Why are maintenance costs so high

In the old days, the outcome of a game was largely determined by the initial colony rush: get your hands on as many planets as possible and you'd be in the best position to win. The increased maintenance costs and tougher economy are there to prevent this from happening.

You don't need loads of planets dedicated to economy though. On small or medium maps I have maybe 1/5 planets dedicated to economy + a few econ buildings wherever my econ capital is (usually my homeworld)

You can build the older versions of buildings (at least this was the case in DA and DL, haven't checked in TA yet) but you'll have to rely on someone else to tell you how. All I remember is it had something to do with the building queue where you could select an option that enabled building older versions   

There's a tab at the top of the buildings list that allows you to change between newest buldings, older buildings and all buildings. You're still allowed to build older buildings in Twilight, although the maintenance costs revision does mean that some newer buildings can be more cost-effective.

Thanks for your help, cannot believe I had not noticed that tab bit at the top. Will be helpful for my new planets I am sure.

While I understand the desire to make random colony grabbing less useful I think part of the problem with these games is they dont give the true benefit for huge planets/cities. Really a single huge city or planet would probably be worth way more than several smaller ones but like in this game it seems beyond a certain population the tax goes daft and is no longer the stated % multiplied by the population and instead it starts getting less and less.

Reminds me of a mod for Space Empires IV where basically your homeworld was by far your most important planet as they decided that trying to move a billion people should be very very hard and that your homeworld should have way more production from the fact its been in use probably for thousands of years.

Still I just keep learning and trying to get better at managing the economy crash, other thing is trying to get into fighting earlier, I naturally tend to be a passive player so most of my victories are culture at the moment or late game big tech lead slaughter of the opposition type battles.

At a certain point you end up effectively paying lots of money just to keep the extra citizens happy (or if not happy then at least content enough so they don't revolt) so I think the best idea is to work with whatever population will be cost-effective on a given planet.

Planets with high population do tend to have better influence so with some cultural improvements they can generate quite a bit of tourism income. However if you're playing a race without many influence options on the tech tree, tourism is always going to be a small slice of your income, unless you get the tourism boosting mega-event.

If colony maintenance is a problem then you need to raze factories or labs that you don't need. You can always build them up again when your economic crisis has passed. More importantly, if you're having to run with the production slider over to the left because of a lack of credits then all those extra factories or labs are keeping you from using your planets cost-effectively.

Actually that's a key point; I realize that I don't do this often enough, changing one type of buildings for the other based on that time's needs. I'm still too much stuck in the mindset of "planet surface used up --> only upgrade or replace by galactic achievements".

Though initially I do the opposite: I build mostly econ buildings on lower quality planets, until my population has grown enough, then I switch to additional labs or factories for the next phase of the game.

So is a far less aggressive colonial rush strategy better in ToA? Even if an aggressive colonial rush strategy is expensive early on, does it not pay off long term?

It's not the maintnence that's concerning me, it's how long research is taking! Anyone else noticed this?

Just like manufacturing, research takes longer when your production slider is over to the left. The proportion of your spending as determined by the military, social and research sliders also haa an effect. The initial colony tile provides some research at each of your worlds but if there isn't much funding the research takes a while. When you add dedicated research facilities on a planet, there's more research that can be funded through the sliders.

Economic starbases can also give a bonus to your research and manufacturing, and you only pay half as many credits to finance the extra as you would for the base research points.

As for early colonial rushes, it can be good to establish quite a few colonies early on because in the beginning you don't have tile-effective ways to improve morale; so having places to ferry your homeworld citizens to is a nice thing. Long before you ever get troop transports, you can use colony ships to move citizens between your planets. I wouldn't rush to grab every old world though, as every colony costs maintenance right off the bat. The ones with asteroids close by make for good choices because once your space miner has set up mining outposts, those colonies that are seeing the benefits of mining operations have more industry points, and that's great for cranking out the next wave of colony ships. More to the point, you don't pay maintenance on great big rocks like you do for factories.

When you need to spend some of your hard-won tax money on research, those worlds that aren't near to asteroids and aren't likely to be churning out lots of ships make good colonisation targets. Most importantly, planet quality determines how many tiles are initially useable. So far I've never seen any bonus tiles (improvements to morale, research, manufacturing etc) on tiles that need improvement to become useable, so planet quality should be a rough guide to which worlds you want to acquire first.

That said, some low-quality worlds actually end up with a pretty decent PQ once they've received some tender loving terraforming, so whether you rush for them depends on just how long-term your plans are.

On the whole, a rush for colonies can be worth it later on because of the tiles you will have available to generate income and do research and manufacturing, but only if you can hold onto them and only if you can eventually run your economy with the production slider over to the right.

Defiantly have to rethink your game strategies from the previous versions.

I think the main reason for High Maintenance is Metaverse. IE back in the day get players with Million scores per game cause of high military score. Now its harder to get those nice high scores. But it does make things more interesting.   

I like the new system. In the past I really did not have to pay to much attention to how I developed my worlds and would rush to grab every plant in range. Now I have to do some real planning.