Any good economy guides?

[Imhotep]

I'm quite advanced into my game, but my economy is only just about making it by. I have to sell a load of stuff every turn and the prices for what are sell are not good, so it's very inefficient.

[Hasefrexx]

I'm not sure why, it doesn't make much sense to work this way but in practice I found that having 3 cities is the key to keep high market prices. High salaries with just the capital is really painful. 3 cities, I made it work with salary in the 20s, sometimes maximal salary. One trick to increase market price is to play the stratagems that give money to cities, commerce helps with this. It's necessary to play it from time to time to maintain prices and PP is scarce early game but that helps going on with low city count.

The other alternative is to reduce salaries progressively and increase taxes, going government to support higher taxation. I think it's the better way but high salary is also manageable, albeit very painful and greatly delays progression in the beginning.

Another thing to keep in mind is to check for corruption if traders are weirdly lacking credits.

[kyonkun]

Never pay your workers more than 0.005. Lower is usually fine.
Sell rare metal. Wait for the price to go up and then sell as much as possible.

That's it. Worker pay is an empire's primary expenditure and selling rare metal (supplemented with regular metal when able) is probably going to be the primary source of income. The main idea is that if you sell every turn, the price never goes up, so you need to wait between selling.

[Slippy]

Kyonkun mostly has it right - its going to be about selling rare metals/metals onto the market in chunks when you get low credits. If you are able to produce machines out of thin air via a rural asset they can be a good source of cash as well.

Raising taxation can help, theres usually a sweet spot for each of the taxation options which you can raise it to which wont cause notable issues. Depending on the majors in your game there might be times you can trade/set tariffs but thats not something you can count on.

Different profiles can also help generate credits. Enforcement has a stratagem card called 'Efficiency Drive' which gives you a lot of credits out of thin air. Its not too difficulty to get hold of. Commerce will boost the private economy which can in turn provide you with more taxation.

There are a few things you can do early on to help. Turn 1 you can sell food while the price is okay, after turn 1 its going to come down. Water can also be sold if you are on a water limited planet but have a way of producing a lot of it due to your startling location (a river/water hex for example) on turn 1. Talking to the governor of your starting zone on turn 1 (via zone orders) allows you to 1) cut worker salaries and 2) remove the bonus for recruit signs ups. If you cut worker salaries you should probably pick the 'first speech' option that boosts worker happiness to make up for it.

Try and keep worker salaries low when possible as thats going to be your biggest enforced outgoing. You can also try and keep the number of workers down such as ensuring certain public assets are running at less than 100% production when you dont need it (such as water, food and ammo producing assets outside of conflicts).

Early on you can also cut salaries of the 'unassigned' leaders if you like but thats not a huge saving. I try not to have a pool of unassigned leaders to limit factions anyway.

I rarely pay my soldiers - solider happiness is much easier to keep up than worker happiness due to the bonuses they get when winning battles and has less bad modifiers. Doubly so if you go down the heart profile.

[Imhotep]

Thanks for the replies.

Here's my Treasury Cashflow Overview sheet:

https://i.imgur.com/vWtac7n.png

Anything stand out?

I should probably try reducing some worker salaries. How happy should they be?

I had 40,000+ recruits sitting around and realised they were being paid, so I stopped all recruitment and recruitment bonuses. I also released 10,000 of them back into the population. I also stopped recruitment and bonuses to colonists.

My worker happiness in my capital city had become extremely low. Mousing over it, one of the issues has been that I have been getting negative points for not fully paying their salaries. Despite trying to always keep 1000+ credits in my account, the workers are paid at the end of the turn and this amount wasn't enough to cover it.

I've also been mothballing some assets that aren't crucial.

[Pain]

One thing in early game to make sure I always have a decent resource gain without much investment are recycling centres. Of course you need a bunch of ruins for that, so depending on your planet generation that is more or less possible. Without ruins, the game is significantly harder early on I feel.

[Pain]

Regarding your screenshot, you seem to employ a lot of your population on public assets. For example your first city has 110'000 people working directly for the state. Do you really need all this? You could try to set some assets to maybe 50% or so and see if your balance sheet stabilizes that way.

Worker salaries are already set relatively low. So personally I wouldn't go lower, especially if they are already grumpy.

[Bumc]

Commerce (+democracy?) can print money by using private investment few times and then stealing this money with other stratagems.

If you have high charisma economy director, private investment goes 2-3k per pop in a big city and you can turn 70 PP into 7-8k credits.

[Slippy]

Originally posted by Imhotep:

Thanks for the replies.

Here's my Treasury Cashflow Overview sheet:

https://i.imgur.com/vWtac7n.png

Anything stand out?

I should probably try reducing some worker salaries. How happy should they be?

Worker salaries are killing you unfortunately, its like 87% of your expenses. Its a bit of a spiral as you can get stuck in a rut where its not really feasible to reduce public salaries as they get even unhappier.

Worker salaries only need to be slightly higher than private worker salaries in order to provide a happiness bonus, so the key is to make sure you arent paying too much over the going rate. The problem is that zones with low pops might have really high private worker salary due to having too many jobs. In Shadow Empire the ideal world has really high unemployment to keep salaries low! But thats the first thing I would check - see if you are overpaying.

There was a new asset introduced called worker housing (or similar - maybe social housing) that produces happiness for workers (if you build enough to cover the worker population) so it might be worth looking into that. Having happiness over 50 (I think) stops the strike events. I am not sure what the cut off for workers leaving their jobs due to being unhappy/seeking employment in the private sector but my guess would be its around the same.

[Imhotep]

A couple of things I'm going to try then:

1) Reduce public worker salaries so they are above average wage, but not too much.

In my capital, public worker salary is 0.03cr, but population income per capita is only 0.008cr.

Is population income per capita the right thing to be looking at? I couldn't find the stat for private worker salary.

2) Mothball more public buildings or reduce their production output using the 100/75/25% Prod option in bottom left of screen.

For example, Bureaucrat Office IV in my capital is employing over 23,000 people. Reducing expenditure is probably more important than BP production at the moment.

[Slippy]

Originally posted by Imhotep:

A couple of things I'm going to try then:
Is population income per capita the right thing to be looking at? I couldn't find the stat for private worker salary.

Its somewhere on the zone UI at the bottom. I think if you click on population it should tell you the private worker salary per person. Its zone dependent not regime wide.

If your private worker incoming is 0.008cr and your public worker income is 0.03cr you have made a horrible mistake. It only needs to be a very small amount above.

[Imhotep]

Originally posted by Slippy:

Its somewhere on the zone UI at the bottom. I think if you click on population it should tell you the private worker salary per person. Its zone dependent not regime wide.

I can't see it.

Here are some stats on my capital city zone.

Total population: 371k
Private jobs: 64k
Public jobs: 122k
(Therefore) non-working population: 185k
Population income per capita: 0.008cr

Mousing over the Population income per capita stat, the game says: "Interesting to compare with your Workers Salary since it plays a big role in determining if the Workers will be happy with the salary you provide."

However, Population income per capita is not the same as private worker salary since it should take into account all the people that aren't working. The word "Population" in the game seems to refer to all those that aren't public workers. When looking at all the people living in a zone, the word "Populace" is used.

So it's not clear how to compare public vs private salary. The game provides so many statistics that not providing a straightforward private salary stat seems like an oversight. Unless the name of the Population income per capita stat is wrong and it should be Private worker salary.

[Hasefrexx]

The game doesn't simulate much when it comes to private sector. People are (public) workers or they are not. It does not matter if non workers have a job or not, the wage is calculated based on all non private workers.

[Imhotep]

Originally posted by Hasefrexx:

The game doesn't simulate much when it comes to private sector. People are (public) workers or they are not. It does not matter if non workers have a job or not, the wage is calculated based on all non private workers.

So you're saying that "Population income per capita" = Private worker salary?

[Slippy]

Originally posted by Imhotep:

So it's not clear how to compare public vs private salary. The game provides so many statistics that not providing a straightforward private salary stat seems like an oversight. Unless the name of the Population income per capita stat is wrong and it should be Private worker salary.

Its under the population tab - the income number. Thats the private income number and thats the number you want your worker salaries to be (just) over over. Its really that simple, thats about the most simple stat you could ask for.

The manual makes references to a 'hidden economy' which implies a certain amount of the population is working 'off the books' anyway - which (I think) feeds into that income.

In addition the game makes a distinction between:
Populace - number of workers/private citizens added together
Population - number of private citizens
Workers - your public sector workers

Which is probably whats confusing you.

[Imhotep]

Originally posted by Slippy:

Its under the population tab - the income number. Thats the private income number and thats the number you want your worker salaries to be (just) over over. Its really that simple, thats about the most simple stat you could ask for.

Okay, so we're talking about the same stat.

When one mouses over it, it's called "Population income per capita".

Here's the definition from the UK's Department of Census and Statistics:

Income per capita is estimated by dividing the sum of estimated total income of all the households by the estimated number of household population. Income per capita is also used to measure the wealth of population of a country.

Therefore it relates to total population, not just the workers. It is most definitely not "salary of the average worker".

I'm going to write in the Suggestions thread that this stat should be renamed, if it is indeed meant to be private worker average salary.