STrategy Guide? I always run out of $!

1. Adjust your sliders frequently. I adjust my sliders at least once every 4 turns. Sometimes, once per turn. Look at your income, expenditures, and treasury. Determine what level of income/outflow you are comfortable with and what level you want your treasury to stay at. I usually keep my treasury at a minimum of 1000bc. On very rate occasions, I will go negative.

2. Research economy and morale techs at your earliest convienence. Do not under any circumstances research higher level factories or labs till you have the corresponding econ tech at least. Why? To keep from overspending by having too high a level factory or lab. Morale techs give you the ability to have higher taxes, giving you more income. My rule of thumb is to always have the next level econ building qued up in my planetary build ques before I research the next level factory and/or lab.

3. Mining resources. During the colony rush, scope out the econ and morale resources. When you are almost finished with the colony rush (only PQ 6 and lower left), stop. Start building constructors. The AI will always keep on colonizing while you can grab those precious resources.

2 things stock markets and at least 2 vr or "happy" structures.

And don't forget, if you get into a really tight spot financially, you can always cut the production slider down from 100%.

I sometimes do this eg to enable me to keep taxes low because I want the 100% pop growth bonus.

Also, what are you spending your race attributes on? I tend to put plenty of points into he economy, since everything else flows from a good econ.

The majority of your income comes from taxes. Taxes come from your population. Try to have a high population and keep that population happy(100% morale for as long as you can afford from turn 1, super breeder works best with this). Then when you can't afford to keep your population exceptionally happy, raise taxes and take your morale down to 46%.

You'll find that you make more money by raising a larger happy population and then taxing them heavily then to tax the smaller population heavily early on. Why? Because then you're taxing less people and that heavy taxation early on will cause very slow pop growth and bring you much less money and later expansion of your empire will demand more funds which you won't have.

If you want to make really good money, them you need to learn the ways of technology trading. But be careful, you may be branded a heritic!

Scincerely,

Scintor@aol.com

Also, research those higher types of governments. They come with bonuses to your economy. 10%-30%.

trade routes (this is only a minor +)

Build A LOT of economy improvments. I do something like 50% of each planet. Except for the Research and production capitals. On smaller PQ worlds i just have one farm and all the rest economy buildings. The tech time to get to stock exchanges isn't too long.

I don't think this is your problem, but dont build too large of a military until you have the money to keep it.

Cool, thanks for all the great advice. I tried it on a game I started this past Sunday and implemented the advice above, and I am right in the thick of things! Thanks again!

Okay..this is what i found out to solve the money problem. I was always in your situation before. So i figured that for each planet you are colonizing, have two entertainment center, forget building any farms. Have at least one research lab, and have one factory if you wish. But you don't need it for each of your planet.

Next, for the spending slider, make sure you drop the miltary slider to almost zero, and then increase your social production to a resonable level, then slowly increase your reserach slider. Do this gradually until both research and social production slider is at max. At the same time, increase your productivity slider gradually, while trying to keep your approval rating to be at 71 percent. As time goes on, your economy should always remain positive. WHile you are doing all this, make sure you the following techs researched as quickly as possible, Xeno Entertainment, and xeno economics. First gives you boost for morale, second boosts your economics. On more difficut settings, it is not enough that you have a positive economy going at all times, you have to expand to a resonable level in terms of number of planets you have.

ALso, there are certain techs, by researching them, you research other techs faster. I think if you research like advanced computing, then a few of the minature techs, and then planetary invasions, other things should go faster. Just try and fiddle around with which techs would help you improve research rates.

If there are wars, you just buy your military ships. It would be cheaper and faster. The best thing is to get all the minature techs as fast as possible. this way, you can put more stuff in ships which would compensate for having low level fire power techs.

From the sound of a lot of the posts here, people don't specialize their planets? You stick stock markets, morale and research buildings on every planet?

I specialize every single planet. Every planet is either production, money/population/happiness or research. Of course, the capitals are specialized as much as possible.

Am I playing incorrectly? From what I can tell, population only impacts taxes. Higher population means a lower morale, which leads to a lower population growth. So what's the point of having a huge population on a production or research planet?

There are buildings like the research coordination center and power plants that increase output by a percentage. So it makes sense to only have those buildings on research and production planets, respectively.

For money planets, I try to increase the population and morale as much as possible, to bring in the most taxes. The only other concern is having a decent population/morale on planets that build a lot of transports.

Am I wrong? Is it more optimal to specialize or generalize your planets?

Specialization is more effective but also requires more player effort and management. I tend to specialize but lately I've been putting 1 farm and 1 stock market on anything PQ7 or better even if that planet is going to be a monster research or manufacturing planet (and yeah sometimes depending on the victory I'm going for I've turned PQ15+ planets into research monsters). Part of the reason for the farm is that since I tend to grab econ and morale racials keeping 11 - 16 billion people happy doesn't take any moral boosters and it generates enough money even with just 1 stock market to support several factories/labs so the planet isn't drawing the treasury down and sometimes 1 or 2 more factories won't actually speed the production of ships anyway.

The farm everywhere giving the stronger pop base makes everything harder to invade as well and allows more transports to be built/bought without much worry. A PQ10 with initial colony, starport, farm, stock market, 4xfactory, and 1xpower plant is actually self sustaining until industrial sectors I believe (if the pop is maxed) and can still crank out medium and large hulls in reasonable time. Killing the farm and the stock market for 2 more factories will cut build times only 3-4 weeks maybe on those ships, though the better the factory tech the more impact those 2 tiles have, if I'm sticking with older factory tech it doesn't help as much.

I've tended to put at least a basic factory or 2 on my econ planets so that auto-upgrades of the econ buildings happen faster, but those factories tend to get upgraded to morale structures later on or if morale is good more stock markets.

But I'll end up with about an 80/20 mix of specialized and generalized planets. The more generalized planets are generally because of tile bonuses as I generally can't get myself to not use the bonus even when I know I'd be better off ignoring it.

I've not been successful with all factories or all labs yet but I'm also generally only about 25% win rate on crippling right now as well so I'm still toying with everything.

GGtheMad, I agree with your assessment of the generalized vs specialized breakdown.

Being specialized doesn't mean 100% specialization. That's so extreme that it's no longer optimal.

For planets with bonuses, the bonuses usually dictate how it's going to be specialized. It's uncommon for a planet to have so many bonuses that it's unclear what I should do.

I do stick a farm on many planets, but it's a judgment call. Especially for planets deep in my territory, protecting against invasions isn't so important. For lower PQ planets, specializing in research or production is the best way to get the most out of the limited number of tiles.

Same thing for stock markets. For lower PQ planets, it's better to have another production or research building. There is no percentage based bonus building for taxes (I think), like there are for research and production. So it's not so vital to specialize as heavily for money. As long as you can control morale, it's okay to have a stock market or two. As expenses start to skyrocket due to high tier buildings, huge production/research output and fleet maintenance, it becomes necessary to compromise and build more stock markets/farms/morale.

For research planets, you do have to maintain a decent production until the research buildings are fully upgraded. Otherwise, it takes forever to build the top tier research buildings. Once that happens, I sometimes switch most of the buildings into research, including the starport, if I built one there at all.

Anyways, I'm relieved to hear that my planet building strategy is okay. Especially since you can individually focus each planet, it just seemed to make more sense to specialize. Personally, I find it makes the game a lot more interesting. Having the exact same build order and having all generalized planets makes empire building very boring. I prefer warring, but a huge chunk of the game is empire building.

That's almost the same as telling someone who is losing a military battle to "just build massive hulled ships with black hole guns and zero point armor"...

I put a farm on every planet, no exceptions. With terraforming, and morale techs and resource SBs, I find it's no problem at all. And the reason you want more people, even on planets way behind the lines, is because more people = more cash.

I also have stopped building any morale structures. I don't find I really need them, if I don't go above 13B on any planets. I do find building one morale structure on my homeworld helpful, since it can go to 16B. But one of the capitals (political?) has a nice big morale boost, so I usually put it on my homeworld for that reason.

The other reason I like not building morale structures is that when I research better morale techs (which grant empire-wide morale boosts anyway), I don't get a bunch of new items clogging up my social queues.

Note that I also grab all the morale trade goods ASAP, so that helps a lot. And Morale is frequently a trait I pick at the start of a game, too.

Between good morale techs and trade goods (and resources if I can get them), terraforming, and 1 farm on every planet, I find cash is not a problem at all.

Note I've been playing at painful, so that may vary from your games. I just played my first crippling game (and first gigantic as well), and it still seemed to be working well.

You could try the All Factories approach. Of course its a tough start, but once you get going nothing can really touch you on Research or money.

When you start playing Twilight if your not already, if you thought the money problems are bad in DA. DA is a cake walk compared to TA Economy.

Look around for it in the forums. Few Threads that are devoted to A Factories laying around somewhere.

but how does having lots of factories around impact research speed????

If you focus your factory output to research, 25% is converted.
It's part of the "all factory" strategy, you build only factories, and put your research slider down to 0%, then you focus all planets on research. That way, you only have to build factories and don't waste any of their "potential" production. (A quirk in the way the sliders are configured means that if you put research at say 33%, that means your factories are only poducing 67% of their max output and your labs only 33%. As most buildings also have maintenance costs, this is wasted production per tile/maintenance.)
However, this strategy is a downright pain in the bum as far as I'm concerned, never seem to be able to get the promised benefit over my "normal" management. It's perfectly possible to play up to (at least Obscene) without using an "all X" strategy. I'd recommend not using it until you understand the processes behind the game economics through and through.

Pick the Thalans as your race, select the Federalists party and devote 4 ability points to economy.

That's a 75% bonus. Equivalent to 3 stock exchanges on each of colonies from turn one(affects all other forms of income too). If you use ARC(advanced race customization), then you can really take advantage of this by using Super Breeder.