this may be considered whining but

Maintenence cost aren't THAT high. The simple solution is of course build more economy buildings.

I consider my navy huge if military support is around 20% of my budget. Your economy sounds like it must be pretty tiny, not "going through the roof", if 5 ships make such a difference.

V1mTip™: An economy budget surplus of 100BC / round is not "going through the roof". It is "eating government cheese and watching free cable".

mid game at full production i get about 2,000bc/turn and while not constructing 3,000-4,000bc/turn
end game multiply those numbers by 3.5

The problem may be that by going from building no ships to building ships, you have added military production costs that did not exist when ships were not being built. Going from no shipbuilding to all of your starports building ships can have a big impact on the economy.

As was said, it cannot be ship maintenance costs--these are (relatively) tiny.

Keep building up your economy!! That way you can afford to build fleets when needed.

my starting planets are the only place that i don't use only econ buildings and i have increased their sizes so that i have between 4 and 10 spaces for econ buildings on them

my ecomimy is sitting at 50 tax and 100 spending sometimes it is as low as 200 and sometimes as high as 1000 extra and when i upgrade my ships no matter how much profit i have i then have to drop to 50 spending and increase to 60 taxes or higher

if i don't upgrade then it goes in the toliot when i have built three to five capital ships and sometimes when i build the small ships too

and with my new ship class it went in the dumps after i built two and by this time my econ buildings are stock markets

i have seen that too so i have not built on planets that haven't been building and i still end up in the dumper

and if i don't end up in the dumper the game crashes

i think it is the maintance on the weapons and equipment that i put on the ships

also does anyone know when the game decides to drop or not to drop the amount you owe to -2000

Wait. Is it possible that you're upgrading all ships of a class at once? That could potentially put you in huge debt and that would cool your economy substantially.

If that's what's happening, then just build new ships and retire the old ones or use them for cannon fodder. Maintenance costs really aren't that high, as was noted above.

There's really only two options here.

1) You are simply misremembering the numbers. Maintenance costs are 2% of ship cost. To wipe out a 200-1000 surplus, you need to build *at least* 10K worth of weapon carrying ships. That is not likely to be 3-5 capital ships!

Maintenance costs rise during the game, but not that sharply. Don't forget to decommission your old useless ships.

2) You have unused military production capacity which is being returned to the treasury every turn. When you start building your ships, you lose that income and your economy drops.

As has already been mentioned, if your upgrading all your ships at once, that's going to be very expensive. I've assumed by "economy goes into the toilet" that you're referring to the surplus or deficit *before* purchases of ships or buildings.

You can look on your economy screen (the one you set your tax/spending sliders) and see exactly how much bc you are spending on ship maintenance. The shipyard screen (where you go to design new ship classes) also tells you for each ship class what the bc/turn maintenance cost is on a per ship basis.

As said before...ship maintenance alone is unlikely to cause your economy to tank like you indicate.

KleinBottle23 has a point...if you upgrade all of your ships to a new class at once, you could put your bank balance into a big negative number and that has bad repercussions. If your bank balance won't support upgrading all ships of a class, only upgrade one at a time so that your bank balance remains in positive territory.

ok will try that

There is a section of the screen which will say 'if you do [this] your treasury will be ####'. Make sure you don't go below (-500bc) - your spending will come to a screeching halt until you get back above it, and you won't be able to 'buy' anything until you are back into a positive balance.

I almost never upgrade my ships, I just build new ones and use the old ones for planetary defense (I also never build orbital fleet managers, so they manage to slow fleets down some to give my real fleets time to advance. Then again, I tend never to build fighters- I don't build anything new until medium ship building)

Economy was tough in 1.2, but it's a lot tougher in 1.3. You need to build lots of planets with lots of stock exchanges and higher populations or you won't get anywhere. Personally, I set up around a third of my planets as ship builders and the rest money makers.