Hello, I had recently done some thinking on the economy in Hazeron and had some thoughts and suggestions that could make it more compelling and interesting. I will freely admit I have not sat down and ran any numbers or done any balancing, these are just broad strokes ideas that would require some additional work and can't just be slapped in, but my hope is that from these broad ideas a discussion could be spawned that might inspire Haxus into making the economy more meaningful and generally just better. I'm an armchair game designer after all, so this is by no means the highest quality. It has two key components, making wealth actually used/important and some changes to how industry/cities function. They are interconnected so the I'll just start with the industry/cities changes.
One thing I thought was weird was how there was never a good abstraction of a civilian economy, and all empires were fully command economies. It is certainly easier this way, but I think it would be cool to enable free market societies or (the likely more common) mixed economies. The first change is the edition of an economic tab for every building. This tab will display the economic importance of the building, showing players how much money that building costs/produces and provides the ability to set the economic "mode" of the building, where there are two modes: Civilian owned and Government owned. This is a building wide option, not a per process option, meaning all processes run by the building are affected. This is to reduce computation for civilian processes.
Civilian buildings have all the same processes as before, except they do not actually produce resources that go into the ordinary city stockpile. Instead, they produce money that goes into the government bank account at the city. This represents taxation on businesses. Perhaps it could be related to the commodity value and a player set tax rate, with higher rates having a negative outcome or more simply just be based on the commodity value. To reduce computation on cities, and prevent the issue of two separate stockpiles and now double the calculations needed on a city to update two separate stockpiles, instead the civilian economy is heavily abstracted in a ratio form where this ratio is only updated with a process is changed, so that 99% of the time it doesn't need to be recalculated and a flat value can be used. For example, 1 ore mining process can support 2 metal smelting processes. This means the "ore" balance would be +1 from each civilian mine process, and -0.5 from each civilian smelter process. With just one ore mine process, the first two metal smelting processes will complete but the addition of a third would not be able to run. Instead of rechecking every city update, this is just saved as a property of the building so every update that building produces X$ for the government, where that value is equal to the economic output of the first two processes. The only time that would change is when new processes are available. Intercity trade does enable the access of resources from outside the city however, so that would need to be taken into account. But again, this shouldn't need to be checked constantly and only when something in the system changes.
Government owned buildings operate nearly identical to how they currently function, where the resources they produce are dumped into the city stockpile. Two changes are made however. Workers employed by a government owned building are paid a salary out of the government (city) bank account, which means government owned buildings actually cost the government money to maintain. Not enough money means the workers stop working and the processes that cannot be funded stall. Additionally, a new option appears to buy resources from the civilian economy during shortages. If the government stockpile runs empty and the process cannot run AND the civilian economy can support an additional process, the process can run and instead of subtracting the resource from the stockpile (which is 0) it will subtract an amount of money from the government bank account that is related to the commodity price. As this is coupled to industrial capacity of the civilian economy, this doesn't enable the production of resources from money, it just means you can utilize civilian economy for some stages of your production. For example, you could have all of your raw resource producers civilian owned, and all of your smelters and refineries government owned.
Another, ancillary, change that might be helpful then is the idea of building and process priority. With limited resource flow comes the issue of "what process/buildings gets resources first?" I think right now the answer is "The building that gets computed first, and some of those processes but this is all random." If it isn't too computationally expensive to sort buildings by a player set priority, and then the processes in the building are displayed in priority order. This would mean the player could choose what should operate first. For example, a player might decide it is more important to produce bombs than blank disks, so in the condition of a limited amount of metal producers but a large amount of metal consumers, the bomb factories get metal before the blank disk factories. Additionally, in the bomb factory, the process to make Bomb Bl Black cat is above the process to make Bomb SlCr Meat Slicer, meaning the Bomb Bl Black cat process will get resources before the Meat Slicer bombs will, so if when the Black Cat process is run the city runs out of resources, the Slicer process and any processes below it will not run, nor will any processes in buildings below that bomb factory in the priority list. The building priority would be set at the city capitol building, and by default they are all equal priority (ie what happens now?). So you could have a majority of buildings unassigned, but if the player really wants one specific building to always work when possible, just setting that one building to priority 1 would enable that. No micromanagement needed unless the player wants. Additionally, all buildings default to government owned when built, to reduce micromanagement.
The last change is on how trade connections function and this introduces the idea of link capacities. As we are all familiar, there are the five connection types. Neighbor connections have a near infinite capacity, but would need to introduce some kind of restriction so that roads are still used instead of just a clump of buildings. My initial suggestion is just a straight limit on how many buildings another can connect to or something. Obviously needs more thought.
Road connections have a capacity that is related to the type of road. A dirt road has a low capacity, but is cheap to maintain. An asphalt road has a high capacity, but is more expensive to maintain.
A sea connection has a greater capacity than roads, but each wharf provides a flat capacity so if the sea connection is maxed out, you need to build more wharves.
Similarly, air and space connections have a flat capacity and to simultaneously transfer more resources per city cycle would require additional air/space ports.
These trade connection capacities are to introduce a logistical challenge, and to provide an additional wealth sink as the cost of trading between cities will vary based on the connection types. Road trade is cheap, sea connection is moderate, air/space is expensive.
Next are the changes to the economy/wealth itself. There are four important bank accounts: player accounts, ship accounts, city/military base accounts, and the empire account. They each have their own type of income and expenses.
Player accounts
Each player has a personal bank account.
Income:
Each spaceship has a bank account.
Income: (same for both classes)
For privately owned ships:
City accounts
Each city has a bank account once that city has a bank.
Income:
These are very similar to city accounts, as a military base is really just a special planet-wide city. A bank building is not required for this account to exist, it is accessed at the Military HQ.
Income sources:
The empire has a bank account once the empire has a capital established with a bank.
Income:
Government and Empire Budgets
Every city and the empire as a whole has a budget which dictates the priority of where money is spent. Ideally this priority should be very customizable. The reason this is important to have is because there are different penalties to the lack of payment for different fees, and a player should get to choose the order in which these penalties may be faced. At the city level, a mayor may decide that it is most important to pay civic upkeep, setting that to the highest priority. Civic upkeep will be paid first, and only after it is paid would the other bills be paid. The mayor may decide that after civic upkeep all city salary expenses must be paid. This would continue. If at any point, the city bank account reaches a negative value as a result of payment, the city goes into debt. Some payments may continue, some may not. This relates to absolute and relative debt ceilings. Both cities and the empire has an absolute debt ceiling which is the maximum amount of debt allowed before all payments are stopped. The absolute debt ceiling of the empire is much higher than a city, and the exact value would be a game balance concern. As a policy, a relative debt ceiling can be set for different payment types. What this means is some payments may continue while the account is in debt while others may not. For example, a city mayor may decide that civic upkeep, being the most important, is paid until the absolute debt ceiling is hit. The mayor may also decide that City Salary expenses will be paid until the city is 10% in debt relative to the absolute debt ceiling. However, the mayor may decide that trade connection fees are not important enough to force the city to go into debt over. Government tribute and Empire Tax are always the highest priority, however both will not be paid if the city account is in debt. As per the stated example, if the absolute debt ceiling of a city is one billion credits, once the city account is -100,000,000 all city salary payments stop until the city account balance is above -100,000,000. The consequences of not paying that bill will begin. Military bases cannot go into debt, as they only have one continuous expense. When a military base account reaches 0, all payments stop and the consequences of non-payment begin. The empire can similarly set it's relative debt ceilings. Ideally each subsidy would have it's own policy on when to halt payment, as some subsidized cities/bases may be deemed more important than others. For example, one might want to stop paying the backwater city before stopping the subsidy for the important military base defending the capital.
Government/Empire budgets are more realistic as now governments can have debt. Find me a real life nation or government that isn't in debt! This feature would 100% need to be decently balanced, and the idea is when the government coffers run dry, everything doesn't immediately start falling apart which should give time for players to change things. But an empire that has massive, long-standing debts will start to fall apart as workers stop working, roads crumble, trade halts, etc.
Loans and Debts
Loans are a way to borrow from the civilian population. Both players and the empire can take out loans. The only changes to this system are allowing the empire to take out loans and enforcing per cycle payment of the loan similar to how real loans work where you must pay some portion of the balance. Ideally loans would also charge interest rates, and perhaps the interest rate would scale with the reputation of the borrower where low reputation results in higher interest. For loans to the empire, there could be a flat interest rate or the interest rate could scale with an empire credit value that is like player reputation but is affected by successful or unsuccessful payments.
Debts are represented by a negative account balance. A player can only go into debt from loan payments, they cannot go into debt from any other method. When a player is in debt, any income is used to repay that debt. For example, if they take out a 5 million credit loan, manage to pay 2 million of it but never make any more income, eventually they will go 3 million (plus any interest if that gets added to loans in the future) in debt which would be represented by a personal account balance of -3,000,000. From that point, any time the player makes money from wealth transfers, salaries, or sales that money increases their account balance like normal, but if after these payments the player account balance is still less than zero, they cannot pay any money to another player, bank account, nor can they buy commodities from a city nor take out additional loans. They must find a way to work off their debt. There is no limit to personal debt, although the soft limit is based of the negative of their credit limit as loans are the only way for a player to go into debt.
A city can go into debt, represented by a negative balance in the city's bank account. This can happen from any city expense, unlike player accounts. Which payments continue while in debt are dictated by the city's budget which is modified at the city capital building.
The empire government can go into debt as well, represented by a negative balance in the empire bank account. This can happen from any empire bank account expense, as with cities. Additionally, the empire can still make all payments while in debt, these payments simply further increase the debt. Payments are made as the government budget is dictated, and stop when the relative debt ceiling policy for those payments dictate.
Ships and military bases cannot go into debt. Once the balance reaches zero, all payments stop.
I left out minting money, because ideally minting money should devalue currency as it does in real life to limit the usefulness of it to players but as currency has a static value I cannot currently think of a good way to penalize the player from mass minting money. Minting money as a quick/instant source of money for a government is already solved by the government loan/debt system.
To address the likely first criticism of "wow this is so/too complicated waa." It is important to have default settings for these new concepts. They would be set such that by default, the player shouldn't have to tweak too much constantly to be reasonable profitable. This would reduce a lot of micromanagement already, but enable a lot of player control. Additionally, no matter how complex a game system is what matters is how it is expressed and introduced to the player. Hazeron already has a problem with this in many ways, so this should be no different. It just needs to be clearly explained during the tutorial. Tooltips need to be clear. Descriptions in places need to be clear. Yes, it will take tweaking. Yes, not everyone will instantly understand it. It's okay. Finally, complexity is a good thing. Hazeron needs more complexity. The game is pretty barebones and not very complex for being a galaxy spanning empire simulator. Adding some complexity to this isn't a bad thing.
I have produced a few screenshots showing how this may all be displayed in game.
![[Image: bJLbOlf.png]](https://i.imgur.com/bJLbOlf.png)
[Building Economy Tab]
Here is the building economy tab, where the building ownership is selected and the policy on if government buildings buy civilian resources is set. For government buildings it displays the maximum a building may cost for salaries to give an idea on the budget. For civilian buildings it displays the income generated from the processes. This value should be accurate, as it is recalculated only when civilian processes change from addition/removal instead of every cycle.
Not displayed, buildings with housing would show how much property tax the building provides.
![[Image: wdsCt1X.png]](https://i.imgur.com/wdsCt1X.png)
[Building Window]
Some changes to the building windows, the capitol building lists the building owner and priority. This priority is editable from this listing by entering a value. Buildings without a value and buildings with the same priority are processed in whatever order is most convenient programmatically. For buildings with Manufacturing processes, text is added to make it clear that the order processes are listed is the priority used. The screenshot shows an example of a civilian building, where instead of the usual Products and Input values, it is using the civilian economy and informs the player if the process will run or will not run. This is only updated/recalculated when processes are changed. In this example, there are 2 "units" of metal available in the civilian economy. The Hammer, Shovel, and Sewing Needle require 1 "unit" each. The Hammer and Shovel will run as they will each have a metal, but the Sewing needle and all processes below it will not as by that point there is not enough metal in the civilian economy. As this is a capitol building, there is a coins button at the top which will open the city budget window.
![[Image: NbTzrsn.png]](https://i.imgur.com/NbTzrsn.png)
[City Budget]
This window explains budgets and debt ceilings, and is where the priority of all expenses are set along with the relative debt ceiling cutoff points. The list is populated by all expenses, and the priority and relative debt ceiling values are editable by the player. All cities should start with a default policy.
![[Image: yEMlbTH.png]](https://i.imgur.com/yEMlbTH.png)
[Empire budget]
The changed empire tax policy window. This window allows the emperor to change the tribute and empire tax amounts. Additionally the empire budget is changed here. This is identical to the city budget expense section.
One thing I thought was weird was how there was never a good abstraction of a civilian economy, and all empires were fully command economies. It is certainly easier this way, but I think it would be cool to enable free market societies or (the likely more common) mixed economies. The first change is the edition of an economic tab for every building. This tab will display the economic importance of the building, showing players how much money that building costs/produces and provides the ability to set the economic "mode" of the building, where there are two modes: Civilian owned and Government owned. This is a building wide option, not a per process option, meaning all processes run by the building are affected. This is to reduce computation for civilian processes.
Civilian buildings have all the same processes as before, except they do not actually produce resources that go into the ordinary city stockpile. Instead, they produce money that goes into the government bank account at the city. This represents taxation on businesses. Perhaps it could be related to the commodity value and a player set tax rate, with higher rates having a negative outcome or more simply just be based on the commodity value. To reduce computation on cities, and prevent the issue of two separate stockpiles and now double the calculations needed on a city to update two separate stockpiles, instead the civilian economy is heavily abstracted in a ratio form where this ratio is only updated with a process is changed, so that 99% of the time it doesn't need to be recalculated and a flat value can be used. For example, 1 ore mining process can support 2 metal smelting processes. This means the "ore" balance would be +1 from each civilian mine process, and -0.5 from each civilian smelter process. With just one ore mine process, the first two metal smelting processes will complete but the addition of a third would not be able to run. Instead of rechecking every city update, this is just saved as a property of the building so every update that building produces X$ for the government, where that value is equal to the economic output of the first two processes. The only time that would change is when new processes are available. Intercity trade does enable the access of resources from outside the city however, so that would need to be taken into account. But again, this shouldn't need to be checked constantly and only when something in the system changes.
Government owned buildings operate nearly identical to how they currently function, where the resources they produce are dumped into the city stockpile. Two changes are made however. Workers employed by a government owned building are paid a salary out of the government (city) bank account, which means government owned buildings actually cost the government money to maintain. Not enough money means the workers stop working and the processes that cannot be funded stall. Additionally, a new option appears to buy resources from the civilian economy during shortages. If the government stockpile runs empty and the process cannot run AND the civilian economy can support an additional process, the process can run and instead of subtracting the resource from the stockpile (which is 0) it will subtract an amount of money from the government bank account that is related to the commodity price. As this is coupled to industrial capacity of the civilian economy, this doesn't enable the production of resources from money, it just means you can utilize civilian economy for some stages of your production. For example, you could have all of your raw resource producers civilian owned, and all of your smelters and refineries government owned.
Another, ancillary, change that might be helpful then is the idea of building and process priority. With limited resource flow comes the issue of "what process/buildings gets resources first?" I think right now the answer is "The building that gets computed first, and some of those processes but this is all random." If it isn't too computationally expensive to sort buildings by a player set priority, and then the processes in the building are displayed in priority order. This would mean the player could choose what should operate first. For example, a player might decide it is more important to produce bombs than blank disks, so in the condition of a limited amount of metal producers but a large amount of metal consumers, the bomb factories get metal before the blank disk factories. Additionally, in the bomb factory, the process to make Bomb Bl Black cat is above the process to make Bomb SlCr Meat Slicer, meaning the Bomb Bl Black cat process will get resources before the Meat Slicer bombs will, so if when the Black Cat process is run the city runs out of resources, the Slicer process and any processes below it will not run, nor will any processes in buildings below that bomb factory in the priority list. The building priority would be set at the city capitol building, and by default they are all equal priority (ie what happens now?). So you could have a majority of buildings unassigned, but if the player really wants one specific building to always work when possible, just setting that one building to priority 1 would enable that. No micromanagement needed unless the player wants. Additionally, all buildings default to government owned when built, to reduce micromanagement.
The last change is on how trade connections function and this introduces the idea of link capacities. As we are all familiar, there are the five connection types. Neighbor connections have a near infinite capacity, but would need to introduce some kind of restriction so that roads are still used instead of just a clump of buildings. My initial suggestion is just a straight limit on how many buildings another can connect to or something. Obviously needs more thought.
Road connections have a capacity that is related to the type of road. A dirt road has a low capacity, but is cheap to maintain. An asphalt road has a high capacity, but is more expensive to maintain.
A sea connection has a greater capacity than roads, but each wharf provides a flat capacity so if the sea connection is maxed out, you need to build more wharves.
Similarly, air and space connections have a flat capacity and to simultaneously transfer more resources per city cycle would require additional air/space ports.
These trade connection capacities are to introduce a logistical challenge, and to provide an additional wealth sink as the cost of trading between cities will vary based on the connection types. Road trade is cheap, sea connection is moderate, air/space is expensive.
Next are the changes to the economy/wealth itself. There are four important bank accounts: player accounts, ship accounts, city/military base accounts, and the empire account. They each have their own type of income and expenses.
Player accounts
Each player has a personal bank account.
Income:
- Salary - If the player holds a government position that has a salary, they get that salary if it is paid.
- Sales - When the player sells a commodity, they make money.
- Wealth transfers - A player can withdraw money from any bank account they have access to, be it a ship, city, or the empire account. Additionally any money sent from a player to a player is represented by this.
- Income from working a job - The player gets paid for any process they work, just like an NPC citizen. The player can only work at government owned buildings, not civilian. The money for this gets paid out of the empire bank account. If the empire bank account has a balance that is equal to or less than 0, the player gains personal government debt that can be redeemed at any bank for up to amount owed once the empire bank account balance has that amount of money. The debt does not need to be paid in full, partial payments from the empire bank account reduce the personal government debt. The player pays income tax on this amount.
- Taxes - Players must pay sales tax for all personal transactions. Players additionally pay income tax from a salary if they get one, and from any job income. Income tax from players is paid to the empire bank account, not a city.
- Wealth transfers - Any money transferred to another account, be it player, ship, city, or empire.
- Personal Loan payments - Until a personal loan is repaid, a portion of the remaining loan balance is paid out every cycle. If the player does not have any money, the cost of the payment is still subtracted from the player account and the player goes into debt. See the debt section below for more details.
Each spaceship has a bank account.
Income: (same for both classes)
- Sales - When a ship sells a commodity, the ship makes money.
- Wealth transfer - the owner, or a player with a government title of sufficient access, can transfer money to the ship account
For privately owned ships:
- Salary - All crew, troops, and officers must be paid for their work. Failure to pay has consequences (slower performance, desertion, etc)
- Sales tax - When a ship sells a commodity, sales tax applies.
- Wealth transfer - The captain/owner of the ship can withdraw money from the ship.
- Sales tax - when a fleet ship sells a commodity, sales tax still applies.
- Fleet tax - An additional tax applied to fleet spacecraft when a commodity is sold. This tax goes into the empire bank account instead of the city.
- Wealth transfer - any title holder with sufficient permissions can withdraw money from the ship.
City accounts
Each city has a bank account once that city has a bank.
Income:
- Every house produces an amount of money that represents property tax. The amount is related to the quality of the home and the number of people living in that home. As I have not put any hard numbers on this, I will express it in a simple ratio to get the idea across. Small homes produce 0.5x the tax amount per citizen. Medium homes produce 1x the tax amount per citizen. Large homes produce 2x the tax amount per citizen. I.e. more "valuable" and "luxury" housing have higher property taxes.
- Business/corporation taxes - every civilian owned building produces money for the government to represent a taxation on private enterprises, this is more detailed above in the civilian building section.
- Sales taxes - Any time a player or ship sells a commodity, a sales tax is collected and retained in the city bank account where that sale occurred.
- Income taxes - A tax set by empire policy on all worker income. All NPC workers pay this tax.
- Tribute income - A tax paid to a capital city from all cities underneath it's control. This income occurs every cycle and the amount of a cities bank account that is transferred upstream is set by empire policy. This could be changed to every day as it is now for less fluidity of wealth.
- Subsidies - A revenue source from the empire. As cities are owned in a hierarchy of titles, wealth can flow backwards through this. Starting at the top, an emperor can provide subsidies to any city in the empire, where this wealth would come directly from the empire government bank account. Additionally, holders of government titles that have jurisdiction over cities below them can provide a subsidy that pays out of that holders top level city bank account. The holder of jurisdiction over the galaxy can pay a subsidy to any city in their galaxy, where the money comes from the galaxy capital city's bank account. A sector governor can pay a subsidy to any city in their sector, and that money is taken out of the sector capital city's bank account. A system owner can pay a subsidy to any city in their system, and that money is taken out of the system capital city's bank account. If the addition of a system capital is not desired, then the chain would just stop at the sector level.
- Wealth transfer - a title holder with jurisdiction can transfer wealth from their personal account into a city's bank account.
- City salary expenses - Every worker in a government owned building must be paid, or they do not work. A portion of this is repaid to the city in the form of income tax. Workers in Civilian owned industry are paid for by the civilian economy, not the government (I.E. there is no salary expense for these buildings).
- Civic upkeep - Infrastructure costs money to maintain! For roads, a flat cost is applied based on the length of the segment and the type of the road. Dirt roads are dirt cheap, while asphalt roads are more costly. This cost only needs to be calculated once, upon the completion of roads so there should be little computational overhead. Failure to pay road expenses will result in roads gradually getting damaged, which represents the neglected upkeep. Eventually the road will get destroyed and is no longer usable, meaning buildings are no longer connected. Buildings not connected could now take damage, which could represent a new form of decay based on economy instead of time or visitation. This could be an additional decay form instead of a replacement too, but it more accurately represents the extent an empire can occupy. More cities, more roads, more costs to maintain! Additionally, other forms of infrastructure such as bridges, tunnels (when implemented), and superstructures such as biodomes and platforms cost money to maintain, a flat fee per infrastructure object where the more advanced/complex ones cost more (biodomes cost more than aerial platforms, which cost more than ground platforms, etc). Failure to pay for these will reduce their health until they crumble from disrepair and are destroyed. This can result in the total loss of buildings for the crumbling of a platform, or result in mass citizen death if the biodome crumbles! It is important to maintain infrastructure!
- Trade connection fees / import fees - The use of a trade connection link costs money for a city, which is an abstraction of the cost of the mode of transportation. Goods delivered by road are cheap, goods delivered by sea are moderately expensive, goods delivered by air are expensive, and goods delivered by space are highly expensive. If the fee is not paid, goods are not moved and trade does not occur. I.e. the city does not import anything if I cannot afford it.
- Research/building process expenses - Money consumed by patent research or by government owned buildings purchasing goods from the civilian economy.
- Government tribute - A tax paid to a capital city if one is above this city. All cities but the empire capital would end up paying this. A city will send a portion of its bank account balance as tribute, where the portion is dictated by empire policy. The default is 50%.
- Empire Tax - This is a special tax that only applies to the empire capital city, replacing the government tribute that all other cities pay. This channels money from the empire capital city's bank account into the empire wide bank account. This is a separate value set by the emperor, enabling the differential transfer of wealth. For example, tribute tax may be 50% so all cities transfer 50% of their account balance to the next highest city. Empire tax might be 80%, meaning the empire capital city will pay 80% of it's account balance to the empire bank account. This is paid every cycle, but as with tribute income, it could be changed to once for less fluidity of wealth.
- Wealth transfer - a title holder with jurisdiction can transfer wealth from the city into their personal account.
- Subsidies - A galaxy, sector, or system capital can pay subsidies to cities or military bases under them. The empire-wide subsidies are paid out of the empire bank account, not the bank account of the empire capital city.
These are very similar to city accounts, as a military base is really just a special planet-wide city. A bank building is not required for this account to exist, it is accessed at the Military HQ.
Income sources:
- Subsidies - The primary income source of a military base, this is money paid from some government in charge of the base. This could be the Empire Government, Galaxy Administration, Sector Administration, or star system owner. Or any combination of these!
- Wealth Transfers - as with city bank accounts, a title holder that has jurisdiction of the military base may deposit money from their personal account into the military base's account.
- Military Building upkeep - All military buildings require money to function, where the cost scales with the power and type of the military building. Failure to pay this upkeep would result in reduced effectiveness, eventually making them non-functional. Buildings that are non-functional will take damage and eventually be destroyed. Once a military base has no buildings other than the HQ, the HQ will take damage until it is destroyed and with it the military base is lost.
- Civic Upkeep - Any infrastructure that is not in the jurisdiction of a city is assumed to be owned by the military base. The military base must pay to upkeep this infrastructure, and failure to pay results in the consequences as described in the Civic Upkeep section for city expenses.
- Wealth transfers - as with city bank accounts, a title holder that has jurisdiction of the military base may withdraw money from the base bank account into their personal account.
The empire has a bank account once the empire has a capital established with a bank.
Income:
- Empire Tax - A separate value from the existing tribute, this is the percent of money in the empire capital city's bank account that is transferred to the empire bank account.
- Income tax - Income tax is collected from all avatars in the empire and paid directly to the empire bank account when that income is earned.
- Wealth transfer - Any citizen of the empire can deposit money into the empire bank account.
- Government salaries - The crew, officers, and troops on government owned spacecraft/stations must be paid or they will stop working (or some other punishment). Additionally, all government positions have a salary as well that gets paid to office holders, with the default positions all having a default starting value that is "well balanced" but enabling the option of changing this amount so if a player wants their emperor to be paid a trillion credits a day they can, although that'd probably quickly bankrupt them. This is to provide an income source for players that might not necessarily have any physical holdings (cities etc) or simply an additional source of income in larger empires consisting of multiple players.
- Player job fees - A player that works a job in any city in the empire is paid. This is paid from the empire bank account, not the city. If the empire bank account is in debt, the player is instead issued personal government debt that they can redeem when the empire is no longer in debt.
- Subsidies - Money paid to any city in the empire. Empire wide subsidies can only be set up by those who have domain over the universe (or if empire roles become a thing, those with that specific role like empire treasury access).
- Government Loan payments - Until a Government loan is repaid, a portion of the remaining loan balance is paid out every cycle. This will continue even if the account balance is equal to or less than zero, bringing the empire further into debt.
- Wealth transfer - any citizen with domain over the universe (or empire treasury access if that system gets revamped) can withdraw money from the empire bank account into their personal bank account.
Government and Empire Budgets
Every city and the empire as a whole has a budget which dictates the priority of where money is spent. Ideally this priority should be very customizable. The reason this is important to have is because there are different penalties to the lack of payment for different fees, and a player should get to choose the order in which these penalties may be faced. At the city level, a mayor may decide that it is most important to pay civic upkeep, setting that to the highest priority. Civic upkeep will be paid first, and only after it is paid would the other bills be paid. The mayor may decide that after civic upkeep all city salary expenses must be paid. This would continue. If at any point, the city bank account reaches a negative value as a result of payment, the city goes into debt. Some payments may continue, some may not. This relates to absolute and relative debt ceilings. Both cities and the empire has an absolute debt ceiling which is the maximum amount of debt allowed before all payments are stopped. The absolute debt ceiling of the empire is much higher than a city, and the exact value would be a game balance concern. As a policy, a relative debt ceiling can be set for different payment types. What this means is some payments may continue while the account is in debt while others may not. For example, a city mayor may decide that civic upkeep, being the most important, is paid until the absolute debt ceiling is hit. The mayor may also decide that City Salary expenses will be paid until the city is 10% in debt relative to the absolute debt ceiling. However, the mayor may decide that trade connection fees are not important enough to force the city to go into debt over. Government tribute and Empire Tax are always the highest priority, however both will not be paid if the city account is in debt. As per the stated example, if the absolute debt ceiling of a city is one billion credits, once the city account is -100,000,000 all city salary payments stop until the city account balance is above -100,000,000. The consequences of not paying that bill will begin. Military bases cannot go into debt, as they only have one continuous expense. When a military base account reaches 0, all payments stop and the consequences of non-payment begin. The empire can similarly set it's relative debt ceilings. Ideally each subsidy would have it's own policy on when to halt payment, as some subsidized cities/bases may be deemed more important than others. For example, one might want to stop paying the backwater city before stopping the subsidy for the important military base defending the capital.
Government/Empire budgets are more realistic as now governments can have debt. Find me a real life nation or government that isn't in debt! This feature would 100% need to be decently balanced, and the idea is when the government coffers run dry, everything doesn't immediately start falling apart which should give time for players to change things. But an empire that has massive, long-standing debts will start to fall apart as workers stop working, roads crumble, trade halts, etc.
Loans and Debts
Loans are a way to borrow from the civilian population. Both players and the empire can take out loans. The only changes to this system are allowing the empire to take out loans and enforcing per cycle payment of the loan similar to how real loans work where you must pay some portion of the balance. Ideally loans would also charge interest rates, and perhaps the interest rate would scale with the reputation of the borrower where low reputation results in higher interest. For loans to the empire, there could be a flat interest rate or the interest rate could scale with an empire credit value that is like player reputation but is affected by successful or unsuccessful payments.
Debts are represented by a negative account balance. A player can only go into debt from loan payments, they cannot go into debt from any other method. When a player is in debt, any income is used to repay that debt. For example, if they take out a 5 million credit loan, manage to pay 2 million of it but never make any more income, eventually they will go 3 million (plus any interest if that gets added to loans in the future) in debt which would be represented by a personal account balance of -3,000,000. From that point, any time the player makes money from wealth transfers, salaries, or sales that money increases their account balance like normal, but if after these payments the player account balance is still less than zero, they cannot pay any money to another player, bank account, nor can they buy commodities from a city nor take out additional loans. They must find a way to work off their debt. There is no limit to personal debt, although the soft limit is based of the negative of their credit limit as loans are the only way for a player to go into debt.
A city can go into debt, represented by a negative balance in the city's bank account. This can happen from any city expense, unlike player accounts. Which payments continue while in debt are dictated by the city's budget which is modified at the city capital building.
The empire government can go into debt as well, represented by a negative balance in the empire bank account. This can happen from any empire bank account expense, as with cities. Additionally, the empire can still make all payments while in debt, these payments simply further increase the debt. Payments are made as the government budget is dictated, and stop when the relative debt ceiling policy for those payments dictate.
Ships and military bases cannot go into debt. Once the balance reaches zero, all payments stop.
I left out minting money, because ideally minting money should devalue currency as it does in real life to limit the usefulness of it to players but as currency has a static value I cannot currently think of a good way to penalize the player from mass minting money. Minting money as a quick/instant source of money for a government is already solved by the government loan/debt system.
To address the likely first criticism of "wow this is so/too complicated waa." It is important to have default settings for these new concepts. They would be set such that by default, the player shouldn't have to tweak too much constantly to be reasonable profitable. This would reduce a lot of micromanagement already, but enable a lot of player control. Additionally, no matter how complex a game system is what matters is how it is expressed and introduced to the player. Hazeron already has a problem with this in many ways, so this should be no different. It just needs to be clearly explained during the tutorial. Tooltips need to be clear. Descriptions in places need to be clear. Yes, it will take tweaking. Yes, not everyone will instantly understand it. It's okay. Finally, complexity is a good thing. Hazeron needs more complexity. The game is pretty barebones and not very complex for being a galaxy spanning empire simulator. Adding some complexity to this isn't a bad thing.
I have produced a few screenshots showing how this may all be displayed in game.
[Building Economy Tab]
Here is the building economy tab, where the building ownership is selected and the policy on if government buildings buy civilian resources is set. For government buildings it displays the maximum a building may cost for salaries to give an idea on the budget. For civilian buildings it displays the income generated from the processes. This value should be accurate, as it is recalculated only when civilian processes change from addition/removal instead of every cycle.
Not displayed, buildings with housing would show how much property tax the building provides.
[Building Window]
Some changes to the building windows, the capitol building lists the building owner and priority. This priority is editable from this listing by entering a value. Buildings without a value and buildings with the same priority are processed in whatever order is most convenient programmatically. For buildings with Manufacturing processes, text is added to make it clear that the order processes are listed is the priority used. The screenshot shows an example of a civilian building, where instead of the usual Products and Input values, it is using the civilian economy and informs the player if the process will run or will not run. This is only updated/recalculated when processes are changed. In this example, there are 2 "units" of metal available in the civilian economy. The Hammer, Shovel, and Sewing Needle require 1 "unit" each. The Hammer and Shovel will run as they will each have a metal, but the Sewing needle and all processes below it will not as by that point there is not enough metal in the civilian economy. As this is a capitol building, there is a coins button at the top which will open the city budget window.
[City Budget]
This window explains budgets and debt ceilings, and is where the priority of all expenses are set along with the relative debt ceiling cutoff points. The list is populated by all expenses, and the priority and relative debt ceiling values are editable by the player. All cities should start with a default policy.
[Empire budget]
The changed empire tax policy window. This window allows the emperor to change the tribute and empire tax amounts. Additionally the empire budget is changed here. This is identical to the city budget expense section.