Andy,
you don't need to invent rocket and just to admit to yourself that game shrinking strategy did not not work and roll it back to old times proportions. I mean:
1. Decrease army maintenance to the level nobody cares about these costs - army employment limits the army size per population, not the cost of maintenance. weapons can cost many times more, but not the maintenance. let the people clash with armies they can buy.
2. Improve profits to 3-5B per corporation a month at least(it used to be 10b-20b and that was not trivial)
3. limit game cash movement between countries/CEO/account - I have said this from the moment you have added this with Jossi many years ago, and this is still wrong - game assets should remain in game domain, not outside of it.
4. Prohibit CEO to store weapons - this is bug, nothing more to say
5. Allow CEO corporations to be destroyed in war - again overprotecting people who cry too mu
Nimz, do you have a lot of public corps in your CEO? I did and was losing money hand over fist every month.
Once I divested myself of most of the public corps I started making a small profit. Not enough, but still, it stopped the bleeding.
And I swear there has to be a tax on inventory of weapons. I'm not going to sell them to figure it out though as long as I'm making a small profit.
EDIT: never mind. I see from your fist post you have no public corps.
I have all private as you cannot control and transfer money to prevent public corporations from bankruptcy at difficult times.
The tax is on enterprise turnover before taxes so called "Enterprise tax" which turns after you exceed 700 corporations I think. Having over 5500 corporations I am making no profit because of it.