How do I keep my economy from collapsing?

[Lemminkainen86]

I just don't understand. Once one item goes bad, the collapse is quick and impossible to recover from. When you are eventually (inevitably) negative on all resources then you cannot make changes in any way at all. Am I playing the game wrong? Spent the past 40 or 50 years with negative resources, watching my fleets deteriorate and my planets go into unrest.

[Elitewrecker PT]

You're building districts right?

[HappySack]

If it's energy that's an issue then it's pretty much mandatory to get the capacity subsidies edict to keep up with all the rising energy costs of upgraded buildings and rapidly expanding fleets, unless you're producing so many of the other resources you can trade for all the energy you need (or are swimming in so many minor artifacts you can float your economy long enough to bypass any deficits).

If it's anything else then it's going to take a lot more effort to figure out what's going wrong.

[Elitewrecker PT]

Screenshots of planets

[Oakshadow]

The economy in Stellaris is pretty complicated.

In the short term the quick fix for a deficit is to use the market to set sell and buy orders. Selling resources you have a surplus in while buying those you're bleeding out. You can also bulk sell and buy to quickly get rid of the penalties of having 0 resources in storage. (this only works if you have something available to sell though.

I strongly recommend deep diving the official stellaris wiki to figure things out in depth. Formulas for how fleet upkeep and what not are calculated are all there.

The biggest mistake people make when playing stellaris is expanding too quickly or going over cap before having the economy to back it up.

Also don't listen to youtubers about specializing planets and what not. Yes it'll power house your economy.... but until you have the economic basics down you're just going to mess yourself up. Specializing planets isn't something you do until your production is in excess enough to support shifting districts around on your planets without majorly disrupting your economy. It's a mid-late game endeavor, unless you're playing void born.

[NixBoxDone]

Basically, by having a healthy surplus.
The first few years you do nothing but pump minerals into mining stations for credits/minerals so you can get a safety cushion.
You do the same for districts on your capital world. You might want to retool it later, but at the beginning having actual positive resources is more important than losing out on a bit of efficiency.
So if you need minerals or energy credits urgently (usually you need one or the other, which of them it is depends on resource RNG) you build one of those districts, otherwise you build a unity building to get your traditions popping and the rest into foundries for alloys - you NEED to improve on alloy production early and often, it's absolutely vital in the 3.0 economy.

As you expand, you search for a mineral, generator and research world. Maybe a unity world as well, if you're looking to tech rush hard.
You settle those as you can afford to (earlier is better, but do try to rush the +1 pop tradition in expansion first if you can and make SURE you colonize the ones producing basic resources before the ones consuming them to produce advanced resources) and then you develop them together so your income grows with your expenses.
You want a relatively large credit surplus (because you can use it to buy resources you're short on, because you need energy credits to butter up the curators and the artists and because ships cost more when undocked, so you want a surplus to not immediately go in the red as soon as you launch your fleet), a moderate mineral surplus, as close to +/- zero food and consumer goods as humanly possible and as much in alloys as you can squeeze out of your economy without breaking it.

If you do this, fortify your choke-points, make sure not to lose resources to overflow and judiciously buy resources here or there to make up for temporary imbalances, you should be fine.
Balancing your resources at this base level means that you will, as you tech up, eventually reach a massive surplus as you research techs and building upgrades that increase pop efficiency.
You'll have the same expenses but increased production. You can use this to compensate for minor imbalances.

By the time those planets are done, you're likely to have researched (or be in the vicinity of researching) habitats. Habitats make balancing your economy laughably easy.
It's basically free real estate if you have a wartime alloy income and aren't actually at war. Just build habitats over energy/mineral/science deposits when your alloys are getting chunky and colonize them when your income in either of those three is starting to lag behind.
The full planets will funnel unemployed pops to them as soon as they're colonized, so you just need to be careful not to create a deficit so large that you can't survive a year without going completely broke.
Use the same habitats to produce strategic resources, build a habitat over a colonized planet to use for paper pushers to keep your empire sprawl under wraps.
Balance your economy to be solvent without edicts. If something goes completely pear-shaped on you, you can activate an edict to give you a hefty boost in whatever industry is bleeding out all over your balance sheet to buy time to fix it with habitats.

At this point you only ever get into hot water if you lose a large chunk of your empire to outside factors.

A few things to keep in mind:

- Get Expansion early for cheaper starbases and faster pop growth, then go for Prosperity to boost just about all aspects of your economy (reduce upkeep, increase production, quicker and cheaper buildings and districts - no-brainer if you're struggling to balance your budget).

- Don't be afraid to build a district that isn't "optimal" on a colony to plug a hole if the alternative is going broke. Minerals are dirt cheap, you'll be easily able to afford replacing it once the need has passed.

- Try hard to keep your naval capacity positive at the start. Going over massively increases the cost of each ship and that can quickly choke out your wallet, especially if you need to undock for any reason.

- Don't build more things on any planet than you have pops to actually use them. Stellaris has a relatively complicated interplay of jobs producing and using resources. Tons of open jobs means less control over what job gets filled when and therefore less control over what you produce or use up - build things you need when you are about to have pops available to actually use them until your economy is robust enough to sustain a few pops doing the wrong job for a year or so.

- AI empires usually trade resources cheaper than the market does. They're also a free source of energy credits and your choice of either consumer goods or unity via commercial pacts if you can butter them up, so staying frosty with a few of them to get some free pocket change and someone to sell your surplus food or minerals to is often not a bad idea. They especially love buying alloys or strategic resources. Even just producing 2 motes extra can lead to a surplus big enough to get thousands of credits from AI empires eventually if you need em. A good way to "store" extra capital.



Keep an eye on when exactly it is that you're sliding into a death spiral. It could very well be that it's usually after you conquer some AI planets. The AI gets bonus income, so their planets aren't always very beneficial when you first get them.
Getting 3 extra planets when you only have 5 yourself can be a HUGE sudden increase in resource costs.
You might wanna consider just forming a sector out of those free planets and splitting it off as a vassal if you can't bench the cost long enough to optimize them.
You can always integrate the vassal back later if you really want that region of space for yourself, but later is better than never because you went broke and got eaten by the devouring swarm next door.
Same goes for stations. The AI often builds a bunch, so after a victory you might easily slide several stations over your budget, costing a mint. Dismantling all of them to take the heat off and then building only the ones to secure your new territory might help.

[ScreamCon]

Don't treat districts as added resource production, but rather like a mathamatical ratio between them versus the planet size.

For example a planet only needs maybe 3 energy districts for planet upkeep... unless you need more for ships.

A planet only needs mineral to the degree of industrial district and pop usage.

Food districts normally also need up to 3, maybe 4 per world.

city districts are only needed to the degree you plan to open building slots, maybe if you really* run out of housing.

So as you can see its a balancing game. Small planets can end up raking more energy cost to buildings so might not be able to have as much mining and be able to support industrial districts.

This is if you plan based on total planet resource, you set one planet to produce the excess and have all the rest based on being sustainable to not dip into excess. There's a planet view to see resource + or - on world, I love to make use of it.

[Tactical Drongo]

If you spent 50 ingame years with negative recource income there is already something wrong but as said before, without seeing screenshots of your general situation and possible a few planets it is very hard to say what exactly the problem is

[NixBoxDone]

There's a lot that can be responsible for that for sure. One time I ascended and set my species rights to assimilation so all my pops would have the ascension perks, not realizing that I'd have like half my pops undergoing cosmetic surgery when I did.

Needless to say I was juggling some major deficits for a while there. By the time enough pops had undergone the procedure to put me back into the black, I was almost entirely out of resources. Literally selling parcels of strategic resources 100 at a time to try and keep me from hitting zero in everything.

[mss73055]

Do not use policies as an emergengy tool. That's investing in a disaster.

When one of your sources dips negative consider repairing and not to exaggerating it.
If consumer goods dip red then stop building research labs and culture clubs. Over time your pops will increase in number, then you can build the things you like.

[Aerowix]

One massive thing are the jobs. The specialist jobs always gets filled first by pops which will leave worker jobs free and available. If no pops are doing worker jobs, you are not getting any of the minerals or energy credits those jobs produce.

If you are building more and more, chances are it's creating a job vaccuum and all pops are filling specialist jobs. What I recommend is only build stuff when there's like 1 or 2 available jobs, that way you wont sacrifice your energy credits or minerals too much.

[Lemminkainen86]

Thanks All.

I just do not understand how the collapse was so sudden. Seems to have been a problem with consumer goods at first, then everything spiraled from there.

Aerowix, thanks for responding in the past 8 minutes, that may indeed have been my major problem. I think I was building research labs on worlds trying to get a tech advantage on an adjacent empire, that and I was colonizing a bunch of planets within my borders with low habitability for my main species with species that migrated in from other world-types.

[ScreamCon]

Lack of consumer goods causes pop happiness to go down by 25% + the standard of living you had, massively decreasing happiness. Happiness effects approval rating which effects stability that effects resource production.

In turn your lack of goods caused your other pops to be less productive and can lead to other resource shortages which in turn can lead to more. For example not having energy effecting mineral mining, not having minerals effects alloy good production.

https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Economy

At the very bottom says what happens with resource shortages, then can be gamed if your smart.

[Elitewrecker PT]

Running out of consumer goods is the worst one as it influences every other resource via stability/happiness.

[ChaffyExpert]

I mean, just set your planets to focus on credits, minerals, food, and trade for what you need, with homeworld also having industrial districts, that way you have everything reasonably covered (make sure to save room for emergencies) and eventually, after specializing new planets you can devote your homeworld or some other planet to alloys and consumer goods. I pretty much build special resource buildings anywhere.
works...well enough, not sure if it's the best.

[Xaphnir]

Originally posted by Elitewrecker PT:

Running out of consumer goods is the worst one as it influences every other resource via stability/happiness.

I'd argue for a long term shortage energy is worst, as that reduces mineral income by 50%, and a mineral shortage reduces consumer goods income by 50%.

Though, if you get to the point where you have a shortage in all three, you're pretty much just ♥♥♥♥♥♥.