An Economic Overhaul: or How I Learned to Stop Minting and Love the Chronodollar

[martianant]

Holy S*&+#! 

What you call an overhaul I call a complete tear out and replace. I like that this makes money production a serious gameplay requirement and actually puts the money to use while creating realistic limits to empires. 

So starting an empire from scratch, how would you see that happening after these changes? I'm trying to envision starting a new empire from scratch after these changes are made. What steps would be required and in what order? 


The only serious drawback I see to this, is this limits the styles of play a bit. If you wanted to run your empire like a power hungry military society, you would not really be able to do so easily. I would also be curious how this would play out when a planet is occupied. I could see this being mitigated by morale bonus's and penalties. Or even something like, higher Q goods require higher talented workforce meaning a high pay. Better paid work force has a production bonus / better maintained equipment (costs) also = better production yields. 

So much could come from this implementation, my only fear is it might be too complex in a "game" situation.

Starting an empire from scratch would be pretty identical. The economy doesn't have any impact prior to the declaration of an empire capital and the construction of a bank. Buildings would default to empire controlled, so would produce stuff in the stockpile as they currently do. But even if you started with all civilian, it should work fine. In both situations the economy doesn't come into effect until a capital/bank exists. Of course, you'll need money to produce patents pretty early on. That can be funded by taking empire loans, or raising taxes for a while, or just waiting. Right now patents aren't that expensive, but everything would likely need to be rebalanced anyway. That's the key, balance is important and it would take some playtesting and experimenting to find a good value for everything. The beauty of the civilian idea is everything is expressed in ratios, so you can just build everything as a civilian owned building and have a functional economy and profit off it. A civilian owned shipyard would charge the government money to layout a ship, similar to how an individual must pay money to purchase their own ship.

I disagree on the limiting playstyles. A power hungry military society would be completely feasible. Increase taxes, and spend more of your budget on the military bases. Keep them as a high priority, the empire can go into debt to support bases until it goes completely bankrupt. You also could have a complete command economy and never have a civilian industry. It's why I added an income from houses. Ideally it would pretty closely match up with worker pay, such that it really isn't hard to support a city. I think a break even point between the income tax of a worker + sales tax they spend + housing tax with the only expense being their salary would be feasible. I pretty much envisioned it that a mixed or free market economy would increase profit in the empire, as opposed to be a requirement. You can only support so many bases sure, but it does all come down to balancing. In the end, an empire can only support as many bases as it can support from taxes regardless of the type. The extra income from civilian industries may increase that, but all empires will have a soft limit on their military capacity this way. 

If by occupied you mean when a city is under enemy control, but the population is not "loyal" then I could see a disloyal population not paying taxes as a good idea. It means the conquering empire has to financially support a city during the transition period, and would be an added expense for war.

The idea of being able to change worker pay is cool, and I do like the idea of certain jobs requiring higher pay, but I feel that itself might add too much unneeded complexity and confusion from that sheer scale of micromanagement. Perhaps if later on we can separate the population better, we can treat different social strata / races differently, that would add some interesting dynamics. You could enslave your enemies and make them do all the menial labour, saving on your labour costs while you pay your own species nicely. It would serve as an expansion on top of my original ideas/suggestion for sure.