I'm in a bit of a pickle.
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[absolutely delicious grand strategy history and outlook]
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I need more of everything - more ordinance factories, more mines, more infrastructure, more fuel harvesters - but for the foreseeable future, up to a year straight, I can do nothing but build finance centers.
I love it. Situations like these are what make Aurora so compelling. Keep us updated!
My one bit of advice about wealth won't do you much good right now, because it takes many, many years to pay off. It is this:
The best way to grow income over the long term is to expand your shipyards.
Why? Three reasons.
First, adding slipways or capacity to a shipyard adds more jobs per cost than building installations (except for financial centers).
Most installations add 50k jobs for a cost of 120 (or an equal multiple of those).
For the same cost, adding capacity to a shipyard gives 125k jobs.
(Financial centers, of course, are better still: they provide 50k jobs plus a 500% bonus.)
Second, it doesn't require industrial capacity.
While your factories are building financial centers, they aren't build anything else.
But expanding your shipyards leaves your factories free to build things that let you increase your impact on the galaxy.
Third, it is easier to specialize a planet for wealth creation with shipyards than with financial centers.
A wealth creation provides optimal output by using all of its workers to make money.
That means you have to build the financial centers somewhere else and haul them in.
That costs fuel and shipping capacity, and delays the return on your investment while the fincens are in transit.
But shipyards expand themselves. You tug one shipyard to the planet one time, and set it to continual capacity expansion. The bigger it gets, the faster it grows.
You only need to provide Duranium and Neutronium, and you need far less fuel and hauling capacity for this than for hauling installations around. Or you can just do it with mass drivers.
If you need to grow wealth even faster, you need to bring in another yard.
Increasing your wealth growth rate is occasionally necessary, but be aware that the cost of the new yard is steep: 2400 for 250kjobs--that's 10x the cost of adding that many jobs via expanding an existing yard.
Financial centers have two relative advantages over using yards:
1) More bang for your buck, obviously. 50k workers plus the tax equivalent of 250k workers is a 500% bonus over the normal rate. Expanding a yard provides just a 150% bonus on jobs per build cost. And expanding a yard doesn't give you more money per worker, just more money per build cost. If you are constrained by available workers, then fincens might be a better choice.
2) Shipyards require Duranium and Neutronium, which have many other uses (Neutronium is in construction factories, Duranium is in almost everything). Fincens require only Corbomite, which doesn't have any other significant uses. You probably have plenty of Corbomite lying around, but having a surplus of Duranium is unusual.
EDIT: Corrected the above point to reflect that Fincens use only Corbomite (not Corbomite and Duranium)
