I am thinking i could limit colonists to the number of housing  provided to avoid the  problem to encountered , otherwise i suggest to increase your capacity by building additional freighters. 

Hi soulieberlin!

Stellar sovereign economy requires a bit more unconventional approach then other games, first of you should not worry about not having excess money all the time. In the beginning your two best bet is high taxes and selling your resources on the market.

Selling resources is almost equivalent to cheating in my experience. Send your mining fleet to a new system, when it mined around 50% of its current location, the reason is that they mine out the rare resources in the beginning and after that they mostly mine common resources that does not sells well on the market. Later you may want to colonize a planet with high resource yield and sell it on the market each turn.

Regarding population growth, migrate your pioneer population to your second colony that frees up space at your capital. It also helps to pick a government type that lowers the cost of housing development.

About importing food; indeed, you need a trade connection to the colony in order to import goods, but you do not need a trade station at the receiving colony. Use the trade station of your homeworld and establish a trade route with your second solar system, then assign freighters to the route and begin importing from the capital.

Research is indeed expensive at the beginning but there are numerous opportunities to mitigate it over the course of the game, there are technologies, traits, bonuses, events and a treaty that can help you with that. I also suggest to half the research cost at the start when you set up the game.

And you may consider picking the random technologies starting bonus, it gives you 10 random tier 1 technologies.

About research bonus, it starts out small, but can be grown until +999%. Each research station provides +5% and what the system has, as well as +1% after each lab module.

What is a bit unconventional about Stellar Sovereigns economy is that you cannot easily afford all that you have access to, so you must prioritize. I know it is frustrating that the population may protest your hight taxes or that their growth is caped, but you building a new capital vessel so they just have to suck it up. On the other hand, when your shiny new ship is built, you ease up for awhile and develop your colony.

Thanks for your feedback, please provide suggestions, ideas on how to approach balancing the economy and I will do my best to implement.

p.s.: You may enjoy Altron’s series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6hEQ0liDm4

Hi soulieberlin!

Here is a bit of an update that aims to alleviate some of the issues you brought up.

For the next update I added starting resources multiplier options 1x 2x 3x which should help with the early game.

I also removed the cost restriction on colony development, which now allows the player to go into debt when paying for colony development, to solve the issue of unable to pay for needed development. In reality most of governmental developments are based of debt so it is not so farfetched. 

I also added Governor feature to help automate colony development, with options for specialization as well as budgetary constraint that allows the player to stay in control. 

If you have any other ideas just let me know!

You can just not from the shipyard! Buying from the shipyard is a shortcut, the original way was from the fleet menu, just as you do it in the very beginning. My suggestion do not use the shipyard if you want to see the loadout properly but create a new fleet and use the + button which opens the vessel options, there you can see it. I am sorry but it is just not feasible to do it in the shipyard.

No upgrade on the bigger weapons yet :P except torpedoes.

A couple of things I am planning to work on for finding ships easier. 1 maybe indicators at the edge of screen when ships are off screen, 2 icons that you can see even from far like in HW, as well will take a look at getting better contrast for the mini map. 

But it may takes a while when i am getting around to these.

Also forgot to mentioned that I want to give a CTRL+A short cut to select all vessels.

Hello there!

The resource production of a planet grows with your industry, as well as you can find planets with 2 or 3 times yield, browse the planet explorer menu. I am making millions with the resources mined from colonies and selling them off at the exchange every 5-10 turns.

In other games you have not much to do with development of a colony, beside putting down the same building over and over and thinker with pops where you want them to work.

In Stellar Sovereigns I am attempting to model development from a governmental point of view like how the administration provides money to towns to spend on development.

I think the thing gets interesting, when you cannot afford development and have to decide where to cut back and try to stabilize over time.  

The choices I often make are of, at which planet to grow excess food, where to build industry and the logistics of feeding needy colonies.

When it comes to population, I often deal with migrating the pioneer population to new colonies and using political capital to stimulate growth or invest into propaganda.

I often aim at achieving colonial development goals to get that sweet empire point to advance my traits.

Colony development might be a bit dull, but it is only a piece of the pulse.

That said I think it can be improved, so if you have any suggestions, I am all for it, beside throwing the whole thing out.   

Awesome Choleric,

About the Damage multiplier, think of it whether you want engagements to be quicker then increase it or if you want to be slower set it 0.5x.

Have fun and enjoy!