What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

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What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by pinback »

My money was in excellent shape. Because I'm a terrible person, I decided to invade a neighboring star system. Once I conquered it, the newly conquered planet showed a deficit of like 34bc PER TURN.

Needless to say, within five turns, I lost due to bankruptcy. Why was the colony losing so much?? What should I have done?

Help?

Thanks!

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Zaimat
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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by Zaimat »

That is a lot of deficit!

If you happened to have a saved game, check the maintenance on the planet. Most of the time high maintenance cost is due to high level buildings, research buildings or orbitals, etc. You might want to destroy any building that is causing you to go bankrupt. You can right-click on buildings to see the maintenance cost.

Another factor is if you there is no food production, in which case a lot of food is imported costing you money. On a very large populated planet that can get costly. Building an agriculture building usually takes care of this.

Also when you take over a planet with a population, for a time morale will be very low (morale affects the population workforce, most people won't feel like working and stay at home or are unhappy to be conquered!). The choices you make after an invasion have different effects.

Hopefully these will help you along if not let us know!
Horizon - Lead Designer | a.k.a. Raf

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by pinback »

I'll try to resurrect the saved game, but it was very early in the proceedings, and I doubt there were any magical buildings that could have possibly cost as much as everything else in my empire times ten.

If you think a bug may be afoot, let me know and I'll send you the save game.

I cancelled/destroyed as many buildings as I could, but there was literally no time to build anything new to offset the outrageous deficit -- the game ended just a few turns after my grand conquest as my treasury plummeted from a healthy profit to -100bc in the blink of an eye.

Love the game, btw, so I'll do anything I can to help out.

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by Lithari »

While this could have been a bug, I don't think your economy was as good as you let on, because a colony cost of 35bc per turn is not enough to screw over an economy is working well.

What I consider working well, is when its getting close to 100bc per turn profit, that way you can handle 1-2 pitfalls, while you sort them out....I have learnt that the profit margin of a colony is the max population, not the planet quality, so maybe the planet's max population was very low, since I learnt that any planet with a low max population (ie. less then a billion) will never become profitable and will be a constant drain on an economy, maybe you could try removing the trade and entertainment buildings of the newly conquered colony and see if that fixes it, but I have never seen a 35bc cost per turn, 5bc sure, but never 35bc....well not per colony anyway.

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by pinback »

Here's the offending planet in question:

http://pinback.moltobenny.com/food-is-expensive.jpg

It is the food situation. 7 billion population, and I have to buy food for all of them. Note that food works out to be about 10bc per MU, which seems prohibitively expensive, at least for this early in a game. You definitely can't take over a planet with too much population until you've established a much more long-game economy.

Maybe that's intentional. Either way, there ya go.

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by Lithari »

pinback wrote:Here's the offending planet in question:

http://pinback.moltobenny.com/food-is-expensive.jpg

It is the food situation. 7 billion population, and I have to buy food for all of them. Note that food works out to be about 10bc per MU, which seems prohibitively expensive, at least for this early in a game. You definitely can't take over a planet with too much population until you've established a much more long-game economy.

Maybe that's intentional. Either way, there ya go.
The solution is to upgrade the listening post, into a colony, then build some food buildings. :) that would really solve the problem.

Not sure how the AI could have gotten it that populated with a listening post.......something the developers need to look into. :)

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by pinback »

Lithari wrote:
pinback wrote:Here's the offending planet in question:

http://pinback.moltobenny.com/food-is-expensive.jpg

It is the food situation. 7 billion population, and I have to buy food for all of them. Note that food works out to be about 10bc per MU, which seems prohibitively expensive, at least for this early in a game. You definitely can't take over a planet with too much population until you've established a much more long-game economy.

Maybe that's intentional. Either way, there ya go.
The solution is to upgrade the listening post, into a colony, then build some food buildings. :) that would really solve the problem.
In this situation, you really can't, because after one or two turns, your treasury is already sapped and you can't build anything.

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by Lithari »

pinback wrote:
Lithari wrote:
pinback wrote:Here's the offending planet in question:

http://pinback.moltobenny.com/food-is-expensive.jpg

It is the food situation. 7 billion population, and I have to buy food for all of them. Note that food works out to be about 10bc per MU, which seems prohibitively expensive, at least for this early in a game. You definitely can't take over a planet with too much population until you've established a much more long-game economy.

Maybe that's intentional. Either way, there ya go.
The solution is to upgrade the listening post, into a colony, then build some food buildings. :) that would really solve the problem.
In this situation, you really can't, because after one or two turns, your treasury is already sapped and you can't build anything.
Yeh, I noticed that after I posted, but I personally don't do anything warlike until my economy sorted, to the point of handling 1-2 problems, if they occur.

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by pinback »

Lithari wrote:Yeh, I noticed that after I posted, but I personally don't do anything warlike until my economy sorted, to the point of handling 1-2 problems, if they occur.
Well, if this situation is working as intended, then your approach appears to be the only feasible one.

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by Lithari »

I am one of those turtle type of players, I like to take my time to get my own infrastructure in a positive situation before moving on, depending on the type of game, its a good thing and a bad thing.

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by Tssha »

The problem with him upgrading the agriculture infrastructure is that no one is tending the fields. They're all on strike, refusing to work, else he wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.

Your workers will join the agriculture field until everyone is fed, then they'll split evenly between industry and science (unless you upgrade unevenly or don't build one or the other). However, since no one is working, that means he has to import food for everyone, since no food is being produced on planet.

So really, building agricultural infrastructure is just going to increase your maintenance costs. :)


It's like playing Thermonuclear War. The only way to win in this scenario is not to play. :wink: Or not to invade, in this instance, until he can afford a -34b credit drain per turn for 20 turns.




It's also possible he bombed the Capital into rubble, or demolished it, so that he wouldn't have to pay the costs. That'd be why everything is level 0. But really, at this point, unless you're demolishing the Pleasure Domes it's not gonna help much.

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by Madbiologist »

It's more like the old adage in economics, it takes money to make money. You need to invest and your colonies will effectively drain your resources, but you hope they eventually turn a profit and your economy grows in the long run. In the early game Earth is the bank, 'giving out loans' to get colonies started.

So the trick a positive balance. Maintenance cost needs to be less than revnue stream. Then you make sure anything you build won't upset this balance, and then spend the money to have it happen. This improves your colony. Now there is more than one field to improve, but field you need to always consider is 'making more money'. Since more money gives more money to do more with (including making more money later). So the other thing is to have a strong revenue stream, not just break even. Since you will need money to expand, breaking even means you are not expanding.

There are sectors that only drain money, but you need them for other things (so this is where you can cut costs but it will cost you in the long run). Science is cost to no immediate profit, but science does increase your tech which can increase your finance. So in the long long run, killing science will hurt you (but if you need the cash now... it is a place to look). Then there is the military, military spending is all cost and no profit. But if you can be invaded then all the profits in the world won't save you. But down scaling the military is also an option if bankruptcy is inevitable.

Cutting costs of colony structures that are not giving you benefits (especially none profitable benefits) is also a place to kill your expenses. A low pop world will have really bad income, and bad science, so trade centers and entertainment centers will operate at a loss, science centers might cost too much for too little, and even industry won't be productive for money. If you don't need your workforce for ind or science, then they can be farmers, so then you only need enough agri structure to not be importing food (import of food is super pricey). Once, you have a surplus, you can consider getting them to work elsewhere. Also poor worlds will always suck at industry, even at high pop. In the end you build structures that either makes you save money or get more money, and once you are swimming in money (or the world is self-sufficient) then you start on costly imperial contribution infrastructures (like science and military complexes).

It is all about investing into the future without breaking the bank.

I am just realising how deep the economic and colony management system really is. Also it scares me I didn't notice this sooner and intuitively figured out what to do....

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by pinback »

An excellent and insightful reply. It just feels weird that you can't afford to conquer a star system that early in the game.

Probably realistic. I'll give the nod to L3O on this one. :)

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by Lerinor »

Things will most likely change, since game is still in alpha state. I found the economy to be quite broken in the long run. If you do things well in the beginning, after a while, you'll reach a point where money isn't an issue, and will never be. Some technologies give stupidly huge bonuses, from industry bonuses, to workforce increase. I had quite a few colonies generating 40 bc each! Got to a point where credits just couldn't be spent fast enough, not even if i built starbases and shipyards everywhere, and not even having a LOT of ships (believe me, i built it, for testing purposes...)

So lets just hope balance is tweaked, but even so, this games looks really promising! Really liked what i've seen so far.

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by EisenHammer »

I think the game should give you a choice to enslave or starve a conquer planet. Instead of just paying to deliver free food to them. I haven't conquer a planet in my game yet so I don't know what choices you get after you takeover a planet. but instead of having my empire going bankrupt I think I would rather enslave or starve them.

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by Madbiologist »

You can assimilate and subjugate planets (but you need to feed slaves too, not feeding them doesn't make them slaves anymore... it makes them victims of genocide... which leads to the last option), and you can do more than just starve them...

Exterminate, and you use bio-weapons (tech) to speed up the process. The game doesn't sugar coat it. It will read, "Under Occupation (Committing Genocide)".

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Re: What happened? (re: bankruptcy)...

Post by EisenHammer »

Nice... :twisted: