Negative Resources, but still able to build?

90% of homeowners would disagree!

Oh I see, so that's the problem.  I wasn't taking out a loan from the government I was running to stay competitive.  Silly me!

Heh. As for the bug, the AI appears to be cheating or something of the sort. What difficulty setting did you use for that opponent?

Join the Club. I had the same thingn happen in my first game. It was on normal difficulty, and 2 empire AI had negative gold. The one that finnaly got me was in the hole for over 250,000.  that pissed me off but I got the new patch and tried again. Well I just started a game with the newest patch and I have run into that again.

This is getting REALLY OLD! I love Gal Civ and stardock did great with them. I can put up with a few bugs because I know they are working on polishing it, but this one bug makes the game unplayable. How in the hell am i supposed to win a game when the AI doesn't need to use the main rescource to create a unit AND they have no Maintanence COST?! I have to balance defense with cost because I will stall my economy otherwise, but he get to ingnore all of that.

  I don't mind playing a game and losing, but playing a game i have no chance of winning is a waste of my time and money. I have been thinking of getting impulse to get me a refund, but I really like the concept of this game and I keep thinking that i will just buy it again in a week when it is stable.

Ahahaha
You're an optimist, aren't you?

I encountered that too and I think it does perfectly reflect what kind of quality Elemental really is. Cheating AIs are something which even many years ago were not necessary.

Large map - All factions but one on the map (lag feast).  Normal mode for the map and the factions.

Started out fine.  Found my Empire neighbor, rushed him to claim his resources.  Found that my entire map had no iron at all.  On a 5x5 grid, by late game, I was controlling a good 1/3 of it and still had no iron until I took over a 4th faction, Guildon?, that had a ton of seige machines.  Found they had around 8 iron nodes all throughout their territory.  I got by with a standard leather + spear combo for the longest while, but when Yithril declared war, I had only just begun making armored units and simply couldn't make them fast enough with the enemy "hero" units coming.

65 hps / 400 atk / 100 def for a single enemy unit?  2-3 in a row?  If you miss, you're unit is basically dead unless it's a company and you just lost half of it in that one attack.

This game gets frustrating with some of the stupid stuff like this.  Are all stardock games like this or did I just find the rotten egg of the batch?

Nah, Solar Empire was quite an okay-game. And it didn't have any grave bugs in it, when released. In fact, I can't remember any bug at all.