Economic help PLEASE.

[Nostromo]

Each game I start, I make it to a certain point and then my economy takes an inexplicable turn for the worst. I will watch thousands of dollars just disappear, to the point where my planets will uprise and colonists will die.

Usually Earth is my only productive planet. I also usually have the planets managed by a governor. There also seems to be a real lack of any quality planets nearby.

Please help! This has happened more than once.

[BiggieTheDog]

Well at least you can play the game. My game crashes before I even make it to the main menu.

[bytestream]

1. don't use governors, they sometimes decide to burn through your credits to get their jobs done faster
2. don't build too many subspace projectors, they cost an awful amount of money
3. don't build too many ships unless you really need them
4. research eco techs such to increase your income and decrease your maintenance costs
5. don't colonize every planet, pick only good ones to start with
6. both production and research generate credits - based on your tax rate - but food production doesn't

[ZeroDivide]

A few more things beyond byte's...

Intersteller governance - This makes all of your larger population colonies profitable.
Trade treatys - if you can, a trade treaty nets you 3credits/round. overtime this adds up to a lot even if it doesnt seem like it.
Dont buid piles of areoponics all over at your colonies. settle 1+ fert planets so you are not dependent on them.
Dont bulid spaceports on planets unless you are taxing and have 6+ people there.
Avoid biospheres unless you expect the extra population will cover the cost. usualy this requires they focused on production with a 25% tax and tax buildings.
Avoid colony shielding unless you expect that planet to be bombed soon. if the planet is not under attack its a wasted .5 credits/turn.
Merchantalism research can help some, but only if you use freighters frequently. it mostly just offsets the maintance cost of the freighters.

[TsuMo]

I experienced the same thing you are talking about early in my first game. I conquered this negative income, and I now run a few core fleets that are small in number for defense and 3 offensive fleets that each have between 20-30 ships in them, along with a few specialized planet destroyer or planet stealing fleets. My upkeep typicaly rises to 500-600, and I'm usually raking in just as much per turn. Run between 20% and 30% tax rate usually.

Anyway said all that so you would consider my words. The short term fix to your problem is to hike your tax rake and go through all of your colonies to figure out the problems, its also the easiest. Despite their bad reps the governors actually do a decent job if your economy is stable. It's when your economy is in the toilet, its better to take over management yourself. And only because others will respond to this, I'll elaborate a bit. The governors are not perfect, but they are adequate. They have idiotic tendencies, and sure every core planet wants its on remnat relay detector (it's all the rave at the intersteller governer soiree). You will always be better off doing it all yourself ofcourse, but since the game is realtime sometimes its just not feasible for you to manage a few dozen planets. And yes they dont have the optimal build orders most of the time, but you didn't hire them to build the planet you want, damnit. You hired them for their vision. They have their own plans, and by god, no space emperor/king/demigod is going to stand in their way.

Ok so maybe I dont love them, but they are useful for establishing colonies if your empire is stable. Yours however is not. Heres how to fix that.

Find a few planets with 2+richness and try to get good population. Build Warehouse, Xeno, Deepcore. Build Rover before all if you want the early production boost. Run these manually and set them to full production with no science or food. If you want them to be self sufficient, throw in a vertical farm. Or is it hanging? The +4 one, not the nasty per colonist one. Throw in the +1 if you need to. These agribuildings aren't a must, but after I get stable I usually add them to all the colonies because SCREW STARVATION. These planets ARE the economy, their population cannot be allowed to starve. Thats worth a couple gold a turn. Then throw in all the economic boosting buildings that don't have a maintenence cost. Spaceports are good on most of them, but not all, and usually only after you have good pop. I'm not a fan of min max spreadsheeting, so I play trial and error personally but you can find the equations buried in the official forums. Aside from setting them up I never build anything on these planets, other than a brigade of ground troops. I do not use the awesome requisition feature because I dont want to risk depleting richness on my money planets. I pretty much run the majority of planets with more than 1.5 richness and less than 2 fertility this way, some are only a 4 coin profit, others are closer to 100. Most fall between 20-60. These are my money planets. In fact, I rename them all creative things like Dollaz 1-30 or MoneyTree. I make them as self sufficent as possible because of the horrible freighter AI in this game. Every save file erases freigther Area of infulence assignment, so if you reload your game keep that in mind. I mention this because a frew freigthers assigned to your money planets and your core planets with food on them will allow you to support the population on them. Once you reach popcap some will be fully self sustaining, some will need imports still. Consider a few dedicated freighters to keep their food running, as these will end up being your 30+ gold planets and you want them. If you get stable is entirely exceptable to set an industrial governer to planets you think might make good money planets. I usually let the industrial guy tinker around on them for a while then give him the boot after he tries to build a research facility, which lets me know his job is done.

Now if you find a planet that has crazy population, 10-17, and has either (hopefully both) decent fert or rich, you better nab that sucker. Don't put deep cores on those, they will bring in 15+ (highest one of these ive had was just over 94 or 95 I think) when they reach fullcap, even with tons of buildings on them. You can also make them self sustaining or give them a little more food so they can export it to your money planets. These make excellent resource focused planets, which also gives you dollaz. And once you are done researching and transfer all that energy to production they become major dollaz themselves. They also make good shipyard planets, where you build 8 plus shipyards and only produce ships at these planets, as they will still bring in 20-30 with a food/production focus split. Building ships can deplete them though. I usually make my homeplanet the shipyard, it just doesnt seem to go below 2/2 rich/fert. Bug or feature, /shrug. Also, dont ever do that unless you have an established economy. Shipyards arn't cheap.

Really its all about deciding which planets would serve you best as industrial/money focused planets, core planets with food and industry but less income, research planets with less income but selfsustaining food, etc. The governers can be useful for setting up all of these, but they will rub you the wrong way eventually. The core governors are really nice for managing your sliders. They will automatically turn core planets to research colonies, producton focus for building things, farming when food is low and so on. Just have to keep them from building a lot of extra crap you don't want. This might be whats happening to you. Your governors might be sliding down your gold to ramp up research or food. It could be that you've let your planets starve, and now your low pop planets can't make money with all the building that are on them. You'll have to figure out this bit yourself, and make those minor corrections. If you cant figure it out, you could just keep your tax hiked up until you find some good planets and get to mining on them. Very early in my first game, I had to do that because my economy started to stall. I think I was actually over 55% at one point. Deepcore, and the tax increase buildings are technologies you should be aiming for if you dont have them yet. Once you get them your problems will probably disappear.