low (0.02 and 0.05 default respectively for me). Workers will complain if private industry wages exceed theirs, but that only happens if your private economy is running at or near full employment. Bring in some more citizens or reduce the productivity of some of your public assets and watch those wages drop.

Yes trade agreements usually do it for me. In my last game i had 50% income tax and 50% sales tax at some point and only managed to get surplus after my neighbour wanted to trade. When that ended, I finally discovered the emergency tax and money problems ended because at that point I had hundreds of thousands of citizens. Just used it on my two largest cities alternately and noticed no problems with loyalty etc. Got max 70k credits a pop (was quite a surprise the first time I used it ) and that gor me a few turns with even 6k deficit (worker salaries the culprit). High democratic, commerce profile.

Meritocracy can unlock ways to make quite a bit of money :
- At 60% you get a Zone-targeted Internal Council "Patriotic Collection" Stratagem that gives you credits depending on your populace, loyalty and QoL : up to 8000 credits per 100K populace, at the cost of 10 loyalty.
- At 80% you get +200 credits / turn / 100K populace.

I used the Reagan approach, low taxes, lots of free enterprise, and have never had any issues with income in my current game. In my last game, I never had enough money had was always selling off rare metals to make ends meet.

But I am VERY NEW to this game, less than two weeks, playing on Normal level currently. I think a lot of it has to do with how sparse your planet is. In my first real game, I was on a mostly desert planet that had little to no ruins, metal, or anything, in my current game I made sure to get a much better environment.