Spend Rate

Tax rate affects how much cash is generated on your planets.

Spend rate affects how much of that cash is *spent* on military/social/research... depending on what you've set those sliders to. If you set it to 50% spending your planets will spend half of their tax income on building/research, the other half will go to the treasury. In short, it affects how quickly your planets will build stuff and/or contribute to research.

Combined, these two sliders give you two ways to affect your treasury. Suppose you're running a defecit (losing money each turn) and want to get out of the red... you can either:

a. Increase taxes at the cost of morale and approval rating.

b. Decrease spending at the cost of less production/research.

Increasing spending might not always result in a proportional increase in production/research though... it often depends on how many production and research improvements you have on your planets. But in general terms, yes... a 100% spend rate is certainly desirable if you want to produce/research faster. Not to say that cash isn't important also... cutting spending is a good way to bulk up your treasury.

I often play as an economic-minded human race and can usually maintain 100% spend rate for much of the game.

" If you set it to 50% spending your planets will spend half of their tax income on building/research, the other half will go to the treasury."

Er... I don't think thats quite right. I think it means that each planet will use 50% of its production capacity for each of military/social/research.

This is why you can (sometimes) set your spendinng to 100% and still make money (ignoring trade by other benefits). Your planets are generating more in taxes than your factories can spend.

I'm fairly certain this is how it works, although I could be wrong. I get a bit confused about all this stuff sometimes.

AILST,

Mojo is correct. The spending slider adjusts how much capacity is outputted (in the form of industrial units, "IU's", which appear as the production symbols on the Planets screen). It is set at the Empire-level, and applies to your overall production capacity, not (necessarily) planet-by-planet. You will spend however many gc's it takes to produce that % of IU's out of your Empire. The sliders then determine (proportionally) how that sum is distributed, i.e., manifested (as either Mil/Soc hammers or Science beakers).

At 100%, your Empire will spend however much money it takes to produce every IU it can crank out. That production is then adjusted for planetary-specific bonuses due to social improvements (like banks, research labs, etc.), or by position-specific traits (like +10 to your Military production).

At 50%, your Empire will spend however much it takes to produce exactly half the IU's it could crank out.

Neither setting is guaranteed to produce either a profit or a loss.

By playing around with both the Tax and the Spend sliders, you will find that there are "break points" built into the economic system. Tax Rate adjustments will produce a range of income results, with (interestingly enough) higher tax rates sometimes yielding both more income and more production (albeit, always, worse morale).

Spending Rate adjustments will frequently allow you to maintain completion of a Military/Social project, or discovery of a new advance, in the same timeframe (# of turns) while permitting "fine-tuning" of the area sliders, or budget savings. E.g., in the early game, I will frequently adjust spending downwards to 60% or less (while maintaining at Tax rate at 55%+) every fourth-turn or so, to maximize revenue and stretch out my initial treasury. By adjusting my area sliders (between Mil/Soc/Sci), I can maintain my next completion date (of whatever it is I'm focusing on) at "1" or "0" (next turn) while netting +10-12gc's for that turn.

~SDC~

This helps a lot, now i can use all 4 sliders