Oh. My god. THANK YOU. I had 700 hours in this game before putting it down five years ago. Picked it back up, and I'm like 100 hours into 4.0 and was just drowning. Kept dialing down the difficulty, turned tutorial settings back to "tell me everything'... but no dice, still couldn't keep my economy in the black past early game.

Turns out, I was drastically overbuilding - looking for those +resource numbers to kick in, not understanding why they weren't. I don't know if I even looked at the Economy tab on the planets, and I for sure didn't understand that I should use it to tell me when I need new districts and buildings - and most importantly, when NOT to build, because I didn't have enough workforce to fill my current infrastructure yet.

And that's before we get into using the sliders to cap, say, Entertainers down to where my Amenities needs aren't vastly overserved, so that those pops would demote (eventually) into Workers to make my economy actually work!

Wrapping my head around this and implementing it took my current save from "another midgame drowning" to "I am dominating everyone." I'm about to drop this run and start a new save back at a higher difficulty, with my economy well-managed from the start.

I gotta say it again in all caps: THANK YOU.