Sector Control & Starbase Tax

Even my Maths aren't this bad....... I Hope

Hi

Question on a game I was playing last night. About 10 years in and I'm playing as the Iconians, going for the technicological victory. I've taken out the Drengin and the Korx after they foolishly decare war on me when I had vastly superior spaceships to theirs, just not many of them. Enough to hammer them into submission though!

Anyway, The Terran Alliance are my main threat, 4 times the ships I have and not that far behind technologically. The Drath are bit part players at this stage. I'm getting a bit worried as my relations with the Monkey Earth boys isn't very good (Cool) and they are much better diplomats than me, plus they have a very strong economy. Mine's pretty strong but the Earthling's is better, and then they start building Influence Starbases all over my space, inside my zone of Influence right next to my planets.

I'm frantically building up a decent fleet, when up comes a UN Vote, "How much tax should a race pay for starbases outside sectors of their control?" With the Drath voting with me, the council goes for a whopping 10bc per starbase a month for 3 years. "Fantastic" I think, "That'll cripple the terran economy and leave me free to transend the mortal coil and achieve my race's true potential for godhood". I didn't have a single starbase outside of my zone of influence, so I wasn't expecting to be taxed anything.

About 6 turns later I tried to buy a Discovery Sphere only to notice that my treasury is coloured yellow. A bit worried I check the economy screen and too my horror discover that I'm paying 1640 credits a month in Starbase tax and have a monthly deficit of -1533bc

Now this doesn't make any sense where:

1. I don't have 164 starbases. I have about 10. That makes a monthly tax of 164bc credit per starbase by my reckoning, not 10bc per month

and

2. Not one of my starbases is outside my zone of influence, and only 2 are in "Sectors" (i.e. a grid on the minimap) where I don't have a planet located.

Thankfully I had money enough left to max out research, charge 70% tax and go for the technological victory before I ran out of money. Still took about 40 turns though. Thank God for the 3 morale resources I had to keep the population happy

Checking the victory stats at the end of the game, I beat the Terrans in all departments except for Military (Fair enough, they'd been fighting every race since the start) and economy. My average was -533bc per month, the Terrans something like +200bc!?! They had something like 30 starbases, a good 10-15 of which weren't even in the terran zone of influence. IThis to me makes no sense at all. For most of the game my economy was in the black and I was actually making a moderate profit, apart from the point where the starbase tax came in. And even that I fixed with the 70% tax rate and dropping production to about 50%..

I'm guessing that I have either missed something really obvious or this is something wrong with the game? The vote as I undserstood it applied to each race in the game, not the "strongest" or most influencial (Which I was at this point) I just can't figure out where all the numbers came from, it doesn't make any sense to me! Can someone explain to me how this happened?

PS. Maths was never my strong point so if I have missed something really obvious I'll apologies now and reset my intelligence to "Fool"

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I have no idea about the tax glitch, but from what you say it appears that you were only about 100 bc/month in the black after ten years of game time. If that's true, then you have not built a proper economy: you should be making tens of thousands bc profit per week after just a few years, not 100 bc/month. After ten years, your economy should be so strong you wouldn't even notice a 1600 bc tax.

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