Empire Tax

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So after giving some thought to a couple of different items like Population, OP spells like hypnotize and E-Storms and Octarine Hurricane and trying to find some sort of adjustment that could potentially help all areas. The idea that I came up with is the Empire Tax.

This would be a player controlled variable that all races would have the option of setting. For example, if the tax rate was a number between 0 and 100 and a player chose 50, this would essentially be a setting for how the game currently runs. The real kick would be when a player changes from the default setting and sets their own number.

The Empire tax would directly impact both population and GC production. Obviously, as you increase the tax rate, income would increase but as a trade off population growth would decline and even be able to go into the negative. If you set the tax rate at 100, your population would only have time to work and no time to reproduce so as people die off of old age there would be no new population to take their place so your population would go down. In the same sense, if you set your tax rate to 0 then your population grow rate would go up to as much as 2-3 times (yes double or triple your pop each tick) but your income bonus would be 0. This would mean that if someone had 1 million pop on their planet and after ops was down to 500 pop, it would take them 12 ticks to recover instead of potentially weeks.

Now this all seems great for a pop bankers population growth and recovering from spells but how does that affect the other roles. Well that is where part two of this idea comes from. Part two of this would be the implementation of a minimum population limit. This would mean that no matter what the role or what race, if you drop below the minimum limit there would be negative impacts. The negative impact I had in mind was something like a population strike that would basically freeze all building and training of troops. You would not be able to send expos or fleets and if fleets are en route, you do not get the action to actually finish the attack. Your troops would basically be a defensive unit and that is all. Basically your whole empire comes to a halt. With this, the Welfare Research would need a tweak so that it Increases Max Population and Decreases the minimum population limit. This is because pop bankers have significantly more population and it would be immensely unfair if their empires were halted and yet they have 10M population still where a CF banker is halted with far less.

Now how does this whole thing bring about a better balance for the above noted issues.

  1. Pop bankers would have more control over pop growth and can increase or decrease growth based on their needs.
  2. CF bankers have ability to produce more revenue with a slightly added risk to keep them competitive.
  3. Attackers and Resourcers could now become targets for spells like Hypnotize and E-Storm. Imaging a pre-emptive strike right before a war. Take out all the attackers population and now they are stuck basically in a defensive mode until they jump their pop above the minimum limit!
  4. Pop bankers would be able to recover in a much more reasonable amount of time than they presently can. Pop Bankers could take no income bonus for 2 days and be recovered instead of being down for a week or more.
  5. CF bankers targeted by OPs like OH could set their tax to 100 in an effort to reduce the impact of the OH.

Just some thoughts, looking forward to feed back on this to be able to further the idea more.

CityOfLostAngels

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I would also say minimum population limit would need to either be based on % of max population or a set amount x number of planets.

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I’d say due to shorter rounds and smaller family size that it would be nice to see some changes to fix population banking.

In years past you might have had:

5 or 6 people passing planets to a banker.
5 or 6 people all sending aid to a banker.
5 or 6 people all building farms for a banker.
5 or 6 people all helping towards big jumps.

Now with smaller family sizes and shorter rounds its more difficult to build a population banker because you don’t really have the time or another 5 or 6 people helping.

Not saying population banking is bad, but it does seem to have taken a hit, where unless I’m mistaken CF / TO banking has stayed the exact same. I mean people complained years ago that population banking was already difficult and that was before the shorter rounds and smaller families.

Kind of feels pop banking is dead / has become redundant and that unless some changes are made then it will just be a dead part of the game / dead option which is no longer used, which is a shame.

Increased starting population on planets / increase pop growth rate / lowering the cost or build time of certain buildings would perhaps help address the shorter rounds and smaller family sizes.

Regarding Hypnotize and Electric Storms, I have always viewed them as a little over powered and found it odd that 2 spells target population. That a banker has to worry about nukes, but also TWO spells as well.

There a lots of reasons not to population bank, cost, time, food, protecting from nukes and spells. However it would be a shame to leave population banking broken.

The seemingly CF / TO banking hasn’t been effected much by smaller families and shorter rounds, where population banking has been effected.

This isn’t a question if population of CF / TO banking is better, either way it would be a shame to leave population banking unbalanced. Guess the galaxy just seems a little more fun with 2 different types of bankers, so some tweaks to pop banking might produce more varied bankers again.

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