Eco Mistakes to Avoid

This guide assumes you already have a basic understanding of Stellaris. If you do not, please read Babby's Intro to Eco instead (https://pastebin.com/hwaqpW2U). I'm gonna focus on the common ways you can fuck up your eco and how to avoid them. If I did not go into enough detail or I left something out, let me know on /4xg/. I don't have a life so I am usually around.

An important reminder, the game is much slower as of 2.2 with the intention that you will be spending more focus on economy then killing your neighbors.

1. Bad micro: Early game you can quickly run short on a resource and need more workers collecting it. You probably have more worker jobs available then workers to work them. The solution is to reassign pops to collect the resource you need. If you open a strata and look at the right side of a particular job you will see +/- signs. This allows you to change the maximum number of pops that can work that job, decreasing it beneath the current amount of pops working will cause them to  become unemployed and seek another job. As an example, lets say you have 4 mining jobs and 2 farming jobs, with 3 pops all working mining. If you need more food production, you can decrease the mining job count by 3 and 2 pops will switch over to farming.

Something to keep in mind when moving pops around is that your resource income will not update what your pops are producing until the end of the month. Using the example above, your resource income would still show the same mineral and food income until the end of the month happens when it will update to the correct values.

2. Pop growth: One of the most important things to do in 2.2 is boost your pop growth speed as much as possible. You want as many pops so that you can fill jobs as quickly as possible. There are 3 easy ways to boost it. Under empire policies is an option to increase the food upkeep of your population for an increase in pop growth speed. There is an edict with a base cost of 1k energy that also increases pop growth speed empire wide for 10 years (base time). The last is to spend 1k of food on a planetary decision that increases pop growth speed on that planet. Migration pacts can also allow you to get immigration bonuses to pop growth speed and access to xenos who have nice traits.

3. Specialists: Since pops always want to go up in strata, constructing or upgrading a building that gives specialists will cost you workers. In some cases this can even double fuck you if miners for example become metallurgists, decreasing your income and increasing costs. Be conscious of what your basic resource income is, and make sure to micro your workers to cover any gaps you made. Many players have the habit from previous patches of automatically upgrading all of their buildings when they research an upgrade which you should be self-aware of. While you can still do that on specialized worlds, just be careful you don't accidentally destroy your eco on a balanced planet. It is ok to leave building slots empty if you can not afford to lose workers.

4. Specialize: Planets will give you bonuses to output if the majority of the planet is devoted to the production of a resource. This is usually a +5%, except for rural and urban planets (which give a +2% to all worker/specialist jobs). Early game it is easier to go for balanced worlds, but you should attempt to specialize as soon as your eco has stabilized. To specialize a planet, 50% of the available jobs must be of the same type (i.e. if total of 20 jobs, 10 must be technicians to be a generator world).

5. Use the market: Sometimes you will have a temporary negative income as you are waiting for a pop to fill a job, or you need just a bit more of a particular resource *cough*alloys*cough* to build something. Do not be afraid to buy more of whatever off the marketplace. Feel free to sell excess resources and reinvest them. In particular you will likely have an excess of strategic resources which you can sell to buy other resources. Minerals are another good resource to sell once the galactic market is founded.

6. Stability: Planets have a stability score that is determined by the happiness of the pops and what the crime score of the planet is. A high stability score adds a bonus to resource output on the planet. Stability can be increased by high pop happiness such as from surplus amenities. Lack of amenities or housing, being recently conquered, or high crime can result in a low stability score which will give you a penalty to resource output.

7. Trade: Trade is a valuable source of energy, which you can then use to buy other resources. Make sure that your trade routes are protected or patrolled enough that you don't have to worry about pirates. You will naturally get trade from planets as well as if you have pops working as clerks. People get very upset about whether or not clerks or technicians are better at producing energy but I recommend technicians since those people are just autists. Megacorps rely on trade more then other empire types but I didn't give Paradox any shekels so I don't really know the details.

8. Administration Cap: Ignore this. Many players feel pressured to try to stay at or below their administration cap, but the penalties are are not as sever as the benefits from expanding. While a 2500 research point tech might now become 3000, if you went from +10 physics to +100 physics you will still finish the tech faster. Try to build more research labs and a unity buildings after you have grabbed a few colonies and aren't in hand-to-mouth mode.