Beta 5: taxe rates and unhappiness

Heh, howd you get that? most games it starts going down around 47-49%

because galciv uses a fairly real world system for the taxes (you pay the majority of youre income in taxes)

But heres somethign to try crank it to 100% and then lower it to 85%

I once managed to crank it to 100% and my citizens were still happy (80%!)

The last game I started, I got a home world with one tile that was +700% (!?!) manufacturing, and another that was +100% manufacturing. I 'bought' a factory on the 700 and my production took off like a rocket. I tweaked my spending to crank out 1 U-Haul per turn (modified colonization 'small' vessel with 40% miniaturization from my custom race).

Even with 100% taxation, I was able to maintain 80% or higher approval by simply hurling 500 million people into space each turn... I also had a morale bonus of 30% to start, which didn't hurt.

I'm guessing I was just taking all their money, but giving them tons of food and demanding that they have lots of sex. Not a bad trade, IMO, and apparently they didn't think so either. After I built about 9 colonies, my happiness started to dwindle, and so too did my ability to keep them 100% taxed. I just couldn't hurl enough people into space fast enough at that point to keep them quiet.

I recall in GalCiv 1, an easy way (but painfully tedious) to keep people happy was to load millions of them into a colony ship and simply dispose of the ship in the nearest sun. For some reason, they loved this ... or they refused to speak out against me afterwards ... either or.

An interesting thing I noticed in 4C (haven't looked for it since then) is that there were points where if you went to a certain tax percentage by increasing the taxes, your morale was higher than if you got there by lowering it, even if the population never payed the lower (or higher) tax rate.

In general I have not been happy with bouncing around of happiness. I have never seen it that severe, but 60 point swings every turn on several planets is common in my games. To be fair though I haven't really tested to see if there are things I can do to the tax rate to mitigate the wide swinging. But it's common for me to see a 2-4% population increase and see happiness drop 40 points. Then next turn, with no tax change or buildings built, it will swing up 20 points. And if I launch 100 mil into space (from a 3 bil planet) I often get a 20 point up swing. How does 3% = a 20 point change?

Yes ; I have this very often.
Something has to be done about those mood swings...
I understand the logic:
- turn n: happiness 60% with x colonists ; colony set to increase population by u% for the next turn
- turn n+1: happiness 20% because the colony increased in size ; now, unhappy, the colony is set to decrease in size.
- turn n+2: happiness 40% because the colony decreased in size because the colonists were unhappy (but did not yet desert you).

It's not logical for the colony to increase so much as to become that unhappy. The calculated growth rate should be computed so as to take into account the projected happiness. In the exemple above, at turn n, the computer should estimate what the next happiness is likely to be (estimates 20%) ; then it should reduce the growth rate to reach the "base happiness level" (where growth is supposed to stabilize ; I guess 40%) => linear interpolation and u is reduced by half : then, At turn n+1, the population reaches a stabilized point from where it should probably not move.

Implementating such a simple scheme could prevent a lot of mood swings...

If the game doesn't implement a "base happiness level", then it should still be possible to alert the player that "planet Y has seen a huge discontent arise", so that we could act before the planet desert... At any time where the hapiness level reaches level where desertion becomes a possibility, the turn summary should remind us of that very important fact! It's more important for me to know that planet X might desert than to know that planet Y has finished building an Industrial Sector and is now planning building a Discovery Sphere!!! The first is NOT in the turn summary while the second is there!

As for the relationship between happiness ans taxes (which certainly also includes pop size), sommething has to be done too so that a 1% change in tax rates does not bring a 30% change in mood rates. That's not how it works in the real world ; I'm afraid that the model currently used has too many modifiers and multipliers and that at some point (when you have too many morale boosts from ressources and technology and too many morale improvements), it becomes too sensitive.

Hmmm I haven't really found that the happyness rating is _really_ was out of whack. I mean sure, there are some strange tax based behaviours, but generally happyness has been behaving itself.

I think it comes down to effective management. Don't let a planet's population get beyond 3 billion until you have the technology / boosters (morale resources) to give higher levels of morale. Get your economy pumping along so you can afford to lower the tax rate (a stoked economy has so many benefits its worth doing regardless). Do this by initiating trades and being the first one to claim economic resources. Don't let your own influence drop below that of your neighbours. A good influence means more tourism dollars too. Basically if you want your empire to succeed you have to manage it competantly - the game can't do that for you.

Look, really, there is only way to ensure sucess. Expand. Be the first to claim territory and lots of it. Any other strategy may work for a time, but owning limited real-estate when others around you are expanding will simply mean they eventually outpace you economically, influencially, and industriallyisthisevenaword. And if you're in their way at this point, you can be sure to see lots of troop transports headed towards your colonies sooner or later.

I base this analysis off my current game. It's huge. The GC system seems to hold up very well in the scenario I'm submitting it to. Perhaps the system does have a flaw in that it doesn't scale well to smaller games?