Suggestion: Building wealth is overpowered

[player1]

Wouldn't per city taxes increase micromangent too much?
Like fine tuning taxes too not affrct number of turns to build sonething.

[fortydayweekend]

Would love some feedback on the state in the beta. There's per-city taxes and a preliminary implementation of the market.

Initial thought was that per-city taxes would be way too much micromanagement. Until I realised that it's not necessary. So it's a good addition I think - adding an optional level of complexity for players who like number-crunching. Plus it gives a little bit of control over migration. Figuring out the "optimal" tax rates is so complicated that most players wouldn't bother, so you feel comfortable taking a rough stab at it.

I played a game through and used different rates in each city at the start (usually starting with 0% in a new city and increasing as it grows). It was nice to get an extra few decimal points of production at a cheap cost. After I started invading everyone I gave up and set all cities to 50% and then used the "master" slider. It would be nice to have a "set all cities to x%" button rather than having to individually go through them all, but it's not a massive deal.

The market I didn't bother because I was never short of minerals, with mountains around my 2 starting cities, but I would probably have had a smoother & more efficient economy if I'd bought some with my hive clearing credits (I rushed buildings instead which I guess is basically the same cost). Might try that next time!

[SephiRok]

Buying minerals is half the cost of buying production (rushing things). Selling also gives you half as many credits as producing wealth. Prices change based on sold and bought resources though, but it's a bit limited in the beta at the moment due to the AI not selling & buying.

[fortydayweekend]

Ok, loving both per-city taxes and the market after using them a bit more.

The market is simple and easy to understand, and the prices rise quickly enough to make it an infrequent purchase, but level back out reasonably quickly for the next time. So it should add a level of complexity without taking a lot of time, which is perfect.

Per-city taxes are really cool, giving some control over migration, the ability to create tax-specialist cities, research city tax-havens etc. Playing as Noxium it seems to make sense to have 90% taxes in some cities (with high morale and stock exchange) and 0% in others (observatory/lab cities). In general it looks like bigger cities with higher morale justify a higher tax rate (because of their broader tax base, the extra tax income exceeds the value of the extra production from the higher morale you get from lower taxes) while small or polluted cities are better off with the production bonuses. Bonus multipliers make a difference because they're applied after morale, so lots of production multipliers = lower taxes, while stock exchange/gold vein etc = higher taxes. And depending on how much you value research it may pay to have low rates in science-specialist cities for the morale boost. 35%-50% though seems like a good range for most situations.

[SephiRok]

Excellent, that's what we were going for. Market will still get improved so prices fluctuate more and hopefully a sexy graph of prices over time.

Thanks for the feedback fortydayweekend!