Without sufficient wealth, you can't run your industry, shipyards, anything. It is the only limit that can't be SMed away, and is a pain to keep up with early on unless you use a trick like this.
Well that is odd. I must have been lucky in every game I have played because I have never had problems running any industry or shipyards and I never made any luxury ships.
Ditto. Economy almost seems to be superfluous in my games, as I regularly wind up with hundreds of thousands of 'credits' piling up in the first few decades. Maybe it's because I tend to expand pretty slow? My labs are in constant full use, and if I have the Mercassium, I'm constantly adding more. I even buy the mineral output of every CMC that pops up.
Yeah, if you aren't a really aggressive expansionist, you generally won't run into problems. But if you're like me and constantly using all industrial, research, and ordinance points while also keeping up a steady stream of ground forces, ships, and upgrading all of your shipyards at the same time, for your entire game, you will usually be running on a deficit until you have a lot of civilian ships generating income, which can take upwards of a decade without exploit ships.
So you're complaining that it can't be SMed away because you don't want to SM it away? :p
Seriously, just RP it as you switching to a war economy, or your government printing money.
When I still was playing around with SM to make things easier, I had a bit of a thing about "I'm going to make it easier, but not autowin", so I would do things like adding minerals to planets and giving myself a bit of extra research and ships beyond the recommended limits, but wouldn't do things like adding dozens of dreadnaughts to my fleet, or SMing in hundreds of installations, or adding minerals directly to my stockpiles. I was trying to learn how to play properly with a bit of help to give me a boost, rather than teaching myself how to have fun with autowin. Sort of like the difference between giving myself a few thousand extra starting resources in AoE II as opposed to making my units invincible, my structures instabuild, and giving myself an army of machine gun cobras. So basically me being obsessive over how much I cheated.