I thought I understood it. When tax rate is high, people are not happy and production goes down. But I realized my production was going down even when I decreased tax rate.

Here is an example from actual game, showing industry here on one system

Industry consisted of several areas, none of them were changed when palying with tax rate, so I ignore them.



Tax rate 25% => Industry 86 (8,7 from tax rate, 7.8 from system approval + others not changing)

Tax rate 20% => Industry 84 (7,7 from tax rate, 7.0 from system approval + others not changing)

Tax rate 15% => Industry 89

Tax rate 10% => Industry 87

Tax rate 5% => Industry 85

Tax rate 0% => Industry 83



I tried also to increase tax rate

Tax rate 30% => Industry 88 (10.4 from tax rate, 8.0 from system approval + others not changing)



What is going on here ? It was early in the game, no high tech improvements. Could anybody explain ?

Thank you

You playing UE by any chance?



They have an industry bonus that increase with tax.



Looks like you had drop going from 15% to 20% but is otherwise increasing with tax. Probably the system's approval state went from one state to another state (ex: happy->content) right at that step.

Exact modifiers can be found here.

adder wrote:
Exact modifiers can be found here.

Is that up to date?



The latest modifier values from in game says 6% industry bonus for every 10% tax.

Everything other than the Sophon and UE-racials only depend on the actual improval, not the tax itself. And of course the Harmony are an even bigger exception anyways.

While the indivudual-systems' approval also affects things, the only approval-bar to practically care about is the overall-one.



So there's a very easy to follow rule of thumb that works for most races:



Put the taxes as high as possible while staying above 80% approval and if that's not possible 40%.