I think my people are a little overly understanding about tax rates ...

from Stardock Forums
I don't know about other people complaining about how hard morale is, but I had the exact opposite problem.

I had my tax rate at 100% ... and yet I was seeing an approval of up to 97%. So 97 out of a hundred people thought it was perfectly OK for me to take all their money from them.

I think this is a little, erm, wrong. :)

In any case, it made it easy to coast to a tech victory.

Some other bugs I noticed along the way was the % countdown to tech victory is terribly broken, as it followed a sequence something like (5%, 3%, 50%, 5%, 104%, 100% ... only reaching 100% as I was researching the final tech).

Additionally, "The Terraformer" wonder was unavailable to build when I researched the appropriate tech.

Finally, I think on gigantic maps moving all those constructors gets terribly tedious, and I'd like to see governors for star bases - such that you could set a planet's constructors to automatically move to a certain starbase and build improvements in a governor specified order. I often had a dozen constructors being built in one turn and it was taking so long to deal with them all I ended up turning my military production to 0% and just doing without any further starbases because I couldn't be bothered.
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
What AI level?

Also, I'm finding taxing pretty easy too- had mine up to about 57% most of my game and 70% happiness or so. The economy seems to be gtting eaiser and easier to run with the patches... I was hoping Brad wouldn't give in to the want it easier crowd. I'm playing at Intelligent levels all around...

~SDC~
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
If you've got mostly high quality planets with relatively small populations, you can get away with murder with tax rates. If your planets are overpopulated (which happens quicker with poor PQ), tax rates need to be lower. Or at least that's what it seems to me.
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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Nah I was just messing around on one of the easier levels, I didn't want my gigantic map game to take all week! :)

The AI level shouldn't affect how happy my own people are though, surely?

And no matter what, taxing a trillion people at 100% and having them all like it seems a bit stupid.

As an aside, I think the numbers are a bit off. I was taxing at 100%, about a trillion people, and bringing in 5000bc a month. So that means the average person is earning 5 credits a month, or 60 credits a year. I certainly hope things are a lot cheaper in the future! :p
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
If you have that game saved somewhere.. go back and fiddle with the tax slider a bit. I think you might be able to get much more out of those folks at a lower level of taxation.

In my games, it seems that there are a number of artificial break points for tax revenue. Above a certain percentage you just get less revenue. Above another percentage it decreases again.. and again. I'm not sure why this is the case.. some sort of trap for the unwary I guess.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
I know about that ... the break points are funny, but eventually the optimum kept shifting higher and higher until it hit 100%.

I do find it amusing that adjusting your tax rate 1% can make 500bc difference in some cases ... or 10% of your economy!
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
the reason for that is that at higher levels of tax people swicth to the black economy(pay no tax). When you lower tax they declare themselves again caue if they get caught tax dodging they are in trouble... :sniff!:
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
I know the why of it, but I'm telling you I checked and 100% was the optimum setting in the game that I was playing.

Which I think is increadibly stupid, because if you tried that in real life you'd have a mass mutiny on your hands.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
The game seems much more forgiving at the lower skill levels of actions like extremely high tax rates. Once you hit a crunch and have to play smarter at the higher skill levels, you'll find that high tax rates aren't an effective way to play. Basically, your population rate goes through the floor compared to everybody else's. This is stated explicitly in the "Galactic Civilizations Survival Guide" (gc_quickguide.html) that comes with the game:

"The issue is that in GalCiv, your taxes collected are based on citizens and so we count those who are rich enough to do so... If you raise your taxes, you'll eventually find your population lowering. Are they dying? No. They are simply becoming too poor (unemployed, whatever) to pay taxes."

This is much more noticable (or it has been in my experience, at least) at the higher skill levels.
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
>the reason for that is that at higher levels of tax
>people swicth to the black economy(pay no tax). When
>you lower tax they declare themselves again caue if
>they get caught tax dodging they are in trouble...

I read about this in the manual, I guess I'd assumed the mechanic for it was to lower morale, and thereby decrease population growth or even cause the population to shrink.

Since there is no gameplay advantage to setting the tax rate higher than the first break point, it's a rather pointless game mechanic to allow the tax rate to go higher. That first break point ought to be 100% taxation.

Unless there's some reason to reduce your own approval rating/morale? Or, like I said earlier.. a trap for the unwary.
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
Well, the breakpoint varies, so making 100% the breakpoint would mean your tax rate would apparently fluctuate as your morale changes.

I generally tax myself into a 50-60% approval rating, which means tweaking every so often (and my approval rating tends to skyrocket for some reason - I don't purchase morale bonuses at game start. I suspect 1.02a makes it too easy to raise approval).

~SDC~
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
Mmmm.. if you mean that my tax _revenue_ would fluctuate as my morale caused the population to swell or diminish, then yes. That's what I'd like to see, a direct causal relationship. There's some nice feedback on what the population thinks.. the little arrow directly from the tax rate slider to the approval rating. But there is no feedback at all which would indicate why tax revenue drops precipitously at certain percentiles. It just is. If fixing it means redefining 100% to be the limit of what the population will comfortably bear, then fine. If it means capping the movement of the slider at some percentage less than 100, well that's a little less intuitive, but whatever works.

I guess what I'm looking for is consistency. There's a confirmation box when you disband a ship, you have to deliberately click on terran manufacturing to let them overcharge you, why should I be able to shoot myself in the foot with a wacky tax slider?
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
No, I mean that if the 100% point is the breakpoint where tax revenues drop rather than increase, that your tax rate would fluctuate as morale and approval ratings change (thus changing the 100%, and by extension, the entire scale, of the tax slider).

~SDC~
Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top
Oh, so if they removed the pointless gameplay mechanic, then the pointless gameplay mechanic would continue to cause fruity behavior in the taxation slider?

Hm.
Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top
It's only a pointless mechanic if the breakpoint were static. It's not. It's based on morale.

~SDC~
Reply #15 from Stardock Forums Top
Okay, I'll elaborate:

Morale is apparently based on more than just how much you're taxing your colonies, but also on how well you're doing overall, how much overcrowding there is in your systems, and so on. With high morale, your citizens will tolerate higher taxes, at least until things begin to go bad. It's better to have an absolute percentage (rather than the relative percentage you suggest) simply because you know roughly how far you've gone, and how much further you could go if morale (and thus approval) rises, or how much you'll have to back off if approval drops.

If the 100% is relative to where people will stop paying taxes, you lose some of that feedback, because while you know you're taxing your people as much as they can afford to pay, you don't actually have a good sense of how much that is, how much farther it might be possible to go if you raise morale and approval, and so on.

It doesn't strike me as pointless - no more than it was in MoO2. Maybe more complex, but that's about it.

~SDC~
Reply #16 from Stardock Forums Top
Alright, you're suggesting that finding the break points in the tax rate slider can function as a sort of third indicator of population contentment, along with approval rating and individual planet morale numbers.

I think it is redundant, that it is not sufficiently different from approval rating to warrant the nuisance, but that's a decent explanation.
Reply #17 from Stardock Forums Top
Out of curiousity, what type of government are you using? The initial government type is easier to mantain morale in; I usually don't switch to newer forms of government right away because of it.
Reply #18 from Stardock Forums Top
Well, more that you know how much you're taxing your people than knowing how happy they are. :) The approval rating is right beneath the slider for that bit of feedback.

Harry, my approval ratings tend to increase as I change governments. I lose fewer elections as a Star Federation than as a Republic. (not sure who the question is aimed at, but just noting a trend in my games).

~SDC~
Reply #19 from Stardock Forums Top
This was on the most advanced form of government. I've not yet really noticed a whole lot of difference morale wise past the second one.
Reply #20 from Stardock Forums Top
It does seem strange, though, that by changing the tax rate _1%_, one can lose hundreds of bc per month. Shouldn't the tax revenue gradually decrease above the "break point(s)" rather than precipitously drop off?
Reply #21 from Stardock Forums Top
And in any event, a 100% tax rate would work for exactly one tax year (or "turn"), after which those who couldn't flee the planet would be driven into poverty. (:(
Reply #22 from Stardock Forums Top
one tax year = 12 turns. ;)

~SDC~
Reply #23 from Stardock Forums Top
I usually get popped with a morale loss follwing a change of government that takes a few turns to overcome. I generally try to get most of my planets to a 55-60% approval rating before switching.