Sudden Dust Loss! What Happened?

There can be multiple reasons. Did you abandon a law that gave additional dust? Did some dust-intense buildings or fleets finish this turn (both require dust per round for upkeep after all)?

A drop in your populations happiness due to overcolonization or over-opulation might also be the cause, as high values grant a big percentual bonus on dust too.

Hi DevildogFF,

You'll want to look for things that changed rapidly between the last turn that it was fine and the next turn where it wasn't as many things could be responsible. I'll suggest some things below.

-If you released many fleets of high upkeep ships from the hangers (which either don't cost upkeep or have vastly reduced upkeep when in hangers.

-If you enacted or abolished a policy that directly translates to a change in dust production.

-If your happiness/approval is extremely low it can drastically reduce production of a lot of things including dust.

-If your trade routes are blockaded by pirates or other factions you may face a highly reduced income as the route is cut off from its destination.

-You may have gotten an event which increased your dust income either directly or indirectly which suddenly expired and lead to the loss of previous income.

-Ingame dust inflation over time can inadvertently effect dust income.

-If you were getting dust income per turn from other factions as per a trade deal (or a canceled trade agreement) once that expires it can drastically reduce dust income also.

-If your production you found has been ramping up a lot, you might have built many of something either buildings or fleets/heroes, if many complete on the same turn it could drop your dust income massively.

I hope my suggestions might have helped,

good luck with your economics in future,

-Pyrocite

Another reason may be that you had an x quantity of behemoth and finished building the behemoth cap system improvement (forgot its name). That doubles your behemoth unkeep, meaning that if you were paying, lets say 10k, for them now you are paying 20k.

Hope it helps :)

Another reason is you could have a trade route being blocked by an opposing factions ships.

rcw wrote:

Did some dust-intense buildings or fleets finish this turn (both require dust per round for upkeep after all)?

As rcw wrote, it can be very likely to be buildings or fleet, with the fleet being especially hard on dust, especially if the majority are say, carriers or behemoths (Behemoths not the majority of fleet, but as in you still have over the average amount). If you've at all created many military fleets but not worked on economy as much, they could be draining it from you. You can always see how much upkeep is affecting the dust by hovering your cursor over the amount of dust you have.

I know that, from experience, military fleets can damage your income a whole lot. I was losing over 3K dust because of military upkeep once..