Hard time making money

Have you tried selling some of your tech for lease-style payments to other races? Usually I make more money per turn on tech sales than I bring in through trade. Hope that helps.

The AI does not start the game controlling more than one home system, and I have never seen a single exception to that on any difficulty level. You will need more than an "I know for a fact" claim before you can convince people otherwise. It is not impossible to obtain Aphrodisiacs on turn 5 if you're in a good starting position, though your long term economic growth will be stunted for decades to come. I doubt even on the lowest AI level such suicidal tendencies will be observed. You will have to excuse me if I chalk this off as exaggeration. Stock markets come with an economic bonus that increases both your income and spending. If you had a domestic deficit to begin with however, simple math dictates that it will only grow in proportion to your economy.

The frustration you are experiencing is a common problem to many players. There are a multitude of posts on this forum that discuss this in more detail, but I will just repeat a few points here first before you go read them:

- There are indeed numerous posts on this forum asking why it seems like the AI cheats. A good portion, if not the vast majority of them however, are a result of an “if the AI kicked my ass it must be cheating” mentality. It is best to keep an open mind here instead of taking a position that does not reflect well on yourself.

- It is not abnormal for your domestic spending to exceed tax income. This is just how the economic system is balanced. Lower your spending or obtain other sources of revenue if you cannot afford to run a deficit. In particular, the value of tributes will far exceed that of trade in most games and you should take advantage of that.

- It is not abnormal for your morale to hover in the 50-60% range. This is just how the morale system is balanced. As soon as you improve your morale, it will trigger population growth to bring your morale back down. The net effect of morale improvements is simply to increase your maximum population, so you should treat them as such.

- The most common problem players face are soaring maintenance costs for ships and social projects. Ship maintenance can be difficult to detect as it is factored into your military spending. You can briefly lower your military income distribution to zero and see how much you are paying for ship maintenance however. Social projects are not meant to be built on every single planet you own. This game is not exactly a Civ clone after all. If you indeed had “all social projects built”, then you will go bankrupt, as the game is so designed. Go into the planetary management screens, click on the “Details” button, and start destroying some of the social projects that aren’t worth their costs. Early social projects such as News Networks, Medical Centers, and Embassies are just cash hogs that are not worth investing in on all but your best planets.

"My first game, I had built everything and I lost the game because I was losing 1 tc (that's trillion credits) per turn. That's with class 22+ planets and about 75% of all the research completed and all social projects built up to that point. Even with 100% morale, I lose quite a bit money."

Here's a major part of your problem - you built *all* social projects. Some of them have really high maintenance costs, which can drive you further into the hole if the return isn't worth it.

ZaH's post has some good basic advice, but seriously, it looks like a big chunk of your problem was purchasing all of the social projects.

~SDC~

Alarinn,

I had the same problem in my early games. I really didn't learn what I was doing economically until my fifth game (so don't feel bad)! My recommendations:

1. DON'T LEASE.
Brad and the BT's can recover from the various accruals of lease payments, and their drain on the economy. Novices like us can't. My greatest problems in my first 4 games are directly attributable to leasing...and it's not like I "over-leased". Frequently, I only leased the first colony ship from Mitrosoft, like the player's notes said.

Two lessons I learned were: (a)early economies are terribly handicapped by even the lowest of lease payments. You are trading long-term stability for short-term gain; (b) leasing, even on a tiny map, is unnecessary. I'm in a race, and the AI beats me to a PQ20+ planet? No it doesn't...I just have to "colonize" it with a couple of BattleHammers and some Transports! Somehow, this basic solution got missed in the Player's Notes.


2. There are some basic buildings (social improvements) which are fundamental for any developing economy. These are fusion power plants, manufacturing centers, banking centers and research labs. Research their respective techs first (you can get universal translators and trade later ... and who needs to translate "BattleHammer" into their language anyway? They'll get the message!) and build them on every planet. Once built, your economy will start to take off.

3. Use your starting balance of 1000gc's to set spending at 100% and keep it there for as long as possible. My money sink started when I depleted my starting treasury, had to restrain spending to begin producing a profit, had to reduce taxes to keep popularity 52%+, and had not completed the above projects (I had built soil enrichers, news networks, etc. instead). The net result was, each planet was producing only 3-4 production points/category, my debt was growing because my empire's net profit was < my leases, and anything being built was taking forever. I discovered I can avoid this by using my initial 1000gc's to build up my basic socials and colony ships instead.

For this purpose, I recommend setting your sliders at 80/10/10 or 10/80/10, depending on whether you need to crank out a colony ship or not. A viable alternative is to set them at 100% in any single category you need to produce, switching categories when that specific project is completed.


4. Go to Republic.
As your first mid-range goal, set your sights on Diplomacy and switch to Republic. The +20% Econ bonus is vital, and it is relatively easy to "rig" the elections by reducing taxes to whatever marginal rate produces 80%+ popularity the month before they're held. Once you're safely back in office, you have another 24 months (turns) to tax and spend to your hearts content. The Democrats would be proud!

~SDC~

One problem with your post, Walter. The prerequisite tech for Banking centers is Universal Translator.

I find that leasing is OK in the begining of the game IF you're leasing colony ships. Even if you colonize a system with 100 million people, you end up getting more money than before the colony ship was built. Also, don't lease multiple colony ships for a single system. Once you colonize one planet of a system, you've claimed it, and don't need to quickly colonize the other habitable planets.

Good catch, Boss!

We can translate "BattleHammer" for them!

~SDC~

Don't get me wrong:-) I've played GalCiv on OS/2 years ago and still have it running. I learned a lesson the hard way - GalCiv is not like any other Civ game. It takes a careful balance of spending and income to keep in the game. It's always much easier for the AI since it "sees" everything.

Now I cheated on my 3rd game by overriding the fog-of-war...I.E. trainer that I wrote. The Arceans did in fact have 3 systems at the onset with 2 colony ships ready to take 2 more. Granted, we are talking about one particular game where the makeup of the galaxy is random. In this case, they had 5 systems by the time I even got my colony ship undocked.

GalCiv also can make things hard on you with random events. One space shark took out every ship in the galaxy and worse, sat at my homeworld for 5 years while I couldn't do anything but crank out battle axes and charge the shark. I found out later on that there were a total of 3 of them. Anytime I see a UP meeting to talk about a money-making idea like prisons I make note of who gets the bid. At some point, there's a prison break.

Recessions and other events are hard to deal with only because you can't predict when they will happen. Even the best-laid plans can't factor in these events. The only way I've prepared for them is reload 12 turns ago and deal with it beforehand. It doesn't always show up 12 turns later, but it will turn up.

The really ugly random events are the Draginol and the precursor artifact that turns a planet into a class 38 planet. If only I could get that class 38 planet:-) The Draginol are bad in a gigantic galaxy when it occurs on the opposite side. Might as well start over if they appear in a race that's equivalent to yours.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, and I'll keep the social projects to a minimum (0 maintenance and economy-boosting projects).

Al

Alarinn,

I've been involved with this version of GalCiv since the early beta and I have _never_ seen a race start with more than a single system.

Beyond that the game designed has stated that all of the major AI races start with the same resources as the human player.

Al,

I agree...the randoms can be game-enders early on. One game I lost when, at the very first UP, the Torians were the only race I had encountered (hence the only other voter) and they out-influenced me ~12:1 (the influence tallies were 1,011 Terran Fed, 12,811 Torian). The very first question was whether every Empire (read: meesums) should give the Torians 1000gc for their efforts in maintaining intergalactic peace. I had ~80gc's in my treasury, and it passed (obviously). My account balance went to -911gc the next turn. I never was able to get to -500gc, even with taxes set at 100% and all sliders at zero. The Torians took Sol through influence about 50 turns later.

I have now changed the auto-save slider to every 3 turns, and just (mentally) rack things like this up to a loss now, reboot, and play on. So far, my (mental) tally stands at 1 reboot on my current game, and 2 overall.

Perhaps Brad could put some feature into the game allowing the player to concede the current situation and re-roll the random event, counting it as a retry if submitted to the Metaverse.

~SDC~

Alarinn,

"Now I cheated on my 3rd game by overriding the fog-of-war...I.E. trainer that I wrote. The Arceans did in fact have 3 systems at the onset with 2 colony ships ready to take 2 more"

By "at the onset" do you mean Turn 1? :notsure: How were the other races?