Economy and Corruption is super broken

[Matrix]

So, I will just throw this out there. How the economy works is utterly broken. The cost to keep ships, stations and planet upgrades is insane and makes the early to mid game an utter nightmare.

So to give an example of a game i played recently:

I played a 700 planet galaxy with 4 sectors, with 7 AI opponents.
I have 6 planets, maybe 40 mining stations, 3 research stations, 4 spaceports
I have 15 exploration ships, 12 fuel tankers, 6 construction ships and 2 coloniser ships.
With this, I simply cannot afford to run a decent fleet. I have 12 escorts, 6 frigates and 1 destroyer in my main defensive fleet and maybe 6 escorts not in a fleet just doing escort things.
My total expenses for all of this mean I essentially cannot expand further because the costs become crippling very quickly with very little in the way of additions.
In all honesty, maintenance costs need some looking at because unless you have 10 planets at max population each with 20% tax, theres no chance of being able to build a decent fleet to fight anything above 5k fleet power.

The amount of money i can bring in just does not scale with the expenses of building ships just to stop your empire from being gangbanged by pirates or space creatures. The fact that ships behave like they are on acid does not really help either. But this is kinda dumb. I get attacked by 5 pirate ships and they have a fleet power of 1k. My entire fleet of 19 ships is barely enough to make for an even match. What the hell is that about? Pirates should at least start off weak and scale with your empire, not just be untouchable till you can build a fleet that financially cripples your economy just to take them out, they are pirates, not the Imperial Navy from WH40k.
Oh and building any kind of planetary upgrades is just out of the question. Wanna build a Planetary Admin Centre on each planet and a couple of armour barracks? Ok sure, thats going to cost you pretty much half your income.
The Empire funding levels just do not appear to work or correctly represent what you are actually using.

And then theres corruption. This mechanic is just dumb in its current state. If I am having issues with money, the solution is to increase taxes and that can cause corruption, i get that. But the moment I have a prosperous planet, its just eaten by corruption. I have had planets at max pop that i tried to do something about, but migration policies just have no effect so the planet gets full of pops, I set 10% taxes to try and counter the corruption, well screw you, 40% corruption anyway. What? Why? Theres literally no way to counter this or reduce it to a level that is acceptable. I have had 3000M pop platens with 10% tax that are like +25 happy and there is still 25% corruption.
Even if there were planetary buildings i could build to counter it, I cant afford to build them because of the crazy high maintenance costs and the corruption draining half my income anyway.
This mechanic, as interesting as it is, serves no purpose but to make the game annoying and frustrating. It really needs some reworking or just flat out removing because the actual description does not seem to correlate with how it actually works and how to reduce it.
I understand this game has a pretty complex economy system, but this particular aspect is so scuffed that it screws the fun out of the game sometimes.

Now don't get me wrong, I think this game is awesome. I played the hell out of Stellaris, Galactic Civilisations, I love these types of 4x games. Yeah it has some issues like the AI being super passive and ships being driven by drunken blind people, but the things I have outlined above, those need some attention ASAP because they just suck the fun out of the game. I want to play a space strategy game, not play payroll spreadsheet simulator.

[Kalisa]

How much are u making on your top planets? also getting good leaders can also help, https://gyazo.com/a827d9e295b0e9bf240caaf53723ace2 my starting planet in current game, it capped its population awhile ago (i manually control taxes till they capped then flip it back) this is only with a level 2 goverment building, plantetary admin complex.
Corruption is usually easily managable, but i dont lock myself at 20% taxes, i also only manage the taxes of afew planets and let the rest do themselves and usually have no money issues at all in any of my games (in fact usually rolling in it, this is on 2nd hardest difficulty so alittle more added corruption that way as well)
Corruption can be bad if ur playing on the hardest difficulty setting as that really ramps it up but then u need leaders, artifacts and other things to help combat it at that difficulty to make good profits.

Also this was just moved from my capital so its alittle less then what it was, i tend to try and keep my capital to my biggest potential planet for future huge gains as it helps.
also dont overbuild stuff like tourist bases, and even fleets u dont need that many to help manage ur expenses.

Watch your troop proudction as well, if ur not getting invaded or dealing with pirates landing on ur planets u really dont need any defense force (i usually keep a token 2-3 early game and only increase that once i start meeting allot more empires and my economy is strong) as for ships, i tend to only run 1 fleet of 8-10 ships to deal with monsters, i often pay off pirates and get non aggressions with them pretty early on for tech trading and easy tech stealing. also colony ships cost a huge amount of maintance sitting around (more then an initial colony losses usually) also careful expanding into other colonies too quick if u dont have the funds to support them, i would also suggest pulling back on the fuel tankers, im running an empire far larger (32 planets, 80 billion pop right now) and u have more tankers then i do, as for starports keep the ones at new colonies barebones if u can to save maintance unless ur dealing with things attacking them. one of the easiest ways to get ur economy hurting tho is managing your own tax rates on planets when your not ready to fully micro it and may not understand the full inner workings of the economy.

I am usually not making huge profits till i transition into several developed colonies though, usually just enough to keep research and growth going at near full or full production, and then use the private industry to carry me till my planets are supporting me fully, making sure to upgrade your private economy at the right time will carry you (usually i get around 1 to 2 million from ship orders when i unlock large freighters) but i still tend to focus economy pretty heavily early on, espically population growth.

[Kalisa]

https://gyazo.com/3b04150c37492faf546dae3d99320c23 one of my smaller planets, it sounds like your chasing corruption focusing on it too much, the game is pretty good at managing it naturally, if i drop the taxes here to 10%, it will drop corruption from 26% to 19%, but my income will go from 25k to 8k total from this planet, the game usually balances the tax to get u best income once growth is at at certain level.

[placsie]

The economy is not broken, you are either expanding too quickly, into bad planets or both. A minimum viable colony (+20 suitability) will only break even with a billion+ pop and only give decent returns with high development and tech. Corruption is not your government stealing from you, it's an abstraction of economic activity occurring that the government is not getting it's rightful cut.

If you're finding the early game too slow, play with the set up options to give yourself a better start and maybe better quality planets.

[vaaish]

I'll echo the comments above. I found that the DW2 economy works entirely different from most 4x games and it took me probably 5 games to really get a handle on it. You shouldn't expect a huge fleet early on, but what you have sounds reasonable. You also have be very careful where you colonize early game to make sure you can eventually turn a profit and even then expect a LONG time past 100m before you get close to making good money. Colonizing independents or invading them is essential if you want early boosts. Just be careful because not every independent is actually +20 suitability and invading or colonizing the wrong one will hurt you.

The short version is DW2 is a slow expansion game that will punish you for running around colonizing every planet you run into or even colonizing quickly.

[bri]

Just from what you listed;

You have way too many fuel tankers and colony ships should only be built for a specific job, you should never have any "standing by". It also wouldn't surprise me if your worlds have an excessive amount of soldiers which is a huge money sink.

[Kalisa]

also make sure populations of different species are not settling on planets bad for them, the AI currently seems to be lacking in this area, you may have a +30 suitable planet but other races in your empire may move to that planet even tho its +2 for them, that kind of stuff can also start to drain your income later as that population grows. i usually do a check every few years in game to make sure certain races are where they should be.

[GeeBee]

Improving the quality of a planet makes a big difference in revenue earned so use terraforming and remove the building once you max out the increase. Also, research the enhanced colonisation options as that gives a boost to existing planets. If you do this on your home world type you should see a big jump in revenue earned. Early and mid game it is quite common for your cash flow to be negative but I generally see this offset by the annual income I get from ship building and tourism so make sure you research tech that benefits the private economy and you get big bonuses when they build new ships or retrofit old ones. Resort bases too can bring in a fair bit of revenue.

[TargetLost]

Well while I agree that the economy in this game is absolutly bunkers because it makes no sense ... you can't influence the income as much as you should be able for example there are hidden mechanics in the background thgat makes it impossible..the game balances itself..you are basicly not in the control here...

You should be able to have a decent fleet if you tune your planets right. Basicly suitability is key and haveing resources and most important do only have very few planet buildings.

In my game closing in to 100 hours .. I am still around 0 cash. (it changed later to the plus because I can not really play it anymore with 4 to 5 minutes freezs and had it simple running without me for some hours)

Aynway I have 34 planets now all doing + income all human only.
Half of them have every building. The other the 3 or 4 most necessary ones.

I have 7 fleets each consist of 54 Ships with a fleet power of 500k each..where as you have to be aware that when you attack an enemy planet only 100k will arrive the rest will go on sighting tour in the galaxy for who knows what game mechanic reasons.

Anyway..you see despite the economic is questionable at best..never experienced so less controll with usless numbers (cashflow is not cashflow) and smoke and mirrors due to hidden numbers.. you can get stable and growing well. All you have to do is start slow and stay with one planet only for a long time.

In fact it looks a bit like the real challange in this game to me is fighting the absurd economics of this game.

[Carlo]

Originally posted by TargetLost:

In fact it looks a bit like the real challange in this game to me is fighting the absurd economics of this game.

Hive Carrier: Am I a joke to you?

:)

[danhammond58]

Economy works. Planets below quality level 20 will cost you money to support and as they grow pop continue to get more and more expensive. Too many of these in your empire will cause you to go broke.

Also use the private sector funds to grow your economy. As you get new tech that will spawn the private sector to upgrade their ships, then you will get an influx of cash to use, spend it wisely and grow your economy. The medium freighter and large freighter techs are great examples of this private sector cash flow into your economy.

[Big_Al]

I agree with the comment above about keeping tabs on how many troops the AI builds.

It really seems to go crazy with huge troop levels so I have gotten where I take over manual control of that for the planets. The AI was costing me a fortune in troop maintenance.

[Carlo]

Manually controlling funding levels might be less micro-intensive (for troop building) - the AI won't build troops if they'd cost more maintenance than available. At least, I think it's not supposed to...

[LHR_Olorin]

Corruption and revenue will be getting tweaked, it's on their roadmap after all the crashes are fixed. Devs have recognised that corruption is overtuned, especially on higher difficulties.

Currently it works out better to deliberately kill population and either stay around 75% filled planet or 50% depending upon difficulty.

[madpraxis]

Ok, I have to throw this out there: The pirates are exactly how they should be.
Game lore, yo. They aren't 'scavengers' or broke ass broken ships breaking away from someone to do their own thing, or some random crew deciding to go their own way from some empire somewhere.

They are literally the remnants of the civilization before. As in, high tech, powerful equipment. They know what they know, and they have effectively been locked in stasis at that positions since things went 'oops' the first time around. They haven't advanced, but they haven't fallen either. They have stayed that way, barely keeping where they are. Raiding, trading, space mining (since they were literally the only ones pretty much to make it through with a space based economy), basically doing their thing until one day they 'oops' realized that the dirt eaters actually made something of themselves.

That is why they charge for 'protection', that is why they raid you. They are trying to hold onto what they had, knowing its going to be a losing battle eventually. But they can't afford (or risk) taking the new players on the stage out since they depend on them too. They can't win, they can't lose, they can just try to hang on to what edge they have and survive.

[Jacky Treehorn]

The demand for 'scaling' is just so millenial.