What makes a stable economy on a planet..

The average planet does run a deficit. To counter this a player can engage in trade, sell techs, and have a few money producing planets. A planet needs to be big 10+ to make a decent money producer. Build a few factories so the other improvments can be built. Then add farms, entertainment, and trade (banks/stock market). Economic capital adds a big boost when available.

In general, a player needs one entertainment building for each farm. A player can use transports to send more people to the colony to boost income. If it gets too full to maintain happiness, transports can be used to send people out.

Another way to boost the money supply is to switch governments. In general, the more advanced governments (republic, democracy, federation) have better money flow as well as higher production and research.

Ok i keep building planets that loose money... Where does the money come from?!

You must wait for the population to grow to get the tax money. Population equals money. This also slows down the "colony rush" phase. You must balance that with your funds.

100% approval on a planet makes it grow twice as fast.
Balance the sliders: Taxation and Spending Sliders.
Balance the Distribution sliders according to the line graphs on the user interface on the main map sreen.
Remember that 100% approval equals double poulation growth. Adjust taxation slider to affect this according to money needs and competition that shows on the line graphs on the user interface on the main map sreen: "population".

It's a balance that needs to be tuned every few turns.

-Wade

It's often better to not make balanced planets, but to specialize instead, based on planet quality, location, and bonus tiles. Like Tiger8 said, high quality planets, especially with farming or approval bonus tiles, are very good moneymakers. Build a few factories, entertainment to keep morale up, farms when the population maxes out, and cover the rest of the planet with bank type buildings, with an economic capital on the best planet of this type you have. Other planets can be specialized for research or production, though planets with production bonus tiles are also good for making money because you need to take up less space with factories.

Another tip is to not spend too much buying things in the beginning phase, and especially not making leases. You will have to run a large deficit for a while until you can get economy buildings set up and a large enough population to turn a profit, so the longer you can make your starting cash last, the better. Also remeber that the more production you have, the more you have to pay, so only build factories (and to a lesser extent labs) you actually need, and maybe worry about fully developing lower-class planets until after you have a strong economy set up.

I don't think the specialized planets idea works in the Camp. mods.. because the dread lords will just take all of your SPecialized planets leaving you with a huge problem of having to rebuild your planet to make it more balanced.. And waiting around seems like a nice idea till the dread lord takes 4 troops and wipes out 100,000 of yours..

A balanced planet should be self supporting.. After all it has every thing it needs.. Factories, military, food and money.
Together all of the planets should support the whole.. However this dosen't seem to be the logic in the programing..

A size four planet should be jsut as effecient as a size 32.. if you fill all the tiles up correctly.. and have a decent population.. soo.. What is Correct?

size 4 planet, only thing it is good for is:
one farm,
one econ building,
one moral building
(use your surplus $$ from other econ planets to buy this so it doesnt take 200 turns to build, and focus on social spending)

4th tile taken up by coloney center.

this is if there are no bonuses on this planet. What this will do is grow the population to 10 billion, and provide taxes with a decent moral rate. You physicaly cant make anything less than a class 10 planet a ship builder and crank out ships at any decent rate.

Hi!

size 4 planet, only thing it is good for is: one farm, one econ building, one moral building

I disagree. The class 4 planets will not grow more than 2.56B pop, so a farm is a waste (until very late game, when you have lots of surplus pop and no place to put them on).
My way to go with those tiny planets (class 3, 4, 5 and 6) is building one factory, then fully specialize them on research, and at the end converting the one factory in the recearch building. At class 5and 6 I may build one econ building, if I'm short of cash.

I prefer more balanced approach to building planets. More specialized are only the ones with bonus tiles, and with econ., manuf. and research capital (but usually those planets are the same).

BR, Iztok

I usually convert my class 4's (especially the ones beside the homeworld) to mini production planets for light defence and sensor craft (very useful early game imo, especially if you chose military production master for race)

Two factories (and any more I can add on due to terraforming later), one starport., and of course the capital.


Although I think dedicating those planets to research works well too. (depending on the size of map you are playing)

Ok i keep building planets that loose money... Where does the money come from?! Let say i have a planet with 8 tiles.. I would normally try to make a balanced planet from this.. 3 factories, 3 research center, 1 entertainment center, and 1 bank.

Gigantic Production capacities are of little use if you don't have the money to pay the maintainance for a gigantic fleet. My advise is to drive back the production capacity and build more structures for money aquisition.
As others said the key to an good economy is a decent population. A class 8 planet I usually equipp with 2 factories, 2 Labs, 1 entertainment structure, one farm and one Market center. This way the planet wont run on deficit. I tend to build my infrastructure with slightly reduced production output, instead of lots of factories I'd build another market or another farm instead.

It's often better to not make balanced planets, but to specialize instead, based on planet quality, location, and bonus tiles.

In my oppinion it's a mistake to build highly specialized planets. My planets are always balanced to a large degree, somtimes a bit more production, sometimes a bit more research. Example:
Imagine a hihgly specialized Planet with 200 Production- and only 20 research-capacity. Now lets say you have the militry and social production each set to 25% (total production 50%) and the research slider set to 50 %. In this case you're planet has a total production output of 100 and research of 10. Now lets say the Drengin declares war on you and you desperatly need to research the phasers in a short amount of time, so you set your research slider to 90 % and total production to 10 %. Your hihgly specialized planet now generates only 20 hammers and 18 research ponts. In other words the planets production is nearly down to zero.
The consequence of this is that hihgly specialized planets are only using their production capacities in an effective way when the economy-slider is set to over 50 % where the planet has its strength.
Over a long period of time a balanced planet will have the larger combined research and production output.

As the question is more torwards economy lets get back to the bean counters numbers crunch.

1) People - Generate Taxes Monies (the happier they are, the more of them that are actually paying taxes)
2) Economy Modifiers:
2a) Morale buildings - Improves morale which directly affects approval which is tied into folks paying their taxes.
2b) Farms - Improves the ability to feed the masses, the more people the more taxes collected.
2c) Economy Bulidings - Improves the amount of monies collected from the planet. (can be wonders)
2d) Starbases - Military really only helps in the increase of influence (which brings in money through tourism). Influence is similar but more greatly enhanced tourism generator. Economy helps production and trade and if placed near a border but in the sphere of influence of a planet can increase tourism a bit also.
3) Trade - the further the trade partnet is away from the planet the more overall value the trade route is worth, other factors affecting trade are 2d) - Starbases and the amount of folks on a planet, the bigger the population the bigger the valued amount of the trade is.

I hope this helps, economy is a touchy feely equation in my opinion (not humble in any way btw).

W/R
Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

The consequence of this is that hihgly specialized planets are only using their production capacities in an effective way when the economy-slider is set to over 50 % where the planet has its strength.

So what? It's your civs overall production that matters, not the planetary distribution.

Specialisation pros:

1. Tech/manufacturing capitals, the research superprojects and economy starbases give partially free production. So if you have a choice of two planets to put a research center and an economy building to support it, you put the research center on the planet with the greatest bonus and the econ building on the other.

2. (Kind of linked to 1). Mid/late game if you've developed properly you may well find you have a greater income than you need, and no planetary tiles left to boost production. At this point, economy starbases are the obvious way to go. If you specialised planets then you'll need less starbases (hence less constructors and time) to use up your excess credits.

3. You can react more quickly to enemy attacks. Done right, you'll have planets which can turn out even your very top of the range dreadnoughts in 3 or 4 turns. This means you can often afford the luxury of waiting to see what's coming at you then building ships designed precisely to counteract that exact threat. Not only will your ships be more likely to win the battle with minimsl losses since they're so well tailored, you'll also have saved a bundle in maintenance costs by only building them when they're most needed.

Cons to specialisation:

1. Losing a few key planets will cripple you.