Resources
Resources (usually referred as "credits") are your basic funding and needed for virtually anything. You need them for the following things :
  • Constructing buildings
  • Paying staff wages (and therefore indirectly for research too)
  • Starting and advancing global projects
  • Building and maintaining military units
  • Buying stock
So withouth any resources you'll be pretty much unable to expand, neither your regions nor your military power. So your main goal should be a balanced budget allowing you to construct new buildings (or upgrade existing ones) while being able to construct new military units for new divisions to epxand into enemy territory. A good balance also allows you to add skilled scientists, agents and generals to your roster.

You can gather resources (credits) from these :
  • Regions (well planned regions put out a lot of resources, especially with high loyalty)
  • Stock market (by selling stocks at high values)
  • Capturing enemy regions (gives you a certain amount of credits)
So checking your balance is always important, and therefore you can always see your current amount of credits as well as the change compared to the last turn in the main screen (info area in the top left corner). Also check your national budget in the information hub to seeh where you spent most of your money.

If you're on a negative balance you can do several things to come out of the red digits again :
  • Release some staff

  • Release some of your agents, generals or scientists, especially if you don't need them anymore. Especially high-skilled staff makes you pay a lot of wages.

  • Rearrange your regions

  • Demolishing buildings will return a part of the construction cost. So you can demolish some buildins to gather resources and rearrange your regions so you can aling them to produce more resources. For the moment even at the expense for a higher pollution level.

  • Stop your global project

  • Global projects can cost a fortune to maintain. So stopping them will leave room from other spendings.

  • Downsize your army

  • Rearrange your divisions and release units that are either too expensive or not needed anymore. This reduces maintenance costs for your army.

  • Increase loyalty

  • The populations loyalty towards you has a direct influence on resource production. So raising the loyalty of your regions will also increase resource output.