I build cities and get consumer goods from my clerks. Plus lots of factories for alloys or research labs.
Balancing your economy is... a terrible idea?
- Thread starter Nussor
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You may have missed my point.
The point is that the market is in flux. Any lopsided strategy which relies on the market for balance is resting on a very unstable foundation. I prefer to try to play as intended rather than finding quirky shortcuts that I know will disappear soon enough.
Have you tried a genocidal civic? They keep the internal market for the entire game and even if you avoid exploiting it prices seem to reset to the base prices pretty fast if you unpause.
I am not the one having trouble with it. I have no trouble with the economy at all. I am not trying to mimic the OP's single product economy. I am instead advising others to not be so lazy when I am certain upcoming changes will invalidate that approach.
One of the design goals for the new economy was that you would be able to specialize your economy however.
Sounds like your fleet was the reason for your budget issues
For me it's leaders. I have a dyson sphere paying my admirals and governors.
Governors do not seem like a worthwhile investment after 2.2 if you are playing wide. Maybe a few for key sectors but not more.
I more or less stopped using admirals after 2.0 because the different STL bonuses they give split my fleetstacks which was suicide against an early 5x crisis and just increased avoidable micro. At best I set all fleets to follow the slowest fleet...
I did give up on governors in my sectors without research worlds eventually. I also kept a 'toolset' - a governor for reducing crime, another for clearing blockers, etc.
The power boost from an admiral is still pretty significant, and you can always relegate the STL boost admirals to your rapid response fleet(s).
The power boost from an admiral is still pretty significant, and you can always relegate the STL boost admirals to your rapid response fleet(s).
I keep a tile blocker governor around too and a trade value one if I have a sector with a lot of trade.
I tend to have one or two admirals for rapid response fleets. It might be worthwhile in 2.2 again to hire more because fleets are more difficult to build now(unless you abuse certain exploits).
I used to field at least a dozen max. size fleets against crisis forces and losing ships was pretty much irrelevant at that point. Losing entire fleets because of different movement speeds was much more of a problem.
Arguably a single or limited focus economy is more realistic; most countries focus on a specific set of exports and import the rest. Comparative advantage is a real thing, and focused economies should be more effective, particularly if they're not genocidal or radically xenophobic.
I personally think it's too easy to balance your economy at the moment and if anything you should rely on the market more. Autarkies should be the exception, not the rule, particularly as you head into the midgame and the diplomatic landscape opens up.
Rather contrary to the title of this post, if you do manage balancing your economy ('rare' resources excepted) you end up with a ridiculous amount of oversupply. No exploits needed, unless you consider alloy foundries themselves to be exploits.
I used to play 5x crisis 2250 endgame date games if I felt like min/maxing as much as I can. I can't see a way to win this now(with habitable planets and research speed at the base 1x) even if I abuse purging. With the normal endgame date a 5x crisis was not too difficult in RP games with a little bit of planet min/maxing too but now it seems pretty difficult to pull off. Time will tell but I ran into the good old bug that causes a species to purge itself in the two 2.2 in which I got close to the endgame date.
The only time balanced economies bite me in the ass is when I conquer a planet from the AI, and it drives me straight into the red. Otherwise, it's a good way to make sure the seemingly random fluctuations of various incomes don't mess you up hard.
For 1-planet sectors, or for a couple planets with low development/pop, yeah they aren't very effective.
When I read through this thread I see descriptions of a variety of economic strategies that are effective. With effective being in the eye of the player/poster. To me, this sounds like success for the devs stated goals. There are multiple ways to construct your economy.
That seems fair. It is completely possible to have a fully balanced economy, even if you do go super wide. It is also possible to get a little extra productivity per unit of population/planet if you specialize alloy and trade. But yeah, many different playstyles are viable.
I will say that in my opinion, civilian industries are not worth building. I wrote a long mathy post about topic a while ago. Basically they convert mats into goods worth less than the mats, while requiring that you give up the valuable +15% bonus from militarized economy. Maybe devs should give the civilian industries a bit of a buff to make mixed economy viable.
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I currently have a medium sized empire and I have no issue with energy, mineral, food, or consumer goods. I do have issue with alloys though. I still try to play a balance economy with no resources in the negatives. What I still have difficulty understanding is how economic score is calculated?
I think that market should ot be infinite. There should be some ampunt of goods inside at the start of the game, but each time someone buys something it dissapear, and someone sells something it goes to market stockpile... but its only my thought.
Wait..... isn't research faster now? I'm comfortably out-teching my earlier games.
For that matter, I'm getting to my effective fleet cap as fast as I ever did, if not faster. OTOH, I've never played a style where I take enough worlds to make a 5x crisis fun to deal with, so I don't know if my approach scales.
Or is it just that you can't abuse the current system as much as you could abuse the old one?
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I found research not that relevant in the early game in previous versions(since the patch which made colony ships a starting tech) and this version does not seem that different.
In a 1.9.1 game in which I researched no weapon techs at all and only used what I got from debris I defeated a 5x contingency with UV laser battleships with tier 3 shields.
Before 2.2 once I got my economy going I still had more than enough time for the necessary research. I got end game level weapon techs from the FEs though and ignored weapon research most of the time.
I usually exceeded my fleet cap by at least 200 % and hit 1000k fleet strength around 2300 which is the time a crisis can spawn with 2250 endgame date although I tends to spawn a bit later.
I did not really abuse anything apart from blobbing as fast as possible with a total war civic, bypassing most weapon and module research by reverse engineering and bypassing the early colony phase by resettling pops.