I have the Prima Official Strategy Guide and it states that one mine plus one refinery equals fifty maintenance points. I had around 900 maintenance points and added five new refineries and mines and now I'm down to 700 maintenance points. I wanted to support a few extra ships in my fleet so I added the mines/refineries thinking that my maintenance points would go up but it seems they are going down. Does anyone have a clear perspective on maintenance points and how to increase them?

What the Strategy Guide says is how it is in game, for each mine-refinery pair you get 50 maintenance. It's always good to check in oyur agent's galactic overview how many facilities of each type you have. (If you have a surplus of mines or a surplus of refineries, in which case you should build them up to equal numbers and then build up pairs)

 

Remeber you get the 50 points once both facilities are builit and deployed at the target planet.

 

If you had such a 200point loss make sure that your enemy is not blockading any of your worlds as that will result in the temporal loss of those points while the enemy is bloacking the world. Make sure your agent hasn't built troops like a madman and spent all your points that way.