I have had that event a few times recently where you get the choice of how much you want to reduce your inflation 10 or 25%, obviously there is an immditae cost to the 25% option.

I have to admit I don't really understand inflation. I rarely build corporations and play on normal speed. Is inflation just a corporation thing or does it affeect finance overall?

it affects finances overall. Just look at the financial screen, it will tell you how much inflation you have to pay each round.

basically, it's a percentage of what you already pay, which percentage increases as the game goes on.

With a range of -500 to -600 percent all the way to 1600 precent give or take a little and that is the amount your base costs are adjusted by unless you play a few thousand turns you wont see much past 300 to 400 as a max.

How you would go about getting Negative inflation rate is waiting for it to role over after it goes high enough this effect that unless you mess with the XML arnt likely to see unless you are much more persistant, however the fact that it can role over basically means that it is a flawed poorly thought out and lazy solution to an unspecified problem.

Inflation is essentially a fudge factor to balance out gold becoming excessively abundant in the later stages of the game. It applies to all expenses, but since corporations have very high maintenance costs it is most noticeable there. Inflation much over 100% is unusual in the most recent patch of BtS, though it was common in 3.02 to see it nearer 300%.

I have had that event a few times recently where you get the choice of how much you want to reduce your inflation 10 or 25%, obviously there is an immditae cost to the 25% option.

I have to admit I don't really understand inflation. I rarely build corporations and play on normal speed. Is inflation just a corporation thing or does it affeect finance overall?

The 'Federal Reserve' event is a great one to get. For 200 :gold: you can reduce your inflation by 25%. :D Even 10% inflation reduction for free is really nice.

I think you need to have discovered the Corporation technology - though I don't think you have to have founded a Corporation. You might also have to be running the Free Market civic.

Also corporation costs get adjusted for inflation so that they effectively arent affected by it (the base corp cost goes down while inflation added to it goes up)

so inflation really only affects civic maintenance, unit maintenanc, distance maintenance, and number of cities maintenance (and colonial maintenance)

^^ ...and units costs. It will also get a bit more on higher difficulties.

Overall - other than the said event, which is one of my favourite - there is nbothing that can be done about inflation... So it's better just to ignore it...

The other note is that AI gets a huge inflation advantage even on Nobel compared to the humans.