Finacial centres v. expand civilian economy

[sighahnyde (OP)]

Quick question  :

Which is more effective for the early game racial income, researching expand civilian economy 20% or building financial centers? Also, what exactly does that 20% affect; tax rates? racial income? or does it affect a more discrete statistic?

[Iranon]

I believe the tech affects all kinds of income.
Personally, I tend to focus on population-limited economy techs (construction, research, civilian economy); things that will eventually be mostly unmanned will have lower priority unless they are currently a limit. I don't care much for fuel because I take care of that on the demand side.

Because I strive to be limited by population and because they are very inflexible (can't be transported), financial centers are under consideration only when my economy is overstretched.

[Father Tim]

Expand Civilian Economy 20% will always give vastly better returns than building Financial Centres.  The drawback is that it requires research points, which are always in short supply.

And it's 20% of income.  It's a huge amount.

[Jovus]

I never build financial centres. You get better return on your resources from building more infrastructure and settling new bodies. Financial centres are just far too expensive for their return.

[TT]

The place for financial centers (for me at least) is on colonies that I've built specifically to add to my wealth, but do not have much in the way of resources. For instance, Mars or the moon when they are devoid of resources. You need the colonies to get trade started but the colonies aren't going to add to the mineral weath of your empire. Give them a wealth talented govenor, a small number of building centers, a cache of resources and let them build financial centers. Their growing population will man the centers and that colony will help pay for your research.

[Michael Sandy]

Expand civilian economy has the benefit of increasing how much infrastructure civilians generate.  Once you have infrastructure on another body that can support 1 million pop, civilian ships start being generated.  This generates a lot of wealth.  Once that colony exceeds 25 million, you can switch the supply and demand of colonists so you are paid for colonist arriving and leaving a colony world.

This can generate ridiculous amounts of wealth, at the expense of creating a lot of civilian ships which will slow the game CPU down.