You seem to have missed that you can also use heroes to improve your system happiness... and unless I'm mistaken you can move heroes around, can't you?

BlazerMortis wrote:
I think you should have the option to micromanage a little more if a player can handle it.



Playing ES last night, I did find myself checking my tax rate and empire-wide happiness several times. like..every 20 turns or so. I'd adjust it up or down to find the sweet spot where they are as happy as I can make them, while at the same time raking in the dust.



I will say this though..once I built Colonial Rights and Information Super Highway, ALL my systems immediately became ecstatic. Awesome. haha.

Yeah, Colonial Rights and Super Highway FTW! Kind of takes away any happiness problems at all, maybe too unbalanced..

I think you should have the option to micromanage a little more if a player can handle it.



Playing ES last night, I did find myself checking my tax rate and empire-wide happiness several times. like..every 20 turns or so. I'd adjust it up or down to find the sweet spot where they are as happy as I can make them, while at the same time raking in the dust.



I will say this though..once I built Colonial Rights and Information Super Highway, ALL my systems immediately became ecstatic. Awesome. haha.

You're meant to make choices. Increase taxes for dust surplus from developed systems or lower taxes to increase growth/industry on underdevolped/unhappy systems. Choose the best balance for your goals.



System taxes means you will always optimize( low taxes then high, tedious micro). It takes away a decision. You need these choices with advantages/disadvantages, otherwise it's boring.

Yea this "adaptive taxation" is basicly free money it should at least cause some unhappines. As for the taxes I think there should be maybe a button that allows you to set a system to a low tax rate of say 5% yetyou cant change this tax level but it improves the happines of this system you've activated this edict on. This button would be located next to the system in the list of planets under that taxation screen, but thats only a idea. Otherwise im not too bothered about the tax but individual system tax would be nice.

Also there is a system improvement called "adaptive taxation" later on. I'm not sure if this improvement would not incorporate your concerns at least a bit?

If the overall issue is the fact that the best way to quickly impact unhappy systems is to adjust your overall tax-rate, and then the serious slowdown effect it has on your production, then I whole-heartedly agree. But I also agree that being able to granularly apply a tax-rate by system could lead to some very unfortunate micromanagement and balanceing issues. One way to create a "happy medium" would be to either include build options that directly impact happiness (like religious structures, entertainment complexes, or the like), or tech that would enable to same kids of things. Shogun 2 is a great example not only for the ability to adjust or exempt a province from the global tax, but also that in the tech tree there are items that directly impact empire wide happiness, or structures that increase the happiness.

Seems like this would remove the strategic choice. You have to decide between happiness for some systems, and production for others - it's a strategic tradeoff, which is what 4x games are all about.



If you could manage them all independently, then you would simply have to micromanaging every system to its ideal rate constantly. Lots more micro, and less strategic depth.

Maybe you're supposed to build up those unhappy systems by rush-buying using the cash surplus from the happy ones?



I'm afraid that allowing to set the tax rates system-wide instead of empire wide, will not only result in more micromanagement, but also make the choices you make less meaningful...

If you want to not drastically increase micromanagement but want some higher degree of control, why not change it to constellation tax rate instead.



I don't know about you guys but I tend to colonize in constellation patterns anyways since I want to keep pirates from harrassing me all the time and my older constellations tend to have a higher happiness from having Colonial Rights, Supermarkets, fixed anomalies or terraforming anyways, and you wouldnt take a big hit to overall economy in reducing taxes on newly colonized constellations.



It keeps the overall empire management simple with only a few sliders unless its a really big really late game but even then it should be manageable, but it doesnt take it into having to look at every system individually.

+1 the optional shogun II type system. there's overall but naturally a newly 'acquired' system is not gonna be able to provide as extensively as the homeworld.



there are alternative solutions but with the unified queue it needs to be explained or folks will get uber frustrated and expansion will be slowed to a crawl.



though I do admit I like a simplified UI they have now. it can get a bit hectic to track all those systems

I think an empire wide only tax systems makes no real sense, however I can see how this can lead to unwanted micromanagement; which as times goes by I find more and more tedious. However it would be nice to have both options, making the empire wide the default always and taking the system value only when it's changed.

I agree 100%! OP hit the nail on the head.

I think there should be the ability to control system wide taxes as opposed to empire wide. cause when u have 3 systems that are as happy as they can be but 3 that are unhappy then u wanna drop taxes to make them more happy to promote growth u end up barely making any dust cause your super happy systems you could tax more but cant but the unhappy systems need lower taxes so they will grow. which then ends up dropping the tax income to next to nothing.



When you need to drop taxes on 7 colonies just to make 1 colony not be in red morale, it realy hurts. you can easily go from making 100 or so a turn to something like 1 or 2. and then you need to stay at that rate for a really long time until that one system grows enough to be happy with slightly higher taxes.

i know there are improvements for happiness like the shopper one tha super mall or whatever but it costs 3 dust a round to have on that system and so then you go into the negative in that system for income which then causes them to still be unhappy and not grow.

hardcore_gamer wrote:
So you would rather be driven mad by always having to pick between not having any money to keep every last system happy or having money but always having some systems somewhere unhappy as a result?



The Empire screen makes it easy to see which systems are happy or unhappy, so I fail to see how it would be hard to take a brief look at it every now and then to check out if there are any unhappy systems somewhere and then re-adjust their tax rate according to it.

No, I would rather not be driven mad, but then again a couple of unhappy systems does not drive me mad. Checking every turn through the lists of system would not either, but it would eat my time, which could be spend on better things.

And I already proposed a solution to the micro: make an auto-adjust option for the taxes. Don't qoute only part of my sentence to argue with it.

Fhoenix wrote:
Only problem is, allowing to set taxes manually in each system would increase the amount of micro

So you would rather be driven mad by always having to pick between not having any money to keep every last system happy or having money but always having some systems somewhere unhappy as a result?



The Empire screen makes it easy to see which systems are happy or unhappy, so I fail to see how it would be hard to take a brief look at it every now and then to check out if there are any unhappy systems somewhere and then re-adjust their tax rate according to it.

Sharidann wrote:
I agree that it sometimes frustrates to have one and only one tax rate. OTOH, you have some techs which offset the happiness problems quite efficiently PLUS the possibility to have planets produce dust for industry, which allows you to run a deficit due to tax rates.

yes its a nice little balancing act actually but somewhat frustrating. the techs that u can use to convert say research to dust is only active while in the queue. and if its dust that you are low on you cant build the happiness tech as it costs 3 dust a turn and that just makes the system have even less dust making them unhappy as well.



so far unhappiness due to food is easy to fix but unhappiness due to dust income is a little more difficult as i currently on have 1 system improvement that increases dust income in a system so its tough to counteract the cost of improvements due to the low income of the system, which then makes the system stay unhappy and slow to grow

I agree that it sometimes frustrates to have one and only one tax rate. OTOH, you have some techs which offset the happiness problems quite efficiently PLUS the possibility to have planets produce dust for industry, which allows you to run a deficit due to tax rates.

Fhoenix wrote:
Only problem is, allowing to set taxes manually in each system would increase the amount of micro. you would have to remember first to deacrese the tax level, and then check periodically if it is save to increase it. An alternative way to do it would be to allow the player to set an Empire-wide happiness rate instead of a tax rate. So for example you say to the game, you want every system to be content, and they auto-adjust: Newly conquered systems get a tax cut, while Garden of Eden worlds have heavy taxes. But that could make the whole tax system trivial.



On a related note, what are the exact effects of unhappiness atm? I do not see any systems rebelling and if there is a decrease in production, it's hard to see how much exactly an unhappy system costs you.

So far the only effect i have seen from unhappiness is it really lowers the speed at which the colony grows population.



as in with the system being happy it will take like 5 turns for population growth but with a really low morale it takes like 20



im pretty sure it also effects production in the system as well but i cant say that it does for sure i havnt tested that yet.



im gonna see later if it does

Only problem is, allowing to set taxes manually in each system would increase the amount of micro. you would have to remember first to deacrese the tax level, and then check periodically if it is save to increase it. An alternative way to do it would be to allow the player to set an Empire-wide happiness rate instead of a tax rate. So for example you say to the game, you want every system to be content, and they auto-adjust: Newly conquered systems get a tax cut, while Garden of Eden worlds have heavy taxes. But that could make the whole tax system trivial.



On a related note, what are the exact effects of unhappiness atm? I do not see any systems rebelling and if there is a decrease in production, it's hard to see how much exactly an unhappy system costs you.