Welcome back! Today I will be explaining the economy system, how it works, and how it interacts with other gameplay systems to make the game more fun and interesting. [h2]Money[/h2] To start off, the main resource the economy employs is money, used primarily for economic development and military expansion, which as a result become mutually exclusive. Your population works to produce resources and you can take some of those resources for yourself as currency through taxes, however taxes reduce the loyalty of your factions, so you only can tax so much before you encounter stability issues. Therefore the best way to enrich yourself is to increase the GDP of your country, so that you can tax more with a smaller tax rate. [h2]Deposit Resources[/h2] Resources which are quantities that provide modifiers to your entire country, as well as money. Resources are very important for increasing your development, which takes a long time but provides lucrative rewards in the form of a multiplier to all tax revenue, which, at least for high population countries like those based on Earth, will be the majority of your economy. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43760976/2bf1602c60e3fc79b4b689eb47d315463092d465.png[/img] [i]Low energy costs make happy people[/i] Resources can be generated by any country, so smaller countries benefit far more from optimizing their resource production than larger ones, as the income from resources is population independent, and furthermore, you can sell your resources to larger nations for [b]huge[/b] monetary rewards. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43760976/391206f5d1591e2925a3cdb06b11633137c8055e.png[/img] [i]Washington produces a lot of energy from petrochemicals, but is not a great region to build ships in due to being earth bound. Earth has one of the worst Delta-V requirements to launch spaceships from in the solar system, beat out only by Venus and the gas giants.[/i] [h2]Projects[/h2] In order to empower your economy, you must build [b]Projects [/b]which, in most cases, use resources to produce more resources or improve your development. Projects are quite expensive and are able to grant massive bonuses to production provided you have the resource access required to obtain them. But beware, as each region can only sustain so many projects, expandable by technology, so you must choose which ones to build and which to save for later. In addition, projects can provide bonuses which stack on each other, so balancing specialization with breadth of options is key to economic dominance. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43760976/4567bab7cd6b64ecfcc81a8144d5ad0a195a6a11.png[/img] [i]You only have so many projects you can build, so choose wisely! Robots provide many bonuses, but require a lot of infrastructure to build properly.[/i] [h2]Conclusions[/h2] The essential thing to remember about your economy is that it is a means to an end, and not the end in and of itself. The object of the game is not necessarily to be the strongest, but to bring your ideology to victory by achieving dominance of the Solar System, which will be discussed next time in [b]Diplomacy and Victory.[/b]