Whats up with my tax rate?

Check out the GC Strategies forum, and the OPENING MOVE thread. There are several alternatives that were posted,I'm sure they will help.

~SDC~

1) Are you building social projects that improve morale? Soil Enhancement, Entertainment Network, etc?

2) Are you in debt? Being in debt/deficit spending will lower your morale.

3) Other races may be destabilizing you. You sometimes get a report on this; your chances are better if you put money into espionage.

1. Every single planet has soil enhance+habitat improv. 50% of my planets have EntNetwork. All of my planets are Class-16 or higher except for one which is 15. Three of them are 21+ but they still have low morale ratings, and these are usually also the ones with a high morale modifier due to improvements (30%+) :notsure:

2. Maybe I'm dumb, but I'm not sure what you mean. So I'll just tell you more about my financial situation.

Each turn I either break even or get a small amount of surplus (1 to 15bc). This is because I always tweak the sliders each turn to make sure of that. Regardless, I have a small amount in leases each month (50 to 60).

Also... There is about a ~100bc difference between my tax income (at 20-23% tax rate) and my spending (which reads 47% at the moment). So say if I get 200bc tax revenue, I'm spending 300bc. I still get a small surplus because I have a lot of trading going on.

So I'm still not sure what debt vs. deficit means, in the context of the game, although I know what the definition of those words are.

3. Good point. I bet its those pesky Altarians. Time to go all out with espionage spending now.

What CG Strategy Forum, may I ask? I only see the one forum here, and one newsgroup.

Build a colony ship and jettison half of your population into space. This seems to make the masses happy. If you colonize another planet with these people you will have 0 morale. What I'm assuming is that the troublemakers and criminals are the first one that "volunteer" for colonization duty. Sort of like France's Devil's Island.

~SDC~

I think it's more that morale drops (presumably asymtotically) as a planet's population approaches maximum. If you yank half the population off a planet, everyone gets that summer home they wanted and morale perks right up

~SDC~

Interesting. Say, is it possible to use colony ships as a sort of way of "mass deporting" large segments of the population to another already-conquered/controlled planet?

Like, I have PLANET-1 with 10 billion people. And PLANET-2 with 1 billion people. And I want to move 3 billion from PLANET-1 to PLANET-2. Can Colony Ships be used to do that?

Yes. They still get used up, though.

BTW.. try to build morale boosting social projets... When I play I pay special attention to morale. I usualy build +morale social projets on all the planets. Especialy in the beginning Entertainment NEtwork is the second or even first thing I build...


~SDC~

Yep, just load them into the ship, move it to the selected system, when it arrives, click on the sun and then on the already colonized planet and the population will be transferred. Remember though, if you have several planets colonized in the same solar system, the population from the colony ship will be evenly divided among the planets.

/Andreas

Oh and I forgot to mention that more democratic your goverment gets the harder it will be to keep morale over 50%. When playing late game on gigantic maps my tax rate was aroung 11% and sometimes a bit lower to help me get elected.

~SDC~

Being in debt is when you have a negative treasury. Your treasury text turns red when this happens.

Being in deficit is when you are spending more than you are earning, so your net income is negative. Your treasury text turns yellow when this happens.

Thanks for all the suggestions, you have convinced me that this is just part of the "realism" of the game and not some bizarre bug

Still waiting for an answer on the "strategy forum". Is it embedded in this forum somewhere?

Check on the lower left side on the forum-page. Or you can use SDC.

~SDC~

Are you spending on propaganda on each planet? Once I discovered that, it helped my morale issues immensely. I leave all my planets maxed on propaganda now.

I never spend money on propaganda. Costs to much IMHO. Build some social projets that will add to your planet morale or even better your empire morale.

~SDC~

Space_dust
I've only played a couple games and against simpler A.I so maybe you're right but in my limited experience propaganda is cheap and effective. In early-mid game I'm spending less then 10 per planet and changing my morale from mid 30's to mid 50's, this is with all morale boosting projects I've researched already built. Propaganda allows me to boost my tax rate and easily make back the money I'm spending on it plus extra.

Mr. Lucky
Good point.. I'll have to look in to it a bit more. I guess I never used it as much is because my morale is usualy in 60%-70% range...

I'm jealous of those morale numbers. Do you get there primarily by lowering taxes? How's your spend rate? In order to keep mine high enough to produce things in a timely fashion, I keep my tax rate as high as possible while still maintaining 50% morale.

Quoting #16 by Citizen Mr. Lucky - 3/27/2003 11:14:03 AM

> "Are you spending on propaganda on each planet? Once I discovered that, it helped my morale issues immensely. I leave all my planets maxed on propaganda now."


The problem I have with propoganda is that it's inconvenient. It resets after each turn. A real pain in the ass. :notsure:

that is indeed bummer. I don't think thats happening to me, my morale doesn't go back down at least, but I'll pay more attention.

I think propaganda should be a bit more obvious in what it does... maybe a slider going from 0 to 20 saying "boost propaganda by this much" or from 0 to 50 saying "keep morale above this" (the cost should be at least 4 times the per-point boost from the average morale-boosting building, of course). Then whenever the planet's morale is displayed, it shows "x + y" so you can directly observe the effect of the propaganda (and take action if the 'base' morale is too low). Also, if the base fall below 25, the effect of propaganda drops off dramatically.

Perhaps it should just be a checkbox that allows you to effectively add a +50% morale boost (for an appropriately adjusted price).

*shrug* If only I had the source-code

~SDC~

An interesting situation regarding taxes and morale last night.

It was my first game:
all opponents are fools, tiny galaxy, rare habitable worlds
I controlled all stars but one
Had excellent espionage on the one remaining opponent with whom I was allied
was 5 or 6 techs away from a tech victory
I had not colonized anything less than a base 16 world
I had built *all* social projects built on all planets
I had a healthy treasury stockpile

I set taxes to 0, morale jumped upwards to the 80s, but on each subsequent turn morale dropped despite a positive treasury and 0% taxes

I suppose this was due to either overpopulation (but nowhere to expand) - but still - 0 taxes and all morale social projects and morale still kept dropping.

Perhaps we need a fourth global slider (military, social, tech, morale) as adjusting 20 world's "propaganda" sliders is somewhat annoying.

BTW- Sorry for the repeat posting, I intended to post in this thread, but when I restarted I saw "tax" and misposted.

~SDC~

Nomikos,

One of the other AIs could be trying to destabilize you.

And to solve the overpopulation problem, some people suggested loading excess people into colony ships and sending them off into space. I wonder what happens to those people if you disband a full colony ship while its in space... mwahahahaha