I will say, since the nerfed power plants, I have not had a problem with late-game money; and let me tell you, I don't build markets at all, and I only build morale structures on the approval bonus squares.

But I remember playing Thalans in the beta. They used to pay full price for industrial sectors, and they paid for them immediately. Plus you stacked the un-nerfed power plants on top of all those industrial sectors. They just drank money. What Stardock's done since then is nerf Thalans, so they paid 25% price for factories and don't build immediately--which is okay--and they severely nerfed power plants--which I think was a bit too much. What they did was curb industrial output. The ceiling on late-game money is still there. Plus you've got this 20k treasury limit or you start taking penalties...uh, why??? How is it unbalancing to have money that just sits there? Sure, there are MUCH higher priorities in 1.50X right now, but I do think it's fair to say that late-game economy is somewhat neglected. And I'm okay with that if it means the FoW bug, defense, and tech trading get fixed.

Based on what you just said, I think your money issues are in how much population you're loading into the colony ships. I know what happens: you've got some small-pop world that has manufacturing bonus squares, and they crank out the colony ships. But you can't populate them. Or the planet's location is sweet, right on the frontier, but it has no population. So now you're stuck with all these 40-million pop planets you just colony rushed.

You need to rape your home world for population. Try to get it all the way down to 2.5B. Spread it as evenly as you can. Some maps are harder than others, but if you can pull off some ferrying, that should help the sporadic money problems.

As far as those money planets, some people swear by them. I don't. The best way to balance your short-term budget is just not to build anything. If they're not doing anything strategically significant at the moment, just turn them off and let them grow. Then turn them on as your budget allows. A lot of people do these money planets with the idea that a little short-term hit to your budget will pay off big dividends later. But you don't NEED the big dividends later. You need the money NOW.

I think there are plenty of ways to jack up your economy as it is. On BR, Iztok's list he didn't mention farms - population increases taxes (as long as you don't go overboard) and when that's multiplied you gain a lot more BC.

The only thing I think is really wacky about econ is the whole "money world" thing. I usually need a lot of them once the war machine gets rolling. Just how many worlds full of nothing but stock markets can galactic business really sustain!

I had forgotten about those as well.

I suppose the mechanics are there (do manufacturing multiplier tiles multiply manufacturing capitals' output?) and it could be implemented then.

Well, my argument against econ tiles has been defused. Good luck with the programmers. (And if you can find out about that manufacturing capital question of mine I'd appreciate it. Thanks.