what do I need to do to get positive on taxes?

[MachinegunMagpie]

so I got tired of always running out of money.
I went and edited a map. In one system I gave my self 7 planets each with 3 moons. each of them is the right type for my species, oceans. quality is 50% or better. I also gave them each a 10% economy boost. whether a world has a planetary admin center or not they are negative on taxes with 800+ million people on each of them.

I lowered the target happiness of the colonies for taxes.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198017013187/screenshot/2527156527022819514/

[ZumZoom]

You need to get higher development. Mainly by having luxury resources.

[Nightskies]

800 million is low population, it should be expected to have low or negative income. A 5 billion colony should be solidly positive with just a little development from buildings and luxuries.

[SgtScum]

Originally posted by ZumZoom:

You need to get higher development. Mainly by having luxury resources.

Yeah if he is going to cheese the game editor then no need to make treasure systems. Just seed some of the rarest luxury goods in your home system and bam your income should skyrocket and then scale with pop and empire size.

[MachinegunMagpie]

Originally posted by SgtScum:

Originally posted by ZumZoom:

You need to get higher development. Mainly by having luxury resources.

Yeah if he is going to cheese the game editor then no need to make treasure systems. Just seed some of the rarest luxury goods in your home system and bam your income should skyrocket and then scale with pop and empire size.

as I said. I 'cheesed' it to try to figure out what was going on. i had yet to NOT go broke in a game. even with a pimped out home system it still happened.

[Wraith_Magus]

Note that negative cashflow is not the same as going broke - the game is actually ridiculous in how it doesn't try to anticipate private economy purchases from the shipyards. Around mid-game, I often set my tax bracket to 20% manually, and then have 80k tax income, and the game says I have 100k expenses, so I have a "-20k cashflow"... and then I'm making 400k per year on private economy purchases/upgrades of ships, which aren't counted in cashflow because the devs didn't bother to even try making a prediction of such things, so they just entirely left it off.

Anyway, the best thing you can do to improve your cashflow in the long term is to cut taxes and eat a majorly negative cashflow for the short term, because low taxes makes people so happy they have more babies, and they grow up to pay more taxes later. You can make money by making a change to a civilian ship, which makes your whole private sector rush to try to upgrade their old ships and give you tons of money for it, until the private sector runs out of cash. This is why I like to set taxes at 20%, before it adds corruption, because corruption annihilates money. Any money you don't tax just goes to the private economy, which inevitably spends it on more ships (whose money goes to you), anyway.

You should also look at the recent "ship design" thread for more details, but a good way to boost your economy easily is to just manually design your ships. The automation is absolutely garbage at ship design, and you can easily cut the maintenance costs of your ships (which are often the vast majority of your expenses) down by 2/3rds with judicious manual ship designs. Also, absolutely make sure you design things like your mining stations (use small mining stations in places not likely to see combat, and don't arm them to save money) with a large mining engine AND TWO SMALL MINING ENGINES, and it doubles the amount of resources EACH mining station produces (and thus, revenues from them) while you can also cut expenses you spend on them. Likewise, manually design freighters so that they aren't wasting money on things like weapons, have four cargo bays (automation only gives them two) so they carry twice the cargo, and potentially even just mark the entire medium and large freighter lines "obsolete" so the private sector retrofits to only use small freighters (they usually can't fill large freighters, anyway, so the larger size is just a waste). Doing this means that you'll go from spending 600+ credits per freighter (of which you have hundreds) down to something like 125 credits per freighter. Doing this DRAMATICALLY changes the picture of your economy.

[MachinegunMagpie]

That is an amazing amount of knowledge you just imparted. thank you.

[Nightskies]

Some specifics about growth:
Growth from happiness caps at +30, but don't forget that full Growth funding doubles growth!

Generally speaking when funding Growth, +5 happiness is the ideal target early on to strike a balance between funding and getting growth from happiness. This is incidentally (or is it deliberate on the dev's part?) a good target for maximizing taxes while avoiding rebellions. If not paying for Growth funding for whatever reason (as Wraith says, and I also would advocate it in many a circumstance), 30 happiness is the ideal target to maximize growth.

I think there's no benefit to raising happiness above 30. It might influence other factors, like mining/construction/recruitment rate, or the rate of exploration for hidden items at the colony. This is only a guess, as other similar factors behave like that - quite notably, Development over the 'soft cap' of 120 (concerning determining Revenue) continues to raise Happiness more and more, which means more taxes for excessive Development.

[DrPhiloponus]

Originally posted by MachinegunMagpie:

so I got tired of always running out of money.
/

Try to start with an excellent home system this helps a lot. Give all other empires excellent home systems, too, to balance it out. Also a nice incentive to get their home systems in wars.

[ZumZoom]

Originally posted by Nightskies:

Some specifics about growth:
Growth from happiness caps at +30

Pretty sure it's 40, though the benefit between 30 and 40 is not that significant (for average growth races on a colony near it's cap it's a difference between 3.7% and 3.9%).

[Nightskies]

I just tested it on 10 growing colonies, the growth didn't change from +30 to +40.

I took it a step further and zeroed taxes on 10 colonies, half of them from the same group as above, letting it run longer. Some changes occurred, but these were minor changes in both directions.

Mostly.

In the second test, on 9/10 colonies, 30 happiness was the cap for growth. There was one exception, which raised from 7.6 to 7.9, consistently, when changing happiness from 30 to 40 (and higher).

I set about trying to identify why this colony was an exception...

• First, I noticed it was Human, while all the others were different races. So I tried it on other Human colonies. They did not change.
  
• I thought 20% Corruption may have been the difference after consistently finding other colonies with corruption over 20% also being exceptions.
  
• I expanded the test and found another exception that only had 10% Corruption.
  
• I looked at numbers for actual population, assimilation, Development, Suitability, and even Growth from resources, and could not determine what made this colony an exception.

The exceptions (primarily with Corruption over 20%) applied to 'medium' colonies, with a population between 10-50% of their maximum population. 'Large' colonies experienced a much smaller change in Growth, if at all.

I gave up on trying to figure out why this one changed Growth beyond 30 happiness.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3213348086

Here's just one of many of the examples where 30% is the cap for Growth, with happiness @ +31 and then +67. It has some similarities with the above colony, hence why I picked this one... I went ahead and used the editor to make it a much larger planet to increase the maximum population capacity dramatically, it didn't change anything concerning the relationship between Happiness and Growth over 30.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3213365502
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3213365587

*There is the banking rounding showing itself strongly in these tests (a displayed 30 happiness might be closer to 29, while 31 happiness surely reaches the cap), but it certainly does not account for the exceptions where 40 has discernibly higher Growth (albeit just a little more than a minor deviation).

[ChrisK(Germany)]

Originally posted by Wraith_Magus:

Note that negative cashflow is not the same as going broke - the game is actually ridiculous in how it doesn't try to anticipate private economy purchases from the shipyards. Around mid-game, I often set my tax bracket to 20% manually, and then have 80k tax income, and the game says I have 100k expenses, so I have a "-20k cashflow"... and then I'm making 400k per year on private economy purchases/upgrades of ships, which aren't counted in cashflow because the devs didn't bother to even try making a prediction of such things, so they just entirely left it off.

Anyway, the best thing you can do to improve your cashflow in the long term is to cut taxes and eat a majorly negative cashflow for the short term, because low taxes makes people so happy they have more babies, and they grow up to pay more taxes later. You can make money by making a change to a civilian ship, which makes your whole private sector rush to try to upgrade their old ships and give you tons of money for it, until the private sector runs out of cash. This is why I like to set taxes at 20%, before it adds corruption, because corruption annihilates money. Any money you don't tax just goes to the private economy, which inevitably spends it on more ships (whose money goes to you), anyway.

You should also look at the recent "ship design" thread for more details, but a good way to boost your economy easily is to just manually design your ships. The automation is absolutely garbage at ship design, and you can easily cut the maintenance costs of your ships (which are often the vast majority of your expenses) down by 2/3rds with judicious manual ship designs. Also, absolutely make sure you design things like your mining stations (use small mining stations in places not likely to see combat, and don't arm them to save money) with a large mining engine AND TWO SMALL MINING ENGINES, and it doubles the amount of resources EACH mining station produces (and thus, revenues from them) while you can also cut expenses you spend on them. Likewise, manually design freighters so that they aren't wasting money on things like weapons, have four cargo bays (automation only gives them two) so they carry twice the cargo, and potentially even just mark the entire medium and large freighter lines "obsolete" so the private sector retrofits to only use small freighters (they usually can't fill large freighters, anyway, so the larger size is just a waste). Doing this means that you'll go from spending 600+ credits per freighter (of which you have hundreds) down to something like 125 credits per freighter. Doing this DRAMATICALLY changes the picture of your economy.

Damn, didnt know that autodesigns eat that much extra, guess ill find out now how to manually design ships and stations, something i never did before. Do you have a guide, link to a guide or video or just general tips for decent designs?

[Brandon]

Planetary Governance (planetary administration center) reduce corruption and gain colony happiness & development, increasing money.

Coordinated Control (command centers) reduce costs of ships.

Improved Logistics reduce costs of troops.

Basic Space Commerce increase trade.

I put them in order for best bang for the buck.

[SgtScum]

Originally posted by MachinegunMagpie:

Originally posted by SgtScum:

Yeah if he is going to cheese the game editor then no need to make treasure systems. Just seed some of the rarest luxury goods in your home system and bam your income should skyrocket and then scale with pop and empire size.

as I said. I 'cheesed' it to try to figure out what was going on. i had yet to NOT go broke in a game. even with a pimped out home system it still happened.

It might be a racial economic issue then? I mostly play human and money is rarely an obstacle even early game and some races are even better at it. Are there any negative economic modifiers on your chosen race to play?

[TheMac]

Originally posted by Brandon:

Planetary Governance (planetary administration center) reduce corruption and gain colony happiness & development, increasing money.

Coordinated Control (command centers) reduce costs of ships.

Improved Logistics reduce costs of troops.

Basic Space Commerce increase trade.

I put them in order for best bang for the buck.

Great list. BTW, I heard that maintenance reductions were nerfed so hard a while back that they really don't even matter anymore. Is that still the case?

[Nightskies]

Yes, ish...

They've greatly intensified the numbers for empire maintenance reduction overall, but the formula remains the same AFAIK. So it's still much weaker than the first impression upon seeing the numbers and the face-value meaning.

It's worth having, but don't go out of the way for it. Fortunately, most of the sources of it provide other benefits or are passively acquired. Try using the editor to give a colony an empire-wide maintenance savings of 100 after a save to see how it affects maintenance (don't forget to do a wave of superfluous retrofitting just to update their maintenance costs, you could simply copy all your designs to achieve this).