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Money problems!!! please help!

 
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Money problems!!! please help! - 1/23/2014 8:44:02 PM   
Miithrandir

 

Posts: 3
Joined: 1/22/2014
Status: offline 		Hi all!

I discovered this game 4th mounths ago, and... it's awesome!
This is the game i looking for some years.

So, i played a game 1 mounth ago, on easy with manual ship design.
It was hard, but i managed to get a nice empire, with 20 colonies and +300 000 cash in income...

Fair well. I decided after that to play a normal game with automatic ship design...
And i never managed to get more than +3000 cash income. And a large part of the time, I was in negative cash.

I gave up and start a new normal game, with manual ship design. This is the same thing! i never be able to earn more than +5000 cash. For information, i have:

- 8 colonies
- 1 shipyard for each system (6 shipyards i think)
- A fleet with 8 warships
- Only 1 defence station
- Privates ships/bases upgraded
- Ships/bases upgraded

A question: If i build 2 "extractors" in my mine stations, do it will increase the production by 2? and my revenue by 2 aswell?

As i can't post any link until one week, here is my financial board:

STATE
Cash on hand: +170 000
----------------------
Colony taxe: 52 000
Ship and base maintenance: -40 000
Troop maintenance: -17 000
Space port income: +2000

Cashflow: -5000


PRIVATE
Cash on hand: +17 000
-----------------------
Colony revenue +173 000
Colony taxes -52 000
Ship and base maintenance: -88 000
Fuel cost: -4000
Cashflow: +29 000

Can you help me to gain more money?
thank you for your help!!

< Message edited by Miithrandir -- 1/24/2014 11:48:14 AM >
Post #: 1
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/23/2014 9:51:49 PM   
aaatoysandmore

 

Posts: 2848
Joined: 9/11/2013
Status: offline 		It's more important to take over (manual) ship purchases than design. The ai will buy buy buy if you let it. So just go down your policy list and make your ship buying a suggestion thing and not totally computer controlled and soon you will have money flowing in from everywhere. The computer ai tends to like to buy lots of explorers and scouts. I only allow maybe 15 of these total and you wouldn't believe the money I save keeping them at this size. I have 100's to 1000's of credits to buy destroyers and crusiers and battleships and carriers and colony ships with


Also take over your gift giving events as the ai will also just give money away to other races if you let it. Turn off manual gift giving and make that suggestive or toally manual as well.

And last but not least taxation: Make it manual totally and when you get a new planet set your taxes to 10% until you have about 500m population. Then up it another 10% then when it gets to 1000m churn it up to 40% like your main colony. The computer never taxes enough imho. I've always over taxed my citizens all the way down to 50% likeable quality rating sometimes. Especially during war. Rest of the time I keep it in the 80's (the likeable quality rating that is not taxes ) because it does effect population growth. If you need or want to grow fast you'll need to keep taxes down on that planet and colony.

One more thing by setting buying ships suggestive or manually you can overspend if you don't calculate maint. There are upkeep fees to ships so you just can't buy all you want when you want willy nilly. Be careful there.


Oh an another thing as you grow into the 500m to 1000m range of population don't forget to build tourist traps as like in Tropico that is where your extra income comes in sometimes. Spend a little money now about 10% to 25% on upgrading your tourist facilities. You'll be glad you did later on.

< Message edited by aaatoysandmore -- 1/23/2014 11:05:18 PM >

(in reply to Miithrandir)
Post #: 2
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/23/2014 10:37:12 PM   
CyclopsSlayer


Posts: 583
Joined: 2/11/2012
Status: offline 		1. Work on a couple techs;

-Coordinated Control - reduces Maintenance by 4% (not a lot but it adds up)
-Open Trade Networks - Then Build the Trade Bazaar Wonder, for +30% to the building colony's income.

Later;
- Unlimited Commerce - The build the Trage Guild Wonder, for +20% empire wide income.


2. Get more people to tax;

-Drop your homeworld tax rate for the rapid growth
-Keep new colonies at 0% tax while they are growing
-Medical Systems Techs help your people grow, and help prevent them dying off in plagues.
-Entertainment Systems Techs allow for increased tax rates while maintaining a happy population. (as you break their backs with taxes)


3. Get your neighbors to bail you out;

-Techs are current highly valued. Sell a few less desired or even antique ones to other empires for big $$$.
-Maintain a Commerce center at every colony, and set up Trade agreements.

(in reply to aaatoysandmore)
Post #: 3
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/24/2014 5:01:49 AM   
Ardilus


Posts: 53
Joined: 12/30/2012
Status: offline 		Good advice above. Remember that there are other ways to make money.

Don't be afraid to lose money in the early game. If you are investing wisely, it will payout sooner and faster than your rivals.

Every time you colonize a new planet, your private economy will purchase new freighters, mining ships, and passenger ships, which can be a reliable source of income and often outweigh red annuals. Your private economy needs to have the cash reserves available, so keeping private sector design maintenance low is ideal overall. Don't overbuild mining stations until you begin trading with other empires.

Private cash reserves are also needed to generate inter-empire trade, which is the primary ingredient for financial health. Send your intelligence agents to steal territory maps. This will allow your freighters to reach trade centers and begin generating profits you can tax. Get those trade agreements! (In the early game, it can also be a good idea to systematically sell your territory maps instead of swapping with rivals. This can help you expand if you are otherwise losing cash reserves while fighting off pirates.)

Tech is extremely profitable, but your rivals will need money to buy it. Undersell to friendly rivals until mid-game. Sometimes it is helpful to donate tech that will help allies reach resources and your own empire for trading. Everybody benefits from economic alliances.

Mining stations are by far the most valuable commodity, though my own feelings are that they are extremely overvalued and imbalanced. If you want to essentially guarantee that you can take all of a rival's cash reserves at any given time, build a mining station just outside of their territory. When their influence expands to overtake the station, they will pay exorbitant fees to claim it.



(in reply to Miithrandir)
Post #: 4
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/24/2014 7:26:04 AM   
Canute0

 

Posts: 616
Joined: 4/30/2010
From: Germany
Status: offline
quote:

Ship and base maintenance: -40 000

At the beginning of the game you don't need any warships, the pirates will rip them apart anyway.
Pay for protection if a pirate clan attack you, and cancel it after they left your system.

Just build alot of explorer !!
Maybe you find an abandon warship, mosttime one of these abandon ships got more firepower then a whole fleet of your own ships.
And when you find Independent colonies you should try to colonize them if they are friendly to your race, or invade them. These independent colonies mosttimes give you a hugh boost at Tax income. And Tax is your main constant income. More population = more tax/cash.


(in reply to Ardilus)
Post #: 5
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/24/2014 10:44:42 AM   
Miithrandir

 

Posts: 3
Joined: 1/22/2014
Status: offline 		ow... okay. Thank you for your advices!

1) For now, my colonies do not have a lot of population.
My homeworld has 5000K, my second colony has 1700K.
i have 5 other colonies with 30k-60k but that's all.
Taxes are auto managed and it may brake population growth. that's why i have far less money than in my previous game.

2) I try to unlock some techs in order to earn more money. Thank you!

3) okay, I stop warship prpduction. I am on war with no one and pirates are quite passive after all.

4) How are your mining stations? Do they have shields? And how many extractors? It cost -88.000cr to my private sector. This is my first expenditure. Maybe i can find something to remove?


5) Some questions about private stations and ships:

- How do they give me money? by the number of stations? the number of ships?
- I tried to build a lot of mining stations in order to produce plentyfull of ressources and then, earn a lot of money thanks to trade. Is that strategy works?
- If i build 2 extractors per mining station, will it drop me more ressources and then, more profits?

Thank you a lot. tehre is many things i didn't know before you tell it to me!

< Message edited by Miithrandir -- 1/24/2014 11:46:44 AM >

(in reply to Canute0)
Post #: 6
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/24/2014 11:51:07 AM   
StarLab


Posts: 844
Joined: 8/27/2012
From: Ontario, Canada
Status: offline 		If you start your game with only one colony (this will not work as well if you start with more than one colony) you can drop your taxes to 0% to encourage population growth. This will also increase the planet value and GDP (GDP is what you are taxing). When the planet hits maximum population, throw on some taxes and you'll be making money (cashflow) hand over fist!

While your planet is growing, you'll likely experience negative values in both Money and Cashflow. Just bear with it while the population grows. If you end up needing cash for something, temporarily put your taxes back up until you get the Money you need then drop the taxes again until population is maxed out. (Your mileage may vary on this point depending on what you need).

As an added bonus, if your cashflow and money are at minimal (or better yet - negative) levels at the beginning of the game, the Pirates won't ask for as much money for protection. Instead of paying them 8K - 20K for protection, you'll only pay 3-4K depending on your money levels.

Perhaps I'll just link you to a playlist I did on for both the above points:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzEZx9zuF9_7NojhT8oA5bWf0ltD9ZiHp

One more thing to watch out for is inflation. Check that all your strategic resources (in the Expansion Planner) are valued at 0.8 - if you see any resources more expensive than that (2.5 is the highest) then try to mine more of them with additional mining stations. More mines will only help the situation, not cure it. Sometimes you just have to wait for the supply/demand to sort itself out before you'll see those 2.5's drop.

So - for example, if Steel is priced at 2.5, then your ships and bases are going to be pretty much TRIPLE the normal cost in both purchasing and maintenance (everything uses TONS of Steel). If you have a fair amount of military this will cut into your cashflow quite heavily.

As far as negative Cashflow itself? It's a bad thing, but not crippling if you have a good amount of trade agreements, space port income (from Private Sector purchasing ships) and resort bases. Granted, these help out more a bit later in the game, but start working on them ASAP.

Hehe.. my current LP on YouTube I was running more than -900,000 in cashflow but was rockin' in the other areas. Still lots of money on hand so I'm still able to function quite nicely.

Anyway, DW is a lot about backward engineering. Try things out, experiment. Keeps what works, toss the rest. :)

HTH

_____________________________

-Larry Monte

Latest YouTube Series
DW2 Mortalen Preview
DW2 Ackdarian Preview

(in reply to Miithrandir)
Post #: 7
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/24/2014 1:24:26 PM   
Shark7


Posts: 7937
Joined: 7/24/2007
From: The Big Nowhere
Status: offline 		One thing, you have too many shipyards.

Each shipyard will pull strategic resources over the colonies, which causes shortages. This in turn causes the price of resources to go up, which increases your ship maintenance, which puts you into the red.

Basically, you should have 1 starport/shipyard for every 3-4 colonies at most. Any more than that really strains the system. Personally I use a starbase design with the medical and recreation facilities at most planets and may have only 1 big shipyard in my empire (of 30 colonies).

_____________________________

Distant Worlds Fan

'When in doubt...attack!'

(in reply to StarLab)
Post #: 8
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/24/2014 2:58:30 PM   
Canute0

 

Posts: 616
Joined: 4/30/2010
From: Germany
Status: offline 		4. You notice the private sector are paying for these stations. And mosttimes it don't hurt them when you design the mining stations a bit strong at the defence to withstand smaller pirate attack. So yes more shields and weapons are OK, better some expensive station who survive pirates then you need to rebuild them allways and don't got needed resources.
At the beginning you can add 3 extractors to the design for maximal resource output, check the other forum there is somewhere a mining/resources guide.

5. alot of stations help, but you should look that you build them for the right resources. It don't make sence you build the 20. Steel mining station when you allready got a big stock of steel at your colonie.
But when you build a shipyard, its called Space port at DW, at some distance colonie you can build there some new steel mining stations (at example) since the private sector is very ineffective to distribute needed resources to the outer colonies.
Mosttimes you can let the construction ships on automatic, just keep 1-2 of them at manual control to build station for important resources. After a while you will notice what resources are important when you encounter shorttages of them at your homeworld.

(in reply to Shark7)
Post #: 9
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/24/2014 9:01:10 PM   
Miithrandir

 

Posts: 3
Joined: 1/22/2014
Status: offline 		Ok guys. I tried to take off taxes in my colonies, but it was too late.
I started to earn money thanks to the bonus income generated by private sector (when i stop taxes on my colonies, private sector gets a lot of cash and then, they bought me alot of ships in my space ports)
But it wasn't enough, as my neighboor (the most powerful of the galaxy) declare war on me.
Ennemy military power is 20x suprior than mine, and even if i have better ships (in quality), i can't do nothing to counter him because i don't have extra money.

In the other hand, in my easy game, i earn +436 000 money and i have 4 000 000 on cash... I simply do not know what i made wrong! but there must be something.
Maybe by switching off colonies taxes earlier?

And thank you for your advices about mining! before the end, i tried to build what each colony needed and it was realy better! (no more "construction of xxxx is stalled....")

This game is very interesting and hard. It's a weak balance beetween colonies taxes (cash income) and enconomical growth. Too much taxes and you slow down your developpement (population growth, new private ships...). Not enough taxes and you won't be able to have decent fleets and defences.
And this is my mistakes.

About Space ports: If i make 1 SP for 3/4 colonies, how the colonies without shipyards trade with freighters?

If in your opinion, i made something wrong, let me know. I want to start a new normal game and i do not want to make the same mistakes.

By the way, The AI of other empire is very good. An empire give me an embargo when another blokade one of my colony... This is really cool!
DW is hard and it been a while i was severely kicked by AI. This make me happy!

< Message edited by Miithrandir -- 1/24/2014 10:04:48 PM >

(in reply to Canute0)
Post #: 10
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/24/2014 9:33:31 PM   
Canute0

 

Posts: 616
Joined: 4/30/2010
From: Germany
Status: offline
quote:

how the colonies without shipyards trade with freighters?

Each colony got 2 docking bays even without a spaceport, thats enough except the colony produce some luxury that are needed for your other colonies.
A Space port is just like you mention before a shipyard with excented docking bay and defence. Some expierience player just build Star bases without construction bays to prevent the private sector to build ships at the place. At this way you prevent a resource shortage there.

quote:

By the way, The AI of other empire is very good.

Believe me so good isn't the AI but not stupid.
Once you played a few games and got the feeling about the game, you know how to take care about other empires.


< Message edited by Canute -- 1/24/2014 10:34:56 PM >

(in reply to Miithrandir)
Post #: 11
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/27/2014 2:53:31 PM   
ReadeB

 

Posts: 99
Joined: 7/22/2013
Status: offline 		High quality planets are very important. Low quality planets rarely yield decent GDP.

You can use this against the AI by invading their high quality / high GDP colonies and leaving the crappy ones.

Their entire economy will come to a halt. You even see them scraping spaceports and freighters in a desperate attempt to get some funds. Any local pirates will happily steal the few credits they can scrape together.

You can capture these low quality colonies, but then you are stuck spending credits to defend them or watch as pirates start raiding for credits and tech.

(in reply to Canute0)
Post #: 12
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/27/2014 8:51:40 PM   
Spidey


Posts: 411
Joined: 12/8/2013
Status: offline 		Letting the pirates raid the AI players isn't a sound long term solution, though. It gives the pirates too much revenue, which just means bigger hordes of banana fly boats swarming towards your high yield colonies. A better approach, IMO, is whatever implementation of the mantra "kill 'em all" that appeals the most to you at any given time.

(in reply to ReadeB)
Post #: 13
RE: Money problems!!! please help! - 1/28/2014 6:26:23 PM   
ReadeB

 

Posts: 99
Joined: 7/22/2013
Status: offline 		I usually keep a 4 or 5 ship capture fleet running around capturing pirate constructors and blowing up their spawn. I keep one of these per star cluster. This usually keeps the pirates from getting out of hand.

If I could wipe the pirates out completely, I could invade the remaining AI colonies and just abandon them spending nothing on defense.

Usually though, pirates can smell unprotected colonies from a very long way and I end up having to do something to avoid getting raided.

(in reply to Spidey)
Post #: 14
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