Benefits/Disadvantages to 0% Empire Taxes

[Flinx]

Recently I have seen some posts where people have lowered Empire taxes close to 0% and allowed local taxes to climb to around 35%.

What are the benefits/disadvantages to lowering empire taxes and allowing local taxes to rise?

[Strifeguard]

The biggest disadvantage I can think of off-hand is the utter inability to spend money of unrest reduction.

The quickest way to reduce empire-wide unrest (either from spies, a government change, starvation, or the oppressometer) is to spend AUs on the unrest reduction slider. Unfortunately, this is not an option if you aren't collecting empire-wide taxes and therefore lack the funds to put into that slider.

You'll also lose grants-to-planets. Planetary grants are a big part what makes your colonies get "up and running" in 5 turns during the mid-to-late-game, while they take 20 turns to do the same thing in the early game. In the late game, migration will fill new colonies up very quickly, but without grants to take advantage of all the potential employment out there, you'll be losing a lot.

[Beamup]

Fundamentally, it puts each planet on its own. Well-developed planets will benefit because the money they produce stays there. However, less-developed planets end up in bad shape because they aren't getting any sort of grants anymore.

OTOH, if you have a bunch of planets producing raw materials and not much else, that are giving all their money to the empire, you might just be able to effectively run your imperial budget off those gifts without imperial taxes.

[Da_Blade]

Advantages:

* As you stated more money stays on the planets, so they get to spend more


Disadvantages:

* Inability to maintain your fleet (just a slight disadvantage ;))

* No grants to new colonies, seriously increasing their time needed for development

* No money to spend on unrest

* No military and scientific grants


I think the biggest , aside from inability to maintain fleets, is no money to spend on unrest. Unrest can be a real *****, and a real solution for unrest always takes time, meanwhile spending money here is the best option. The military and research grants can be quite sizeable, do not underestimate them either.

That being said, overtaxing surely is a bad choice. I usually set my empire to 7/8%, 9/10% in early game. System taxes are not completely useless as some seem to think, so i set them to 2/3% as the planets carrying the seat get an extra infrastructure bonus which need money to be used :)

[Skymage]

In my current game (as Psilons) the empire taxes started out at 11% and the system taxes at 3%. I slowly (over the next 100 turns) lowered the empire taxes to 3% and system taxes to 1%. I've had no ill effects of this (mostly because 'roy does a VERY good job at lowering unrest through tax levels. This also gives me enough spending money to build up newly colonized worlds.

One of the drawbacks I've seen is that you have to watch 'roy a little more as he will tend to overdrive research a little too much.



SkyMage

[pterrok]

By turn 200 I was down to 1% Empire taxes--yet I was STILL spending 250K through the Empire sliders!

It's because I was in the Senate and had a LOT of Economic treaties--they were bringing in 192K a turn. You DO get TA: Economic and Open Border: Trade agreements, right? ;)

The 'Gift to Empire' box is left ON for all planets and so every other turn or so the big planets send their excess AUs to the Empire...I bounce around 150K-250K in the Empire bank while it does this.


The advantage:

The individual planets spend a LOT more on military items since a lot more money stays there. At Peace & Prosperity's 15% limit this can make quite a production difference!

The disadvantage:

You have to be a LOT more careful with wars and Sanctions--if I lose ALL my trade income I could be seriously in the hole. If I had let my bank build up a bit more so that I could handle a 250K drop, then I could aways suffer no ill effects from such a drastic event before resetting the Empire tax burden...

I suppose I could set it to 0% now and still spend 190K a turn, but that 1% makes me feel a bit safer. Going forward I can't see any reason I WON'T be decreasing my Empire tax as my Empire grows in future games. As Skymage said, you start out at the default and just lower it by a percent every now and then....(It'll depend on your game circumstances as to when that will be.)

[Skymage]

I actually prefer my Empire Taxes set at 3% (not lower) because:

a: I don't trust the Trade agreements to last long enough (I'm a bit agressive ;) )
b: Gifts to empire vary wildly between turns, so it's difficult for 'roy to get a handle on spending at the empire level. :bulb:


It's my opinion that the empire actually runs itself better with LOW Empire taxes :cool:. There is much less unrest, buildings seldom get torn down due to embargos/not enough money, planets can support more infrastructure (thus a better industry), and there seems to be more money for overdriving. I'm waiting for the patch (1.2.4) then I'll try this with my klackons on impossible :)

SkyMage

Edit: for clarity(sp?) and typos:bulb:

[Czaroc]

Talk about taking it to the max. I brought up the idea of minimizing empire tax a long time ago and got beat over the head and neck for it, so I let it drop. But now that someone else has brought it back up I will put my 2 cents in again.

Now, I have never though about taking it down to 0 (you need money to pay the bills at least), but 5% is not bad from mid to late game (say turn 100 and on). At that point, you should have so much money coming in that you do not really need to send large planetary grants to your new planets (ie: a sufficient amount to help your worst ten planets is not a significant dent in your budget).

I have tested putting 0 money into the military slider and have not seen much difference in my game play. So, in my opinion the military grants are not too terribly important. Though people will say that they build ships faster with money going into military grants (and they are right). It just does not work in my game. About 50% of my planets are small and support producers (they make ground troops, scouts, outpost and colony ships, etc) I do not need any one planet pounding them out in great numbers because I have 50-100 planets of this type. Ususally, I turn off the vicroy on these planets and set my military production to 1% on these planets. 10-20% goes into the planetary production, infrastructure bar, and terraform bar, and the rest goes into research. I lock in the military production que to build 1 battloid or one troop ship, or one whatever support type unit/ship I need, and I walk away. I make huge advances in research this way, usually outpacing the AI 2 to 1 (i am on tech 40 while they are on tech 20).

***The bad stuff *** with the viceroy turned off, new planetary building will not be put into the que, so you have to do it. I check on one planet every few turns to see if there is anything new. If there is, I have to scroll through the plaentary list and add it to every planet that I have locked out this way. (********This really sucks********) but I choose to do it.

Where my money goes is into research. You will always get a bang for your buck here.

I set my empire tax to 10, and system tax to 0 at the begining of the game. I put money into planetary grants (up to the fourth bar) for the first 10 turns or so, to get that first colonized planet moving fast. Then I move it most of it to research so that I can get my techs coming in quickly. I play by feel, but usually put about twice as much into research as planetary grants (up to the fourth bar). If at any time I have research and planetary grants both up to the fourth bar, I put the money into military. Soon, the game will adjust and make the increments bigger and I can readjust the slider bars and have room to move to the right again.

Around turn 100, I lower empire tax and let the the slack filter into higher planetary tax.

Around turn 150 or so, I look at system tax to see if it is worth the effort. If I have enough planets that will benefit and few enough that will be hurt, I give a few points to system tax. I hate system tax, but I will not knock it completely. For some people it works great (it all depends on how you build your planets).

OK, going back and reading, I got really off subject. Oh well, beat me up or just ignore it all. Good luck to you all trying with an empire tax of 0%. You might want to take it easy on yourself and set it to 1% so you can afford your defensive spys. Of course if you have plenty of money coming in from trade with other empires, you may be able to get away with 0%. (I dunno)

[synchro_w]

mmmm...reading all you guys posts i'm thinking to myself..."where the hell am i going wrong?". it's turn 190, i'm evon with parliament and i'm struggling to build anything within 7 turns unless i hike up the cash on it and the pollution goes up to about 1200!
sys tax is 3%, emp tax is 7% [no.. just put it up to 8% cos i was in deficit every turn.. i think...well, it said i was -1.5k on the ledger] and military grant i've had to drop down from 4 to 3 notches, as i have also done with research <grrr> and grants to planets have been lowered to cope with the drop in cash input after i dropped my treaties with the grendarl after the trilarians demanded i fulfill treaty obligations [i didn't think ALL my treaties would be cancelled... just the defensive, non aggression stuff... i thought trade and research would be left alone as the options are to cancel trade treaties or something or other ,forget which, treaty] .

<can't you tell i'm noob? do i care? do i bollox>

to add further injury to my pride i'm playing in a 2arm galaxy with 13 races [2 of which are bloody ithkul!!!gahh] on EASY setting.

great. wonderful. excellent.

EXCELLENT!

etchchellenteh!

prepare the broadband connection as i'm planning to play moo3 multiplayer online...

not bloody likely [i'm still playing moo2 style... it's just that i canot bring myself to trust those eejit 'roys nor the AI buildqueue... utter utter utter utter ****e-... erm... berks, so they are. i mean, how am i supposed to defend my empire with colony ships and ground troops... oh, and dropships <sorry.. my term... 'transports'>]

at least i'm having a lot of fun getting annoyed with my hopelessness. i wonder if my being bad at moo3 has anything to do with my having the IQ of a tepid glass of sewer water?
mmm.. let me consult my IQ itinararararay....

<<< "mee is grate">>>

nope. my IQ is up there with giants such as that lithping boxer bloke who lives in brighton, ulrika jonsson, giles brandreth, david hasselhoff [i really wish he would just go and hassle off... tossa], pee wee herman and ben elton.

but...
i am possibly the world's worst moo3 player.
and damn proud of it!

[Da_Blade]

:haha: Now that's something to be proud off, you in the company of real geniusses there mate!

As for your moo3 skills: do not worry, it will come. Give it some time and i bet you'll be a s good as any of us... Well, except me of course ;)

[Czaroc]

Synchro_w,

Do yourself one quick favor. Check your planets to see if your citizens are growing properly on your planets. I just found a little bug where your people never migrate out of the first region of a planet. Basically, your people sit in one region of the planet and the other 4-9 regions of the planet sit empty. The only difference that I made is to choose parliment as a government (I usually play hive)

Go to any planet and check to see how many green thumbs you have. If you only have one on every planet (not counting homeworld) you may be bugged.

Other than that, the skills will come. My advise is to read the boards and try new things. Find what works for you and what you like. Disregard the rest. A lot of the 'This is the best way to do it" stuff is all about playing style and may not work for your style. Have fun.

[Ron_Lugge]

I'd also like to suggest you D/L the patch - the no forces, all transport is a big symptom of pre-patch.

[Poptoad]

I learned a lot by reading this thread. Now that I've been playing for an entire three weeks, it seems simple, but once I'd found it I thought I knew everything there was to know about setting empire-wide taxes.

Really, just a *bump* to prevent deletion.