If this derails, apologies and please move, but as a new player I'm curious about misanthrope's (and others) thoughts as to why the FC 's suck. And what info or data points you use to judge when you can lay off the FC builds and rely on the growing trade economy solely?
Do FC's suck in relation to the other alternative being 'free' of needing minerals or pop once trade gets big enough? Is it because they take a long time to pay off the investment cost? As FC are presented as the only real option for Wealth when starting, I haven't really explored how good they are since it's the only option I have control of directly. My playstyle is heavily into colonies, so I am very interested in learning break even points of when I can expect the Trade economy to really take over.
FCs require you to invest always-scarce factories (and minerals) to build and do not scale at all - there is not even a tech to improve their output as far as I know (Wealth Generation affects worker taxes only). Every other persistent source of wealth income scales with your empire to some degree, whether worker taxes which increase as you have more population and installations, or the various trade and CMC taxes that increase as you expand your colonies and CMCs over time. These other methods of gaining wealth also come as side effects from doing things you would be doing anyways - building, expanding, colonizing, and so on. Only FCs really require a dedicated investment in wealth.
Usually since you start with a bunch of FCs it can make sense to move them offworld, for example Luna or Mars can be good places to dump your FCs and put a wealth-skill governor if they have no useful mineral deposits since you want to colonize them anyways to stimulate civilian shipping and trade. I might also put a few factories on such a planet along with a stock of corbomite and have them slowly build FCs just to give the population something to do (and to find something to do with that worthless corbomite...), but otherwise it's not worth investing in when you could be building mines, factories, shipyards, etc.
Brings up another question I've had forever....How much Wealth is enough? I know it will change based on Empire size, but is there a standard number or ratio you like to keep as reserve? I know it's the rate of change I need to keep an eagle eye on, but in general do you try to keep your Wealth maxed or 100-200k? With the way building is not immediate in Aurora, I worry less about large immediate costs upsetting my treasury as builds are spread out and use the rate of change as my main barometer.
You want to break even with enough of a reserve to cover any emergency spending. As long as you are not going negative for any long period of time it will be fine, but maintaining that balance takes consistent attention and adjustments (usually in the form of canceling or delaying construction projects). There's no real need for a target reserve but I would say trying to keep it in roughly the same ballpark as your annual income/expenses numbers is a good idea.
