UP Freighter Protection Resolution

Cuts *way* more than 10% of my trade

from GalCiv2 Forums

So I'm playing the Terrans, looking to build a trade empire. The United Planets meets and proposes a 10% tax on trade to protect freighters in times of war. Sounds good to me, as I have the best-developed routes in the game, so I support it and it passes. My trade income, previously 248bc, is now 165bc. WTF? I just lost nearly 40% of my trade revenue! What kind of calculation is going on here?

 

Somebody please help me see a reasonable explanation here - this seems like a really neat game at heart, but I'm getting awfully tired of wading through these poorly organized forums trying to understand its bizarrely unintuitive design decisions, absolutely horrid interfaces, and occasional outright bugs.

9,039 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

What is your treasury at each turn?

I'm a bit rusty on the numbers, but I think if your treasury is above 100K you get decreased income from trade, and at 200K your tax income gets cut 50% and your trade income gets cut another 20% or something like that.  (I used to have these numbers memorized, but it's been a while since I played)

This was built into the game as "graft" - to represent the greedy politicians of your empire padding their wallets and funding their own pet projects with all the excess money in the treasury.

This is and has been a hotly debated topic for a long time, with many players asking for a change to the system.

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

My treasury wasn't even 10K, much less 100K.

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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Trade also fluctuates each turn depending on how far out each min-freighter is.  It's further influenced by the popluation and/or income of the source and destination planets.

Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

I'm aware of that. Here's specifically what I'm seeing...

 

I look in the domestic management screen, both the overall economy tab and the trade tab report a total trade income of ~250bc. On that same turn the UP meets and passes the Freighter Protection resolution. Immediately after exiting that screen, I go back to the domestic management screen. Both the overall economy tab and the trade tab now report a total trade income of ~165bc.

 

I don't think I'm just misreading the interface or completely misunderstanding how trade works. Either there's some really subtle interaction here that I'm not seeing or this is just an outright bug. I'm guessing the latter.

Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

The AI's you're trading with may have signigicantly altrered their tax rates the turn of the U.P. vote, which might also explain the drop.

Hopefully someone else will chime in, as I've said it's been a long time since I've played and I'm scratching my head to try and remember all the things I used to have memorized.

Hrmm, now that I think of it, they may have adjusted the trade values in the last couple of patches too.