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

[Rockinsince87]

Martianant Wrote:

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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.

Ok I like this. It would add some spice to a new empire that's for sure. 

Martianant Wrote:

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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. 

Makes sense. But what about the consequences of doing that. There should be some balance to oppressing your people, something like possible revolts and morale penalties. Something like another building or an ability for your military to police your people and offset the penalty without the ability to fully get rid of it. There is a unfinished building called Mass Media and perhaps that could help with propaganda and influence. Make is so that a military presence is required on colonies? a ratio of troops to citizens depending on how hard the morale penalty your trying to off set? It could work, that would result in higher military expenses than normal. Thoughts? 

Martianant Wrote:

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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.

Exactly!

Martianant Wrote:

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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.

Yeah your right that really does over complicate things a bit but you see were I was going with that  :P




My Thoughts
So yeah this is completely feasible. It would require some dang good training and tutorials/youtube videos but it would add some very interesting strategy and another layer of meta that 
would be fun to play around with.