Are you certain you had no economic bonus? 'Cos those numbers are consistent with a 10% bonus (it may have come from tech, or political party...check your race stats screen).

To calculate income on any given planet, you need:

1. Population in millions. Thus 5 billion is 5000.
2. Your civilization economy bonus. You'll find this under the civ stats screen. It contains a variety of things, so don't assume it's zero just 'cos you took that pick.
3. The planetary bonus, available in the colony details screen.
4. Government type, if any, out of Star Repbulic/Democracy/Federation. These give 10/20/30% bonuses respectively (the descriptions in game are wrong)
5. Tax rate

Then the formula is

Income=sqrt(population)*civ economy bonus*planetary bonus*government type bonus*tax rate

Example: 6B people on planet with 50% racial ability, 40% tax rate, Star Democracy and 90% planetary bonus would give

Income=sqrt(6000)*1.5*1.9*1.1*0.5

With *zero* civ ability and no planetary bonus, 5B at 40% tax should give

sqrt(5000)*0.4=28 which is why I suspect you forgot a 10% bonus. Note there's a few techs that give that bonus and I think one of the political parties too so it could have come from there.

Thanks for the information Random50. One question though what about trade income where does that come into it?

Ta

Jase

Trade income is a completely seperate thing, and is independent from your taxrate. ou set up the route, and then you get money depending on the distance ond planet wuality of the two planets.

So does the trade income get added to the planet the route connects, at the end of all the calculations, or does it go straight into your coffers?

The reason for all this economic stuff is that every time I get to a certain point in the game I start losing money rapidly. So, I thought that if I learn more I might do better.

Ta

Jase

local income has no importance afaik. all income is pooled and spent where you have the facilities for production. no need to ballance your budget planet by planet

if that point is just at the end of your colony rush you are suffering from a serious population deficit. this does NOT mean you need more farms, it means your growth rate is too low for your planets to pay for themselves. put another way, you have too many planets, each having support costs. the low population you have due to poor growth rate makes that cumulative support cost exceed your income. so, 2 possible solutions.

1) stop your colony rush early. not my favorite option. leave yourself a cash reserve to give those planets you do have time to grow enough to generate income.

2) increase your growth rate. one way is to increase your morale. LOWERING your tax rate early can get you a good boost in population with minimal cost. 100% morale gives double growth rate, 75% gives +25%. when you have few planets you can't get much from taxation anyhow so crank morale to 100% for a bit to get an initial population boost. learn from experience when it is time to back it down to pick up money. soil enhancement->habitat improvement makes aphrodisiac trade good available(+50% growth). last, and my personal favorite, population growth as a racial bonus. i normally run 30% growth bonus no matter what race i play, and consider it a bargain.

My cash problems usually happen later in the game. For several turns I'll lose loads of money then suddenly make money, only for it to flip again a turn or two later. This seems to happen even if I don't have anything in the build queues, so if I can get my planets to be self supporting then I know that my money problem is else where.

Jase

The income from any individual trade route varies depending on how far the freighter is along the route. And it can vary *wildly*...by a factor of 5 times or more with long routes on big maps. Multiple trade routes should smooth this out a little but it's still likely your overall trade income will vary quite a bit from turn to turn. Could that be the reason?

The other possibility I can think of...there's an income penalty for your treasury moving over 20000BC, something like 20% I think (multiply expected income by 0.8) What might be happening is that you pass over 20000, so your income drops and you start losing money, but a few turns later you're back under 20000 so the income picks back up again. Another few turns later you move over 20000 again and start to lose money etc, etc.

The other possibility I can think of...there's an income penalty for your treasury moving over 20000BC, something like 20% I think (multiply expected income by 0.8) What might be happening is that you pass over 20000, so your income drops and you start losing money, but a few turns later you're back under 20000 so the income picks back up again. Another few turns later you move over 20000 again and start to lose money etc, etc.

That's what happens, why is there a penalty? It makes it a lot harder to save the cash to mass upgrade ships, and when you have a wildly swinging income how are you suposed to know if you have funds to spend on ship building. Sounds a bit daft to me, so I could have a good economy and it's the game changing things bah!!

Jase

I agree, it's very annoying.

My cash problems usually happen later in the game. For several turns I'll lose loads of money then suddenly make money, only for it to flip again a turn or two later. This seems to happen even if I don't have anything in the build queues, so if I can get my planets to be self supporting then I know that my money problem is else where.

It may be because you don't have anything in the build queues - the economy in the last revs was revamped so that if you weren't building anything the credits weren't spent

If I have anything in the build queues then my funds really do drop. I believe it's what Random50 said about the penalty. How do we go about getting it removed?

Jase

Wow, great posts learned a lot.

What is really annoying to me is that i have to browse thru posts to find out details like these. Think they really need an area on the website that gives detailed information on the game and keeps it updated for the current update.

Are you sure there's a penalty ? I remember in GC1 there was, but never read about it in 2. I've also have a lot of games with a monster economy. It could have been so big, i didn't notice the penalty though...

I haven't checked with 1.3, but yes I'm sure the penalty was there in every version up to that point.

Oh, one other thing, the formula I mentioned earlier on in the thread seems to become unreliable deep into the game. When you have a huge empire, you often end up with less income than you should for some reason. I never worked out what triggered this reduction, and unlike the 20K penalty (which is sudden and severe...look at your finance charts and you'll spot it easily) it's not a "hard" cap.

You're right about the penalty. That seems like a hold-over from GC1, and i don't think it fits the spirit of this game. It's very obvious if you're hovering around 20k, you see a step function back and forth in you economy chart.

I wonder if you're economy score in the end would be ~25% better if you had less than 20k ?

Also what is the impact of advanced governments on morale, is there a penalty like it says or is just harder to win the elections ?