Can you help my econ? (Screenshot inside)

Can your trade income be increased? By starbases along the routes maybe?

Astro

~SDC~

I always make sure that I have some form of tribute coming in. It looks like your the Tech's so it shouldn't be too much of an issue to stay ahead of the game on Research. Trade a nice technology for some tribute. Your approval rating is a bit high, bump up your Tax rate to around 30 - 32 percent. The tribute is really want you want to go for though. Oh yea, one more thing, your 'Income Distribution' seems a little high on the Socials, try to even it up a little more between social and research, unless it's war time then bump up the military as well as the research.

Hope this helps...

~SDC~

my few cents, your 'Spend Rate' is set too low. this is your primary means of controlling production (manufacturing)

also, you don't want to keep morale as high as possible 'cause that increases pop growth, and leads to overpopulation which leads to lower morale and lower production. the trick is to find the 'sweet spot' for a given stage in your game where both are maximized.

another tip is lots of starbases with upgrades, but it looks like you've quite a few (hard to tell from the screen)

You approval *is* high, let it drop to 58% before you really start to worry, but you have some entrenched problems to that game it looks like to me:

Trim your fleet. Maintenance that high should not be forcing your production sliders so low- or *do* something with that fleet that's sucking up all that cash- go kill som puny AI or minor race and take their world. Lose ships in the fight. Trim the Navy budget. You're at almost 50% of your budget, whoa! I think I've yet to pass 10% while still dominating militarily.



~SDC~

I'll agree with Dearmad here.

You're spending a LOT on maintenance and military. Take some of those ships and sell or trade 'em. And you should contact those minors and sell them your tech for monthly payments. In my current game I can usually get 75-200bc's for 15-25mo. This will give you a nice year or 2 with some good income.

Also, consider contacting a race you're close with and pay them to attack an enemy, then tribute them some of your fleet. With a little luck you can have the torians wipeout the drengins for you. You won't even get your hands dirty.

idle

~SDC~

Badbonez,

can i copy your image onto my website? i want to copy the comments here so other people can get help too.

If you've gotten all the upgrades, then you've gotten a bunch of the high-maintenance/low-effect ones that you probabably just don't need. This isn't like some other 4x games where you *want* every thingy for every base. Some are always cost efficient and useful, some have specific uses, and some (in my opinion) cost too much in maintenance to ever be good. I don't know what tech level you're at, but if you've got things like orbital hospitals and cultural exchange centers sitting around, scrap them. My rule of thumb is, if it costs 3-5 maintenance and only gives small modifiers (+5%) or modifiers to stuff I don't need (like influence for a system that is deep within my territory), then just don't build it. Maintenance can really kill ya.

This is mostly reiterating what other people have said, but:

Start by bumping up your tax rate. You probably want to keep bumping it up until your morale hits about 55% or so. I say probably because the income from taxes is discontinuous. Sometimes you'll increase taxes by 1% and suddenly you income _drops_ 100 bc or so because a whole bunch of people got upset and decided to leave your empire. However these dropoffs usually happen at much higher tax rates, so I don't think you'll need to worry about it before you hit 55% approval.

Second, unless it's _really_ necessary, even out your spending. Unless there's a drastic problem like a war or racing to reach a really important tech, you should almost always keep the distribution at 33/33/34. There seems to be some kind of inefficincy penalty built in to having the values get too extreme.

Sell some stuff to the AIs. Tech is usually my first choice. If you're on good terms with everyone else in the game, you can get _great_ rates on some of your older military tech. Otherwise you can offload some of the more peacefully techs. Whichever tech you trade, trade it to everyone in the galaxy, unless there's someone you're at war with or really want to hurt. Get the money for it yourself rather than letting some other race decide to trade it around or give it in tribute.

In your case it looks like you've got a lot of military, so maybe you should sell some of that as well, either to allies who have deep pockets or to one of the minor races.

Once you've done all that, start increasing your spending rate. I usually aim to have as small a possible positive balance as possible in the early game (don't want other races getting any ideas about tribute) and start accumulating a little in mid to late game once i'm doing pretty well compared to the others and don't have to worry about tribute. (Well, at least not about _giving_ tribute

Thanks for the comments, and russellmz2, certainly, use the screenshot.

OK, here's the thing. If I bump up taxes, I will lower production (as moral drops, the shields each planet produces drops) so I was trying to keep production as high as possible. Throughout most of the game I was able to maintain nearly 100 spending. It wasn't until I absorbed a whole bunch of planets that I was losing money as I increased spending.

So I want to keep moral up to maintain production, but I can't get more production without upping the slider and if I do that my income drops.

About my military. I didn't have the right chart up, but I can win this game with military right now. I have beaten everyone down so much that they only have a few planets left and I have starships cruising their sectors. So maybe I should just get it over with and play the end game. Although I was interested in researching more techs.

About tributes: I don't want these guys to have any more techs. I sold good techs to them already and the longest period I seem to be able to sell for is 20 turns (which is WAYYY to short). I want to know if there is a way to do balance this budget, increase production spending without selling techs (and no, I'm not selling my boats either...I don't want to fight them).

In the end, there are only 2 other civs left and I am at least three times their military combined, so I guess I should just end and try a new game.

Thanks for the help and insights!

Kevin

~SDC~

I didn't think morale affected production? Just population growth? The spend slider along with the social improvements/starbases affect production.

Hey Dave, look at a planet with low moral, examine the production on that page (number of shields). Then go to Details and set the Propoganda slider all the way to the right, now go back and re-examine the production. If the planet has enough population you will see a difference. Keeping moral up also keeps production up. More people=more workers=more production. The production slider on the economics page determines what percentage of that planet's income will go to production, which does increase/decrease production. But so does the planet population.

~SDC~

Badbonez: your comment that the longest period you can sell techs for is 20 turns seems odd. I've found in my current ('painful') game I can sell to minor powers for infinity (ie 2000 turns). That's handy because I know the tribute I will get for the whole game. I get around 800-1,000 per turn. Does anyone-else sell for really long periods?

Start scrapping some of your social improvements on the planets. Fully equipped planets are not self sufficient. by the end game a planet with every upgrade would be about 100/400 income/expense. If you have this for every planet (or any planet) you are going to be in a world of hurt.

I have a rather odd habit for selling my techs, i either offer an initial price of 20bc per turn for 20 turns, or 100bc per turn for 100 turns, depending on how valuable the technology is. I then adjust it up or down, and usualyl keep the two fairly close together, raise/lower the per turn by 10, and then if that doesn't work raise/lower the number of turns by 10, etc.

Although i try not to do any trades for less than 20 turns, and i've found that once you get up to a certain point, you can increase the number of turns by a huge ammount without it impacting the price per turn. I guess the aliens realize too that you've effectively asked them for an infinite ammount, so they don't really care exactly how infinite it is.