2.2 Economy works only with economy edicts

[Less2]

We really need more information on the OP's build vs. his friend. Races are absolutely not created equal now. If you, not fully understanding how everything comes together economically, stumble into an awful choice like Egalitarian and enabled Social Welfare/Utopian Abundance (especially without robots), you've basically shot yourself in the foot except it took you several decades to find out. Stuff like this pushes your support costs into the stratosphere and arguably does make edicts mandatory. On the other hand if your friend started with a Syncretic race whose workers produce +35% resources and have 1/3rd the support cost of your workers (not an exaggeration, it can be this high), they are going to pull way ahead regardless of skill.

The post also implies intentionally suppressing clerks, so my provisional diagnosis is that they shot their own foot by undervaluing trade & amenities, which would drive higher than normal technician employment and impose generally inferior productivity for all pops.

Ignoring Clerks is fine. Clerks are not very productive pops. If on low habitability worlds (and/or using poor policies like shared burden) they are likely to cost more in maintaining than they produce.

What you do need though is amenities, either from entertainers (best early on) or domestic servants (best late game). Ideally you want to just meet your amenity needs, not going significantly over (wasteful for minor bonuses) or below (awful penalties).

 

[AlanC9]

And some setups won't need to worry about amenities at all. The stock UNE, for instance, shouldn't ever need entertainers.

 

[evilcat]

If you know what you are doing you can balance your economy without edicts. However running edicts 100% time is even better, since this is 20% better over already balanced economy.

If you have mid game economy crisis this a couple of tips:

• Change your reasearch labs and monuments into something else. Dont really build them. Same with gene clinics. Entertainers buildings are fine (most ametites for the minerals)
• If you are at war just change research labs and civic factories into alloys.
  
• Planetary forts are starbase you pay with minerals instead alloys.
  
• If you are at war or plan to use Militarized economy policy. And build pleanty of alloys.
  
• You can control planet type after colonization with first building or building 3 districts of the type.
  
• You can use standard food policy, or even rationalisation. Especially after conquering enemy when you need food to fix stability issues.
  
• You can change species living standards to lower.
  
• Alloys, rare resources generally sell well on the market. Even better late game.
  
• Civics like: Mining Guilds, Enviromentalist, Functional Architecture could help your economy.
  
• Species with conservationist or other housing reduction are universality good.
  
• Robots take 15 years before they pay off.
  
• Some very top tier buildings like research complex it is just better to temporary swich off and keep unemployed for a while.
  
• IF you dont conquere galaxy in 100 years you will gradually collect all techs giving bonus to minerals. Tradition are another techs but without randomness.
  
• You can conquere enemy as tribute. They will be useless but having 50energy and 20m early on as total bonus is always good.

It is hard to run military war machine and peaceful growth at the same time. Pick one or another and just go for it.
Generally if you can run edicts all the time, that is good. If you can take executive vigor or even cuthroat politics that is good start.
But in the same time having bad economy is the choice you made.