Penalty when you have too much in your treasury?

Yes, it's real.

But once you start making enough money, it doesn't matter anymore. If you are making 30k per turn you really don't need to worry about it.

It's real and it's 20K.

If you don't care about scores, this can be true. I still sort of scoff scores overall, but I'm a known Metaverse sympathizer.

I played quite a few successful-to-me games before I ever thought about the Metaverse. But, after I started thinking about MV scores as a game goal, I found that the "forced" spending that the >20k limit promotes did help me post better MV scores. I don't like this, but it seems true.

It's real, it's 20k (sorry to echo you, Purge), and it applies as a racial "bonus"-of 20%, IIRC.

You're getting 10 from Xeno Economics and 5 from Xeno Bank Construction, at a minimum. An economic resource or two grants you either 34 or 39 a piece (my memory's foggy on that one), and if you picked a race that had some inherently or spent racial points on it, you've got that too. Not to mention you can get up to 30% from governments alone. Point being, most games, you're probably looking at at least a 150% -bonus- (that's a 2.5x factor, if you will) to your economy. I'd go so far as to say this is a probable although not certain value even on a tiny map.

So in the above example, you drop from making 2.5x your base income to 2.3x your base income; a total loss of ~8.6% of your "real" income. On larger maps, with more economic resources, the effect is even less noticeable.

So, to reiterate what Moosetek said-by the time you're making that much money it doesn't matter.

@Swicord
My hunch is that is largely due to your increased production/ships (military)/happier population that you can tax more rather than the fact that you had that additional 20% racial bonus (which is the other way of looking at it, really). It's really insignificant...although scores would be higher without it, even with the area under the curve mattering at least as much if not more than the actual values, it would not be a significant increase-especially after taking the logarithmic nature of score into account.

Let's take a gigantic galaxy, for instance. We'll pretend we're playing Thalans as they get an innate 25% economics. 25 innate+30 racial points+20 political party + 15 techs + 30 government + 100 (let's go evil, shall we?) gives us 220% /bonus/. Assume we have 5 or 6 economic resources-a decently safe bet; I've seen some gigantic games with 8 or more, but those are rarer. I'll round up because frankly I'm lazy. 6x39 ~=6x40=240, add to our current 220 and we have a 460% bonus, which gives us a factor of 5.6. (In TA, with tech trading on, this gets even more ridiculous.) Not to mention all those anomalies you probably picked up, right?

If we're above 20,000bc, we're only making 5.4x our base income-which happens to be about 3.7% less than our below 20k bc value.

Which makes it more significant than I thought it was...but still, I don't believe I'm exaggerating too much when I call it insignificant.

Here's a thought...

As I understand it the penalty is meant to represent corruption when huge amounts of money are sloshing around (sub-prime anyone?)... how about reducing the penalty depending on the number of secret police centres you own (perhaps proportion of planets with centres to planet without in your civilization).

Franbo

I still don't think I'd ever build one of those.

Its not entirely significant if you're making massive amounts of money per turn, but it can be significant if you make only like 1000 per turn. However, in that case, keeping your treasury below 20K is a lot easier. I think my best game had me making like 13k a turn, and i spent it down each turn. I just hate leaving any money on the table.

I've read that rationale around here several times, and it works for me as story and as a general notion for a game parameter.

I prefer a "fix" that would replace the hard 20k boundary with some kind of derived value, e.g. a formula based on your average income over the past 5 turns, your last year's colony maintainence spending, or some combo of figures like that. To many of us, the flat 20k just feels too aribitrary.

How do I mod this out?

You can't.

I fully agree, a derived effect (which could hence be counteracted in various ways) would be preferable to an arbitrary limit. Indeed; I'd prefer no such effect rather than the one that currently exists.

That said; it's not a particularly big deal for me. It's an annoyance no doubt; but within the context of this great game not a significant one.

Franbo