Where is all my money going?

[Xmudder]

I am running a profit of 20-40k plus 20-40k in bonus income, in the early mid game, yet I can't get my cash reserves above 10k. Every time I do, I go into the red. I am not buying anything, I can't bribe minor powers, pay off pirates, or build colony ships. I was able to track this down to auto-upgrades of my fleets, especially when I shifted from small to medium hulls (exploration, construction, troop transport, fuel tankers), which I spotted when I turned on the announcements for state ships upgraded.

Given that medium exploration and construction ships are no better at their jobs than the small version, fuel tankers are useless, and I don't have enough planets to fill my small troop transports with troops, this is annoying. Its taken me a while to manipulate screens to put a stop to the auto upgrades / retrofits and the games obsession with upgrading every ship every time you research a new tech.

My suggestions to fix this:

1) A ledger showing what the game spent my money on so I know the AI is not spending all my money on hookers and blow. There is a line item lump sum spent on ship construction, which apparently includes upgrades, but no breakdown. Would make things a lot easier to figure out.

2) Better automation. Instead of auto upgrading everything, prompt the player to upgrade ships / bases and tell me how much it costs. Also allow the player the same options to control upgrades and retrofits as they do for other type of spending: Automated / Suggest and Execute / Suggest / Manual.

3) Allow us to set a minimum cash balance before we are prompted to spend or autospend spend any money. It seems to default to about 10k. I'd like to see options for 37.5k (diplomacy), 50k (wonders and colony ships), and 75k (limited terraforming). I'd likely choose the last, as that is in the range of diplomatic expenses to bribe a minor followed by building a colony ship to colonize them. It would also make diplomacy more interesting as the AIs would have more money on hand to trade with.

[MaximKI]

What are your construction and economic policies set to?

[ChrisGb]

My suggestions to fix this:
1) A ledger showing what the game spent my money on so I know the AI is not spending all my money on hookers and blow. There is a line item lump sum spent on ship construction, which apparently includes upgrades, but no breakdown. Would make things a lot easier to figure out.

Just switch off Automatic Hull Upgrade in Ship Builder and put Retrofit on Auto - this will swap new components without going to a Star-Port (but they must be same component only higher version (v1, v2, v3)
In Policy screen set manual ships upgrade, retrofit to off and you good to go.

To retrofit to new components you now have to click on the ship retrofit button.

2) Better automation. Instead of auto upgrading everything, prompt the player to upgrade ships / bases and tell me how much it costs. Also allow the player the same options to control upgrades and retrofits as they do for other type of spending: Automated / Suggest and Execute / Suggest / Manual.

we try to get rid of the message spam and not increase it
you not need all this, srlsy.

3) Allow us to set a minimum cash balance before we are prompted to spend or autospend spend any money. It seems to default to about 10k. I'd like to see options for 37.5k (diplomacy), 50k (wonders and colony ships), and 75k (limited terraforming). I'd likely choose the last, as that is in the range of diplomatic expenses to bribe a minor followed by building a colony ship to colonize them. It would also make diplomacy more interesting as the AIs would have more money on hand to trade with.

for that oyu have to set the budget to manual then you can set all this but its wonky as the income goes up and down dynamically as plagues etc happen

Just make sure you upgrade your merchant fleets and civil ships so they spend their cash on upgrading their feelt and it goes into your state funds.
I often run on a negative budget and still my overall account goes up like nuts because of civil ships building/retrofitting, turism, trade and fuel sales.

[Xmudder]

What are your construction and economic policies set to?

Most everything is manual in terms of construction and ship design. Colonies and tax rates are automated. I'm still losing money, and I don't know where it is going,

Hmm.... I just found a bunch of troops being constructed, so I turned that to manual as well.

Again, a ledger would be nice.