Altarian Economics / Arnor

Now that the Altarians have shown up in Arnor, I've been playing them. Or I should say trying to play them. Because even though I've maxed out their economic bonuses, even though I'm using a party that has additional economic bonuses, even though I've locaded economic resources and done everything I can think of on the research front, I KEEP GOING BROKE. I mean, so broke that even when I hit -500 and the whole empire is doing nothing but trying to make cash, I'm still heading deeper into the hole. So broke that I even if I raise the tax rate to the point where I'm calving off planets every other turn, I'm still losing money. At the same time, I'm getting "our economy is rated at 150." I didn't have this issue with previous versions of the game, and while Arnor was certainly tighter on cash with humans, it was nothing like this.