i've read this thread and agree with the problems the OP pointed out, but i'd like to suggest a different solution.



the way I see it the current system has 2 problems:



1. the tax/dust system isn't very intuitive. i won't go much into detail here because this problem is very well explained in the post I linked earlier.



2. focusing on dust production only ever makes sense when you are already in late game AND going for economic victory. Having better dust production is supposed to allow you to lower the tax rate without going bankrupt. The problem is that lowering the tax rate makes this very thing absolutely horrible. If you take this to the extreme (like you should when you play as sophons for example) and play with 0% tax, every bit of dust production except for trade routes and ind-dust conversion is literally worthless.



What makes this even worse is that there are planet types (like arid) that are supposed to be good for dust production. Does anyone ever actually use dust expoitation on arid in early game before you can "afford" to play with a high tax rate?



Now here is my suggestion to solve both problems:

Make dust production completely independent of the tax rate. This means that if the tooltip says a planet produces 30 dust per turn, it actually produces 30 dust per turn and upkeep costs are subtracted after that.



What does the tax rate do then? Well it could lower upkeep costs for example. Meaning that with a 0% tax rate you have to pay full upkeep, with 50% you pay half, etc..



With this system you would actually have to balance out whether you can afford to focus more planets on food, industry, science or need to focus more on dust production. It would actually be a choice whether to take the arid or the tundra planet



Obviously the values would have to be rebalanced for this to make sense (like the upkeep costs increased by a lot), but that shouldn't be much of a problem.

Isn't the dust production from trade routes also affected by the tax multiplier?

FaeRhan wrote:
Now here is my suggestion to solve both problems:

Make dust production completely independent of the tax rate. This means that if the tooltip says a planet produces 30 dust per turn, it actually produces 30 dust per turn and upkeep costs are subtracted after that.

You can see exactly how much dust is every single planet producing.

FaeRhan wrote:
What does the tax rate do then? Well it could lower upkeep costs for example. Meaning that with a 0% tax rate you have to pay full upkeep, with 50% you pay half, etc..



Obviously the values would have to be rebalanced for this to make sense (like the upkeep costs increased by a lot), but that shouldn't be much of a problem.

This would also mean that the upkeep would have to be affected by population accordingly, which makes only sense since it's called tax rate. What I'm trying to say here is that no matter how intuitive the system is, running 0% tax rate should cost you a lot. So the resulting dust income shouldn't change noticeably anyway.

YellowSock wrote:
Isn't the dust production from trade routes also affected by the tax multiplier?

Nope. Trade route gains are not affected by the tax multiplier.

YellowSock wrote:
You can see exactly how much dust is every single planet producing.

how?

just to clarify: i mean what they actually produce after tax

and even more important than the planet output are the tooltips on improvements and exploitations

YellowSock wrote:
This would also mean that the upkeep would have to be affected by population accordingly, which makes only sense since it's called tax rate.

Well they could call it something other than "tax rate" if that is the issue

Maybe what you suggested does make more sense, that is something that would have to be tested in actual gameplay.

YellowSock wrote:
What I'm trying to say here is that no matter how intuitive the system is, running 0% tax rate should cost you a lot. So the resulting dust income shouldn't change noticeably anyway.

I agree, the resulting dust income souldn't change noticably but the way you go about mitigating/preventing that problem would change.

At the moment you would do ind-dust conversion and focus on trade routes because they are seriously overpowered in a low-tax scenario while in the other system you would actually try to produce more dust by building dust improvements, colonizing arid planets, etc..

FaeRhan wrote:


just to clarify: i mean what they actually produce after tax

and even more important than the planet output are the tooltips on improvements and exploitations

My bad.

FaeRhan wrote:
Well they could call it something other than "tax rate" if that is the issue

Maybe what you suggested does make more sense, that is something that would have to be tested in actual gameplay.

How they call it is not such a big deal, except maybe for people who don't know how the system works and the name can confuse them.