Losing money due to corruption

**Gmith** · July 11, 2012, 09:01 AM

Hello

I encountered this uhh.. interesting thing while playing Stainless Steel. In short, I had a lot of income at one point, suddenly out of nowhere, I started making massive losses.

Here's how it went: I was making money pretty decently at one point, about 10k per turn, then suddenly I started making something like 38k per turn out of nowhere. I wasn't on a crusade with a bunch of armies, doge didn't change and basically nothing special was going on or happened. I just started making a lot of money suddenly.

I figured I'd make new units with all the spare money I had and so I did. I made tons of new units and built stuff and then I was making about 10k per turn again for a while, but all of a sudden after about 10 turns of pretty consistent income, I started LOSING 38k per turn. I didn't do anything and besides a few wars I was involved in, nothing special happened. I started looking in to this thing and using "add_money" in the console because I didn't want this save game to get borked because of this. Anyhow, here's a picture of the financial overview. I noticed that corruption is causing insane expenditures and it seems to be way to high at least for what I'm used to. I dunno if that seems like a normal corruption for a country of that size, but I think corruption clitched somehow and dropped drastically at one point and then increased back to "normal" or something like that.

Has this happened to anyone else here and what can I do to fix this?

I'm pretty bummed out because I'd have to disband like half of my armies and I'd become even weaker than England, which has maybe 1/3 the provinces I have.

**CloacaMaXima** · July 11, 2012, 09:07 AM

That's odd... I suppose you don't have BGR? That could cause massive expenses, especially with recruiting new units, but then again, I don't think the additional income/expenses from BGR are displayed in the financial window...

**Gmith** · July 11, 2012, 09:14 AM

I don't use merchants because I hate micromanaging them and they almost always end up going bankcrupt because of the AI merchants who seem to automagically be better than mine. My capital is Rome, which I think is about in the middle, but it didn't do much when I changed the capital and I did build a lot of law buildings when I had that huge influx of money.

Oh, and I don't have BGR

**PapaRosario** · July 11, 2012, 09:10 AM

Why don't you use merchants? Such good free income. That's one way you can start offsetting your corruption. In order to actually reduce corruption, move your capital to the center of your empire if it's not already there. Also, build as many law buildings as you can, especially on the edges of your empire.

**Navajo Joe** · July 11, 2012, 10:26 AM

In this turn you have spent 84% of your income on the army and its recruitment, you are living beyond your means. You need to look at your armies, consider whether you need them and make sure that in quiet areas that the garrison is no more than free up keep allowed.

Also what traits does the FL have?

Edit I just noticed plague sign in Ajaccio, how many cities have plague?

**Gmith** · July 11, 2012, 10:59 AM

Originally Posted by Navajo Joe

In this turn you have spent 84% of your income on the army and its recruitment, you are living beyond your means. You need to look at your armies, consider whether you need them and make sure that in quiet areas that the garrison is no more than free up keep allowed.

Also what traits does the FL have?

Edit I just noticed plague sign in Ajaccio, how many cities have plague?

Yes, Im using a lot of money on the military, but the reason for that is, that I used to make enough money to support those armies and still have tons of gold to spend on building, but then I suddenly lost almost over 50k gold per turn for reasons unknown. I used to get 10k gold per turn with an army, maybe slightly smaller than that, but then out of nowhere I got 36k defict and that didn't happen slowly due to recruitment, it happened in a single turn, which is why I'm puzzled.

**Gmith** · July 11, 2012, 11:02 AM

I can't edit my posts for some reasons, but I might add, there are no plagues anywhere else besides Ajaccio. I don't understand how that much gold can just come out of nowhere and then vanish like that.

**Navajo Joe** · July 11, 2012, 12:41 PM

Do you have any save games that you can load and take a picture?

**Ichon** · July 11, 2012, 02:08 PM

Corruption was always around 40,000 or just now? For empire that large without changing corruption with mod the basic SS corruption should be more like 10-15,000. So you are about 25,000 over. If you had had treasury surplus over 50,000 for a long time most of your governors could get bad financial traits and also your FL could have them. I'm not sure if that would double corruption or not but I'd check that and if you had any large conquests lately without building law buildings on the edge of your empire or some buildings were damaged by riot, enemy agent, natural disaster.

**Gmith** · July 14, 2012, 05:08 AM

Originally Posted by Ichon

Corruption was always around 40,000 or just now? For empire that large without changing corruption with mod the basic SS corruption should be more like 10-15,000. So you are about 25,000 over. If you had had treasury surplus over 50,000 for a long time most of your governors could get bad financial traits and also your FL could have them. I'm not sure if that would double corruption or not but I'd check that and if you had any large conquests lately without building law buildings on the edge of your empire or some buildings were damaged by riot, enemy agent, natural disaster.

I don't really know, because I got loads of money every turn before, so I didn't pay attention to it. There haven't been any riots except in one town that had maybe two riots. I don't think this could be because of bad governors, although, most of my governors are pretty bad, I still don't see how that could make a 10k profit turn in to 38k deficit in a single turn.

Originally Posted by Navajo Joe

Do you have any save games that you can load and take a picture?

Unfortunately I've overwritten all the old save games. I tried looking through the save games to see if I'd have one save before I started losing money so I could see if it's the corruption that's the problem or something else.

Sorry for this delayed answer. I'm moving abroad in two days it's been a bit of a fuss and completely forgot to check this thread for a few days.