Dust start decreasing really fast

[Vallter]

Hi there!

So during my last two playthgroughs I keep loosing the same way - I have a big, stable and economically strong empire. Than at some point I start loosing 50k-100k dust per turn for an unknown reason. As I run out of money, AI starts selling my buildings, warships etc. Please, advice me, what is going wrong?

[CursedPanther]

Do you have the Penumbra DLC installed?

[Sloan]

Originally posted by Vallter:

Than at some point I start loosing 50k-100k dust per turn for an unknown reason. As I run out of money, AI starts selling my buildings, warships etc. Please, advice me, what is going wrong?

if this session with the Penumbra faction, then you have been hacked. Behemoths require a lot of dust.

[Reeva!]

Multiple things could be going wrong.
1: Sleepers. If you get hacked, you'll be notified. You will not be told what's going on with that hack. If Sleepers get embedded into your empire, your population starts becoming double agents, sending your resources to whoever hacked you.
2: Dust Inflation (Taxes). Inflation increases as Dust is produced in the galaxy. Not just by you, but by everyone. The more dust produced in a game, the more expensive any dust related purchases become, related to the Marketplace anyways.

3: Military Upkeep. Building any ship, even a civilian ship, costs dust every turn to upkeep them. Behemoths are the most expensive ships to own, as they have high upkeep. There is a unique upgrade, called a Behemoth C3 Centre. If you build this improvement, Upkeep for behemoths increases by 50% of the original 100%, every, single, time, but, you can build additional behemoths, +1 for every C3 Centre built. Even if you don't build another behemoth, all existing behemoths have their upkeep increased by 50% per Centre built. Eventually, Economic Behemoths start costing you dust, instead of giving you dust, it does become that expensive if you keep building these centres.

4: Less of a problem: System Improvements. Every system improvement (upgrade) costs upkeep as well. That's why when you run out of dust, the AI starts selling your ships, and your system improvements. Some of these upgrades take tons of upkeep, so just be mindful of that.

[Vallter]

Thank you for replies!

Yes, I do have Penumbra DLC and both times was at war with Choir. So this seems to be the first reason.

And the second one was that I kept spamming citadels to enforce the planetary shield, creating more and more C3 Centers. I thought that with conversion to Citadel, Behemoth does not cost you any more.

Thank you a lot! Will try another time to bring Horatio to victory.

[Tat011]

You can hover your mouse over most resources to see your production and consumption and you can do this both on a system level and on an empire level, it's very useful for figuring out why something is in the negative.