killing yourself with maintenance costs.

I never build planetary improvements that cost money to maintain until early middle of the game...

I also have a question about taxes: Is there some optimal level of tax rates that your population is used to? In the middle of the game I increased my taxes a bit and ended up with a bigger deficit compared to what it was with lower tax rate...I know that population might drop cos of high taxes but in my situation the effect was instentaneous...

They also 'avoid' paying taxes more with a high tax rate. They stop reporting their income.

and to add, starbases cost no maintenance, i like to get some set up along my trade routes and watch the money pour in, then i start on the moral maintenance costing structures.

~SDC~

yep 2/3 of my bcs were going for maintenance costs.

yeah its not needed to have everything on every planets, like if you start in a corner and have isolated planets that will be far away from combats there no point in making shipyards and such on them since it will take so long for the ships to get to combat, especially on bigger maps.

I'll always grab the zero-maintenance (or low maintenance with econ boost) social projects on all planets, and the Manufacturing center/Research lab on any decent planet, and major shipyard/manufacturing projects on one or two core worlds, but other than that, I only build what I need, for exactly this reason.

Ship quality bonus isn't that important on most of my colonies. I've usually got a small set of high-production colonies that are maxed out for production and ship quality, and they crank out all the ships for my empire, and I still wind up with too many ships with maintenance costs at times.

Interesting. I found specialization to be too much micromanagement (sometimes I really love that...I played month long Moo2 fests and SE IV, but recently I've had less time for it).

I've bought everything on every planet, until there ain't nothing left to buy. I've found the big keys are building Research boosters, Econ Boosters, and Morale Boosters (in that order). But in order to build these things fast enough to give me an advantage I start with the production boosters.

Decent 18-19 planets with everything are usually only spending a little bit more than they make, and that little bit is easily earned with trade or tribute.

Further, I've found that because the military / social spending can't be customized by planet, any planet that is not building ships (regardless of how far away it is) is just plain wasting money...the budget for the unbuilt ship or unbuilt social project just disappears.

So in the end you're wasting more money if you're not constantly building that your wasting on maintenance anyway

IME anyhow.

I have the compulsive problem of having to have every single world builing everyting possible. This actually worked out very well because my trade was +800, and with my spend rate was 100% I was still making money, but I was exclusively trading with one nation and they declared war on me. I didn't even have enough money to cover maintenance with spend rate at 0%. (:(

I had a huge problem with maintenance until I stopped colonizing marignal planets(12-13 Maybe even 14.) that really can't support themselves.

I build like Valamir, except that I only use social spending in bursts(when my colony number will be stable for a while, or I absolutely need to implement an improvement), so there's not that much money spent on pointless things.

I like to have 100% spending on one category. Gives results faster and it's very easy to keep track of everything that way. It works on Crippling level anyway.

And all these reasons is why this game is fun.. LOL


fleabitfox