Just a lil strategy tip for ya'll...

After seeing someone in my legion miss upkeep several days in a row, i've decided to keep a credit balance high enough for all the important stuff

First, there's upkeep of course... the whole reason for the credit balance
Then, there's invasion costs... can't tell you how many planet shares i've missed out on invasions for, all because I was out of cash
And let's not forget the 3.6B cost for repairing all 4 hyperchannel relays (which seems to occur roughly once a week for me)

right now, all three of those together come just short of 10B for me (and yes, i've had all 3 of these occur at the same time for me before...)

And... that's not even including an allowance for hull repairs...

Thats a pretty good tip that quite a few people dont seem to realise.

I Try keep atleast 20 days worth of upkeep around.
Upkeep at 7.1B with builder + 3 Dark assembly bots (-50% and -15% upkeep)
(Invasion cost here is around 12B atm)

and to top it off, once you have that reserve credit balance.... you have to remember not to use it unless it's for one of the conditions you've included credits for...
so if i want to colonize a planet after that, i'll build up my credits to about 13-15B so that i don't drop below 10B after building all my structures

-50% = 0.5x
3x -5% = (0.95 ^ 3)x

combined upkeep modifier = 0.4286875x... roughly 43%... so you basically have a -57% upkeep modifier

thats why more than half my planets are mining planets.......

Yeah, mining and NPC hunting is very important at my level. I recently switch to Fixer and my upkeep is 16Bn, leaving me with only a few Bn for reserves.

I have to save up all the resources for the whole day and use the Dark Aperture-Key to gain the extra credits.

Reasoning behind NPC hunting is equally important is Toxic Purfiers, Terraformers. With maybe 500-1k NPCs a day, I would be able to make one or two 15/16x Toxic planets a week.

Hate running out of credits- current "zero" for me is much higher than 10 bill- will not upgrade planets or ship unless i save over the base amount i keep in reserve- will take planets though- that's the point of a very high reserve

Dan's suggestion in the vacation thread makes me think he has something in mind for vacation mode and will be implementing whatever he finally decides pretty soon...

His suggestion requires saving up 7 days of upkeep if you want to avoid coming back to a damaged ship and 0 credits....

so...... modifying my original credit reserve to prepare for this (in case he decides to actually implement his own suggestion).....

..............................I'll have to save up a reserve of 20 Billion credits now