There's a penalty if you keep your treasury above 20,000 bc???

Stay under it by spending the money on ships and buildings, until you have enough weekly income to make it worth your while to absorb the loss.

Because a treasury that is under 20k is worthless if you need to buy a few capitol ships in a hurry. You could spend twice that easily on a single ship.

You can think of it as the population seeing the government running a huge budget surplus, yet still taxing the people to death...so cheating on taxes goes up and income goes down.

I really didn't notice this effect until 1.3, but probably wasn't smart enough to notice it back then. But it really hit me last game. Once I went over 20K, my net income went from about +600/turn to -300/turn. So I kept spending it down by buying building upgrades since I was near the end of the game.

I don't understand why people say that you should purchase ships to lower your treasury every turn.

I simply let it continue to increase, albeit at a slower rate.

I hope I spelled that right

So how long will it take to live this down?   

Spending your money on buying planetary improvements is about the most cost effective thing you can do with your money. The next most effective thing is to build hulls and upgrade them to full fighting ships. Buying ships that are almost finished being built isn't that bad either. The most expensive thing you can do is to outright buy ships (you do get a break on this if you're neutral). I always try to have a fleet of bare hulls around for upgrade purposes.

In v1.2 a good economy generated about 1000 bc per planet. With v1.4 perhaps it may only be half that. In v1.4 you would probably need about 50 planets with a good percentage of them dedicated income planets to get to the 20K per week mark.

until you have enough weekly income to make it worth your while to absorb the loss.

The higher your income, the greater a percentage of your income you seem to lose. I've seen it to be in the 25% to 40% range. I don't think it's ever worthwhile to absorb this kind of loss. It's usually not all that hard to spend money.

It's not a bug.  If your treasury goes above a certain point then new income loses some income due to graft.

It's not a bug.

Oh. OK. Graft makes sense.

It's not a bug. If your treasury goes above a certain point then new income loses some income due to graft.

That being the case, then, perhaps there could be some sort of indicator to the player that this is happening? Maybe income being shown in red on the tax screen, or a "Graft!" message next to the treasury figure when it goes above the limit?

It's not a bug. If your treasury goes above a certain point then new income loses some income due to graft.

Understood, but 20k in a small game is practically impossible, while in a gigantic is fairly common. (not so much anymore, but late in the game at least)

Is there a reason things like this don't get balanced for galaxy size ?

I have never lost a game and thought I did well economically, even breaking 200,000 saved. Apparently, that's nothing, folks claim well over a million with income that seems to border on a fairy tale. I try to keep 6 econ bases near every planet as far as sector lines allow. I, like everyone else, build ten trillion galactic stock exchanges. Are these folks running their empires at 10% or what?

Maybe I pay too much in production bonus w/ all the bases.

Hi!

If your treasury goes above a certain point then new income loses some income due to graft.

I know two tresholds: 10k and 20k. At 10k it seems graft is about 5%, at 20k it gets another 15%, to ~20% cummulative. And it is in a game from 1.0x.

BR, Iztok

It's really not that hard to make enough not even to worry about it.

On the other hand, if you try to spend too much, especially on ships, just to keep below the 20k limit, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. The maintenance on buildings and ships will counter it until you get the population to cover the costs with taxes.

Production costs $$$ as well. I would rather get to the point where I am making several thousand per turn, than worry about what it takes to get there.

And at some point, there is nothing left to build - all the tiles are full.
So it is better to make sure you can turn a profit, than to be worrying about how much you might be losing to 'graft'.

I usually follow mumbles advice and spend the extra on improvements. I always seem to have something to build. Of course, by the time I get that far, I usually don't have to worry about bc too much.

I have noticed one game where I spent down below 20000 every turn, and then my end game said my average income was some negative number(I was making about 50k a turn near the end). I thought the two may be related, but I am not sure. I never looked through the forums for that. Anyone else ever see that or know why it happens?

I'm not sure if it was Mumble who I first saw mention the 20k limit, but I started a thread a while back b/c I thought I'd found a too-many-econ-bases bug (I think I had *ten*). The By Design explanation makes perfect sense to me, but so does asking

Is there a reason things like this don't get balanced for galaxy size ?

I can imagine the practical answer that it's too hard to do, but the political scientist in me wonders if the graft math ought to base penalties in part on the number of planets in the empire and some ratio of tax rate to approval, or even a ratio of cash on hand to weekly maintainence spending. The flat 20k thing seems a tad arbitrary.

Whats graft? newbe here

I know two thresholds: 10k and 20k. At 10k it seems graft is about 5%, at 20k it gets another 15%, to ~20% cummulative. And it is in a game from 1.0x.

Never noticed the 10K limit before, I'll look for it as well. But the 20% is definitely not absolutely correct. It does depend on your income level as well. If you're right around the 20K per week level, I'd agree on the 20% figure but in v1.2, I was making 950,000 bc per week and losing 400,000 bc's per week to graft if I didn't get my treasury down, that's more than 40%. I'm sure you'll need to cut these figures in half for v1.4 but still that's a lot of cash to throw away by not spending your treasury down.

Whats graft? newbe here

Graft is what reduce's your income if your treasury gets too high. Just keep your treasury below 10K as Iztok mentioned and you'll lose nothing.

The flat 20k thing seems a tad arbitrary.

It is arbitrary but I don't see it as any big deal as long as you're aware of it. If you save your money from turn to turn it affects you eventually no matter what the size of the game. You might have to deal with it a bit more often in a gigantic game than in a medium game, but in the larger game you have more money so you can spend 40,000 bc each for a few dreadnoughts each turn. I don't see this as a disadvantage.

Graft is where:
1) The politicians steal your money for their own personal use so it doesn't get into the treasury
2) People (or companies) bribe treasury officials to not tax them at the proper tax rate
3) People (or companies) simply don't pay their taxes

The fixed 500BC debt limit does not make sense when your economy gets large! If I am turning in a surplus of >1000BC per turn then why is my production shutdown if while spending my surplus I accidently exceed the 500BC debt limit! The debt limit should be relative to GDP!

Hi!

I was making 950,000 bc per week and losing 400,000 bc's per week to graft if I didn't get my treasury down, that's more than 40%.

That's why I wrote "I know two...". None of races I played has EVER get even to 10% of your income. I dislike big games. Too much work for the fun gained.

Also it seems the graft percentage does not depend on the amount of your income, but the amount of money in treasury. You can check that by having treasury 20000 BC and giving one AI just one BC. Immediately your income will increase significantly.

BR, Iztok

Graft is where: 1) The politicians steal your money for their own personal use so it doesn't get into the treasury 2) People (or companies) bribe treasury officials to not tax them at the proper tax rate 3) People (or companies) simply don't pay their taxes

First off, "graft" is a slang or jargon term, not a formal one, so meaning is fundamentally fuzzy. Plus, from what I can tell, the GCII math is really about corruption in general and not graft in particular. Revenue that goes into any "black market" context like that is lost to the legal system.

Re point 1, that's just stealing--graft is a mutual arrangement. Same thing applies to point 3, that's just cheating on taxes. Re point 2, graft affects far more than just treasury officials--many cops are on the take, as are health inspectors, labor union officials, etc.

Put somewhat differently, the econ penalty in GCII is a very plausible attempt at modeling the results of extremely large, relatively open economies (we've talked elsewhere about GCII's weakness re assuming everything in a galaxy full of aliens works from an Adam Smith world view). Regardless of my desire to see more sophistication (differentiation) in species economic models, I really like this "graft" penalty now that I've come to understand it.