HomeWorld Tax

I never understood this Tax... it penalizes exploration..

It doesn't make sense either, because each colony is supposed to
be self sufficient....


There should be a one time setup fee, to establish a new colony which
should be the cost of materials etc...

The homeworld tax went away when your colony grew over 70,000...

AG

The homeworld tax was implemented to prevent hyper-expansionism where some players (like me) built small cash colonies all over the known universe, everywhere they could reach, and get insanely rich.
Homeworld tax slows this down but does nothing to stop it.

The underlying problem is that if you build a cash colony you get an *income* while if you make some money making and selling a combat ship, you get a one time lump sum of money. Which means that if you wait long enough and the cash colony does not get destroyed, building cash colonies *always* gives more money for your efforts. Which basically kills trade except for newbies and roleplayers. It also leads to hyperinflation, where people have more billions than they know what to do with. Eventually they pay insane prices to the last remaining player who does offer something for trade, and after a such few deals the trader retires from the trading business as now he too has more money than he will ever use.

Mankind solved it by removing money income altogether and letting players earn money by selling minerals to an NPC trade base. This lead however to endless resource hauling to the NPC trade base, which was unpopular with players. So recently Mankind re-introduced some modest income from hi-tech cities, which are expensive to build and are limited to a maximum of 10 cities per player.

I`ve considered removing money from the game and let the buildings simply work for themselves, but wasn't satisfied with it. Also adding increasing economic penalties as you get further away from your main base, or adding extra penalties for every additional base is not a good solution as this discourages expansion and exploration. I've considered letting players not have one bank account, but multiple bank accounts, one per solar system, but that leads to other problems.

I don't have a good solution for this problem. Unless somebody has a good idea, I'd go for a combination of lowering income from bases, adding new ways to make money that give a large lump sum of money for effort rather than an unending income, decreasing the importance of money in the game (by placing more importance on the availability of rare minerals (*) ) , and a boost for newbies to speed up initial growth.

Giving newbies too much however will lead to multiple account abuse, where a player registers multiple acounts and sends the newbie bonus income to the main account. A partial way to solve this is to give players with the rank of Magistrate or Governer a discount on everything they buy (not giving extra money as this can be sent to another account).

(*) lowering the importance of money and increasing the importance of minerals: see the thread "re-designing BP" on the sourceforge forum.
sourceforge.net/projects/beyondprotocol/...4521560/index/page/3
the post made on 2011-11-15 16:05:54 PST

Now that we are talking about income, I've never liked the current system.

In the current system, if you lower tax to zero you have high morale and thus high productivity from factories, mines and labs. If you tax the colony you get income but low productivity. It works, kinda, sorta, but it is also lame and unrealistic. Players are encouraged to build their cash colonies with labs, as this gives higher wages. But who is paying those wages and why?

Also to get the highest productivity, you need the highest morale, and for this you need 0% tax, 100% housing and 0% unemployment. However such a situation is not stable, it leads to population growth, which leads to lack of housing or jobs, which leads to lower morale, which leads to lower productivity. To get maximum research speed of labs, you should have 0% tax, 100% housing, 100% jobs (0% unemployment), and every few hours sell off the excess population from population growth to another player. This is tedious and illogical.

So lets think about this: how do capitalists in the modern world make money? They hire people, let them make consumer goods and then sell those consumer goods. The Capitalist makes sure that selling the products gives more money than hiring the people costs. He then keeps the difference.

Perhaps some kind of simple civilian economy should be introduced in BP. Aside from factories that produce military hardware, there should be buildings called manufactories that produce consumer goods. These consumer goods are never seen, they get sold for cash immediately.

Lets have a colony with mines, labs, factories, and manufactories.
if a player starts mining, researching or building military stuff, his population go to work with priority in their respective buildings. Whatever pop is left (not needed to man the labs, factories and mines) will work in the manufactories producing income. If the player does not use his labs, mines and factories, more population can work in the manufactories (but only if those manufactories actually exist in the colony) leading to more money income for the player.

All working population cost salary, but population working in manufactories give income.
By increasing the size of the population the salary per worker rises (bigger organizations need more managers) so the bigger the colony the more expensive it will be to produce there, aside from the extra costs of surpassing Facility Points (FPs). This encourages building multiple medium-sized colonies instead of one big colony.
Tax rate can be removed, morale (which only drops because of unemployment or lack of housing) is only needed for determining population growth or decline. If there are not enough manufactories (e.g. when the player is using too many facility points, or the manufactories are still under construction), A player can opt to pay unemployment benefits (welfare) to prevent population from leaving when he does not use his factories, his population leaving because there is no work.

The result is roughly the same as the current system but more realistic. By tweaking the link between salary level (pop does not like to live in an overcrowded city or nearly alone somewhere far away in space), and population size or colony location, the game masters can financially encourage or punish certain colony setups by players.