I Could use some as well. I just got the game a couple of days ago and have been very frustrated at the lack of help in the manual as well as on-line. You have made it further than I have so maybe you know the answer to this question; "how do you upgrade your ships?" I have learned all kinds of new features yet every time I click on a ship and press upgrade nothing is ever available to be used to upgrade my ships. Any help from you or anyone else reading this would be very helpful.

YOU'RE SCREWED   It should begin to level out but if it is a must lower your spending Its not the bes thing to do but sometimes its the only answer. I think everyone has been there. GOOD LUCK  

WeezyF:

One other thing to do (though prior to getting into war) is to increase your techs towards "markets" and "stock markets" to put on your planets. They help increase your internal money flow, and your trade money as well. Generally why it's best to wait on war to build up your econ base first (unless forced into it).

Ankhman:

As WeezyF showed you, you have to chose from available ships to upgrade to. Though, if you do not upgrade the components on your ships all you can do it upgrade (change) the ship type. You first have to go into the ship designer and plug in all the newer components and give each ship a different name or an update name (ie. Mk 2, Mk 3, etc.) Then you can go to the upgrade screen and chose the newer ship version to change to without changing the ship type. Using the ship designer just for component changes is real easy. You first select the ship you want to change components on then hit the "upgrade" tab and the bottom of the screen. The ship layout (base and jewelry) will remain the same. All you do then is add the components and save it under a new name (as mentioned above). Give this a try and see what you get.

For some reason I keep getting these ships called "Lucky Ranger" And they pretty much dominate everything i've gone up against, so I would say I'm winning. The ships that the guys im fighting seem to have more weapons. Anyways, I built more freighters and sent them to planets as far away from the fighting as possible, I cancelled some of the stuff i was producing in my planet and an event occured that increased tax revenue, so now im out of debt. Thanks for the help!

I usually give large morale bonuses to my civs at the setup phase of the game. That way you can tax the crap out of your lower population colonies without them even going below 100%. This has the dual bonus of getting you more income with those currently unprofitable colonies as well as have them grow at an exponential rate (since population growth correlates to morale). The added growth ofc results in a larger tax base, so its sort of like a vicious cycle (in your favor )

Xeno Farming is also a must if you want even more people to tax.

That way you can have a freer hand just splurging out colony ships. I've very rarely had income below negative 100 bc, and those instances never lasted more than a few turns. By midgame you should be churning out a healthy profit each turn and have morale between 70-80%, at a 45-50% tax rate and 100% production rate.