DW Economy Guide

A Distant Worlds guide to L O A D S A M O N E Y

The economy in DW is made of 2 separate, but linked parts: The private sector which is entirely automated, and the State which is basically you.

The private sector being automated and entirely "hands off" is where many players find themselves somewhat confused, but the vast majority of your money comes from it.
The first and biggest part of the private sector is planets. Or specifically colonies.
While a colony is techically owned by the state, it's population ~is~ the private sector and pays taxes to you based on the following things:
-	the tax rate you set
-	the quality of the planet
-	the size of the population
-	the availability of various resources at that colony

Taxes are a steady if small source of income throughout the game.
The amount of tax you can draw from a planet depends upon it's happiness - greater happiness = higher possible tax rate.
You can see this by raising or lowering the tax on a planet and watching the happiness. More tax = less happiness. Generally you want to set the taxes as high as they go while still maintaining a good positive level of happiness.
There is however a reason you might want to set lower, or even zero taxes.
As the happiness of a colony directly affects it's growth rate, so for maximum growth you want zero taxes. This allows you to race to the front of the pack and give yourself a huge headstart on the AI players in the early game at the cost of possible money shortages and crippled expansion.
It's a gamble, but to be fair it usually pays off.
Tax income also increases as a colony's development level does - higher development = more income from taxes.
Taxes are taken out of the private sector funds and added to your state balance.

The quality of a planet acts as a cap, both for possible income and maximum population.
Further detail:	https://pastebin.com/jsDmVYZQ
Generally you want the highest quality planets for bigger populations, and more money.

The resources a colony has access to is where the private sector makes most of it's money.
There are 3 types of resource:
-	Strategic (things you build stuff with or burn for fuel)
-	Luxury (things which make your population happy)
-	Super Luxury (rare things which make your population really happy)

Strategic resources are needed by all colonies to build thier infrastructure, or "development". Without them growth will be almost non-existant and happiness will take a huge hit because nothing works.
None of these resources are particularly valuable, but the volume required by colonies makes them an okay source of income.
Occaisonally a non-hostile xenos empire will buy these basic goods from you.

Luxury resources exist only as a money making device. Treat them like pokemon - get as many different types by any means your are comfortable with.
As your colonies get luxury goods made available to them they will get a boost to happiness meaning you can tax that planet harder, but also since luxuries are quite expensive they will produce a fair chunk of money just for passing through your ports.
The more different types of luxury resource available on any planet, the greater the effect they all have.
Luxury goods will also make up the vast majority of your trade with other empires, who will send frieghters quite some distance to acquire goods they lack.

Super luxuries are like the proverbial golden goose. There are 3 of them in the game and there might be one, ~maybe~ two sources of each in the entire galaxy.
They are:
Zentabia Fluid (Volcanic worlds)
Korrabian Spice (Desert worlds)
Loros Fruit (Marsh worlds)

All of them not only give you extra happiness (and tax), but have a huge price tag so will generate a lot of port income, and ALSO will boost the development of your colonies by up to 30% so long as they have access to it.
Yes, this means that if you can control all three you can nearly double the development level of all your colonies.
These things are a pretty big deal, and are good reason to plant a colony on a bad quality world.
Other empires will send transports as far as thier fuel and engines will allow to buy these from you, and will pay huge sums for the priveledge.
These resources are a special case for diplomacy too given thier huge positive effects.
You can deny trading super luxuries on an empire-by-empire basis in the diplomacy screen. However doing so gives a negative modifier to relations.
Conversely, allowing trade gives a positive modifier.

Regardless of type, every shipment of goods that passes through one of your spaceports will generate income for you based on the value  and amount of the goods in transit.
The in game values can change depending on availability and can be viewed in the expansion planner screen.
The amounts can be viewed (if you care) by selecting a frieghter and double clicking it's info panel at the bottom left - the one with the ship portrait, and then selecting the cargo tab.

All these resources come from somewhere, right? And that somewhere is mining stations (and mining ships, but they're entirely automated so you don't really need to worry about them).
Your primary role for most of the game is to locate, secure, and extract resources to feed your empire.
One of the first things you should do is make sure you build mining stations on all the sources of fuel in and around your empire. Not only do your ships need it to do things, but your colonies need it to grow.
Also, doing this denies those sources to other empires and pirates and allows your exploration to reach further and your ships to patrol more territory.

Making sure you access to all types of strategic resource is important for building anything, but this will frequently be the hardest task as there are 3 resources which can be a pain to find if the RNG gods decide to mess with you.
-	Chromium. Found on continental and marsh worlds, used for energy collectors and torpedoes.
-	Carbon Fibre. Found only on marsh worlds, used for engines and armour.
-	Polymer. Found on continental, ocean and marsh worlds. Used for engines and support systems.
As you can see, marsh worlds are kind of important. And any you come accross within your expansion range should be locked down asap.
But all three of these resources are the most likely bottlenecks you will find.
Next, make sure you drop mining stations on any sources of luxury resources you find. You don't need them all, but it never hurts to have multiple sources of anything.
It also never hurts to deny other empires the ability to mine things, either to stall their development or force them to buy it from you.

Use the expansion planner to find these sources by selecting the "resources by galaxy priority" dropdown. And don't be afraid to strike out from your borders to secure something you need.
And last of all if this seems like too much of a chore and not fun, you can automate this process on a ship-by-ship basis by selecting a construction ship and selecting "automate" at the bottom right corner of the info panel. (Looks like a blue circular arrow.)
This will allow that ship to pick it's own destinations for mining stations, and it does an okay job of doing so. You might find the AI is willing to drop stations far, far outside your ability to protect them though. How much this bothers you, if at all, is your call.

Mining stations are a special case, in that they can be paid for out of the private treasury if you don't have any money yourself.
They are the only things you can build that behave this way so you always have a safety net to recover from debt.
To do so you need to select the planet/moon/rock where you want the mining station, and select the build mine button at the bottom of the info panel. You cannot right-click to "build at" when you have no money.

Ports are also vitally important as they are the only place the private sector can build ships. Every single frieghter and mining ship is owned and run by civilians, but most importantly they paid money to have that ship built. Money which goes straight into the starport funds, which itself goes into your pocket.
The more ships the civvies build, the more money you get. This also applies to retrofitting, they pay you to update thier ships.
This can be used as a temporary crutch to generate money, by re-designing a frieghter and waiting for the AI to upgrade them. It's not 100% reliable, and can eventually bankrupt the private sector, but it can give you a helping hand if you need it.
Every colonised system should have 1 port just to act as a local stockpile and refuelling point. A port over every colony allows you to get happiness bonuses from medical and recreation facilities on the port, providing you design it with those components (which you should).

Resorts are the last part of the economy.
They require:
-	A specially designed station
-	A physical location with a scenery bonus
-	A nearby source of population greater than 1500M
-	At least one available passenger transport ship
- 	A positive cash balance

First off you need to design a resort base. It can be as bare bones as you like or a floating fortress, so long as it meets the design requirements it will work.
Each passenger compartment on the base can hold 200k tourists, and can be further upgraded by research.

Passenger transport ships only need a single compartment to fully service a resort base, as the maximum number of tourists they can carry per resort run is 20k.

Next you need to use a constructor ship to build a resort base somewhere with a scenery bonus.
This can be:
-	A gas giant
-	A planet or moon with any ruin
-	A planet or moon with either a canyon feature or rings
-	A gold or crystalline asteroid
-	A Neutron star
-	A Black Hole
Several of these locations will also have valuable resources, so it might be worth considering the addition of mining equipment to your resort base. Even if you don't there is nothing stopping you from building a mining base there as well.

Once your resort base is up an running it will await for it's customers to be delivered from "nearby" population centres.
Nearby in this case depends on the engines and fuel cells fitted to your passenger ships - lower tech = shorter range.
This can be expanded slightly by adding more fuel cells to your passenger ships.
However, a colony will not start releasing population to become tourists until it passes 1500M. So for a while your homeworld will be the only source for tourists.
The closest bases to source planets fill up first, then the ones further out. Priority is given to bases at high value scenery locations given equal travel time, but generally distance is more important than scenery value.

Another thing to consider is that is doesn't have to be population from your empire that fills up a resort.
If you build one near another empire, both your and thier passenger ships will deliver tourists from whatever colonies are nearby, regardless of who they belong to.
And for every ship full of tourists that lands on the station, you get paid.

Once all these things have been done is when things get a bit fruity.
Resort bases act as a population sink. People go in, but they never leave.
And most confusingly the tourists only pay you once when they first enter the resort, NOT continually as you might logically expect.
Once a base fills up it will not make any more money, but will still cost upkeep.
This can be worked around by either:
-	Scrapping the base and rebuilding it
-	Re-designing then retrofitting the base to have more passenger compartments

Think of resort bases as soylent green factories.
Population goes in, money comes out.

Resort bases need passenger modules to function.
At the start of the game, each module can carry 1.2M people.
But tourist ships can only carry 20K people, no matter how big they are.
1.2M / 20K = 60
A single passenger bay on a resort base can service 60 tourist ships.
When you build your first resorts in the early game, you don't need to put any more than a single bay on them.
This makes it much easier to fit a useful design into the small size limts. The bases can always be expanded later, and you're saving money by not paying upkeep on empty modules.

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