Tax level to morale

[PavelCibulka]

Fixed tax to morale scaling between "Moderate" and "Above Moderate" tax level.
Used to be:
Low -> Moderate = -1.83 morale
Moderate -> Above Moderate = -10.87 morale
Above Moderat -> High = -3.66 morale

old scaling (see jump between 33 and 44)

	same	other
0	5.00	5.00
11	-1.83	-2.75
22	-3.67	-5.50
33	-5.50	-8.25
44	-14.67	-17.60
55	-18.33	-22.00
66	-22.00	-26.40
77	-25.67	-30.80
88	-29.33	-35.20
100	-33.33	-40.00

new scaling (same tax at 33 and 100 but more consistent scaling)

	same	other
0	5.00	5.00
11	-1.83	-2.75
22	-3.67	-5.50
33	-5.50	-8.25
44	-10.07	-13.46
55	-14.64	-18.68
66	-19.21	-23.89
77	-23.78	-29.10
88	-28.35	-34.31
100	-33.33	-40.00

[akarnokd]

The tax-morale mapping was supposed to get a jump from moderate to above moderate, otherwise I could have just used a linear transformation. It was a heuristic. Why would you like to change it?

[PavelCibulka]

It feels wrong. There is almost no reason to set taxes to Very low or Low. There is no reason to set taxes to Above normal. You should have taxes either on None, Moderate or Slavery.

What is the reason for the jump? It is still linear. It just has barrier between tax level 3 and 4. When you cross this, it is linear again.

There is no reason (except roleplaying) to set taxes to Above Moderate. You will always get more taxes at Moderate or High, because of this jump. I have calculated what tax level is most optimal depending on morale.

Morale Tax level
0-1 None
2-5 Very low
6-9 Low
10-37 Moderate
never Above Moderate
38-40 High
41-47 Very High
48-55 Opresive
56-62 Exploiter
63+Slavery

BTW the tax level has very small effect on the morale compared to buildings. Changing Very High to Slavery is compensated by single church building. This seems really wrong to me.

[akarnokd]

The current tax-morale "curve" was the result of playing the first two ranks of the campaign and observing how the morale/finances was affecting this early gameplay.

You'd have to rework the entire population <-> morale <-> tax triplet and also not drag out the first two levels and not require too much micromanagement regarding tax-morale. So the current basic strategy is: decrease tax one level if the morale is decreasing and increase tax level if morale is increasing. Yes, you can spend your initial campaign money on raising the morale, but you'll drag out the completion of the initial missions. The longer you spend in rank 1 and 2 the stronger the aliens will become in the meantime.

[PavelCibulka]

Jump between None and Very Low and between Moderate and Above Moderate makes other tax levels than None, Moderate, and Slavery unefficient. You will always get more money and growth, if you just use this three tax levels. If you need something between, it is more effective to rotate between these three rather then using other tax levels.

BTW optimal campaign strategy right now is:
1st day - Raise tax to Slavery everywhere. Build church at San Starling. Repair Fire Station and Power Plant at Achilles.
2nd day - Build Colony Hub at Achilles
next days:
Sell unnecessary buildings on Achilles when mission finished.
Build 9 churches everywhere.
Build Trade Spaceports.
Build banks.
Upgrade Trade Spaceports.
Upgrade Trade Banks.
Build and upgrade Water Vaporators (You can now sell two churches on these planets).

This is most optimal strategy right now. Most optimal strategy would be similar, if churches stacking would be disabled. It would just take longer to build more expensive morale buildings. Tax level strategy would stay exactly the same. Just set them to Slavery everywhere.

BTW Achilles goes down by 10 morale each day without hub, no matter tax level. So you should always set it to Slavery.

So there is no tax strategy in the game right now. Just tax roleplaying.

[akarnokd]

So neither the tax curve adjustment in #1010 nor disabling stacking works for you. Remember, churches take up space and you are limited by the number of total population. With your strategy I could get 40k/day, yes, but it took me a month to get there. Either in IG 1 or 2, there was a saying that you can keep your taxes high and your people happy.

[PavelCibulka]

Yeah #1010 doesn't solve this. It needs more complex changes.

I've made test run. And I've been able to set Slavery tax level and build 9 temples on all three planets on 3rd day (15 August). I've also build power plant, food factory and have 5k money left.

I've been thinking about changes. I will try to make patch for testing. My goal is to keep economy same as now if you don't exploit game too much. So overall balance will stay the same.

Ides:

• no same morale building stacking
• increase morale bonus to recreation center (it sucks with 5) ->10
• decrease morale bonus to water vaparotor (too op with 20 + 180% pop growth) ->10
• add one more tax level between low and moderate
• starting morale is 100 instead of 50
• all tax level scales by 10% tax and -10 morale (-12 or -15 for occupied worlds)

Everything should be comparable for moderate tax. It would have 60 morale and 40% tax. Old system has 44.5 morale and 33% tax. This is better for moderate tax level. But it will be much more difficult to increase taxes. So overall game balance should be comparable.

Tax level should matter more. Setting higher tax level won't be nobrainer.

[mansam]

@PavelCibulka have you tried playing the original and taking notes on how morale behaves with various tax buildings and other morale effects? I would hope any change gets things closer to the original game's behavior rather than changing it for the sake of changing it.

[PavelCibulka]

@mansam I've played original for last time something like 5 years ago. I can see your point. I' would like game mechanics to be same as original too.

Problem is, that tax levels as they are now, are completely irrelevant. Changing tax level from High to Slavery (by 4 levels) cost you only 15 morale. 15 Morale is amount you get from single bar building...

Was it the same in original? Maybe this should be implemented as MOD or settings.

[akarnokd]

I played Open-IG on normal and followed your steps. It took me a month to have all 3 planets up and running with 9 churches, trader spaceport and bank fully upgraded. The initial 32K is only enough for 8 temples, you can't build on Achilles until you get 40K raised through tax, you will need additional power plants and the morale increase is alpha-smoothed (takes more than two days to get from 50 to 100%).

I played the original in a bit and setting San Sterling on the highest taxation without any morale buildings causes 50% -> 60 -> 51 -> 48 -> 43 -> 36 -> 34 -> 29 -> 29 (Revolt, game over).

I repeated the experiment with 8 Churches: 50% -> 58 -> 51 -> 45 -> 38 -> 34 -> 31 -> 28 (revolt, game over).

Built 4 different morale buildings: 50% -> 60 -> 55 -> 51 -> 45 -> 45 -> 47 -> 48 -> 48 ...

It's difficult to test things out because of the limited initial money, the frequent quests and the needs of the other planets...

[PavelCibulka]

I've made some testing of original too. There a lot of things different.

• You get only 33% of price when demolishing buildings (50% in open-ig).
• You can't sell tanks. This trick provide 33K credits in open-ig at the start of the game.

BTW Imperium Galactica has cheat codes. So you don't need money or do quests, if you want test something.
https://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/915820-imperium-galactica/cheats

[akarnokd]

The original tends to be too unstable for me. I can use CheatEngine to modify the money but the missions require attention and eventually you are promoted to level 2 even if you haven't properly fixed Achilles.

In Open-IG, I wanted to remove the slowness due to low tax income for both the player and the AI. The alien races don't have morality buildings and a non-cheating AI would almost always suffer from money shortage. Thus changing the tax-morale mechanics could also hinder the AI. Not sure if you saw the guide about taxation with the various compensation factors.

The original didn't limit the number of the morale buildings but it appears having more than one per type has no addifional effect. There were generally a couple of bugs/inconsistencies in the original so I can't say for sure if morale buildings were supposed to stack or not or why wasn't it limited to 1 like the factory buildings. It is also possible that the morality buildings had a hidden population support/capacity value just like the house/food buildings. For example, Church adds +5% morale for 5000 people. (Checking this may need a more lengthy play).

[chrcoluk]

cant comment on open-ig (only downloaded it 10 mins ago).

But have tons of experience on the original game.

On original game police stations stack for morale., with higher taxation level the effectiveness of police stations greatly decreases, so e.g. on moderate one police station can get you about 25% worth of tax moral for about 30000 people, whilst on demanding tax level it was more like 15000 people.

The other morale builds from my observation had no stacking effect, so churches, stadiums etc. all only gave boost for first building. This is obviously important for balance reasons limiting the amount of morale that can be gained per planet, planets which had access to park's had an advantage for this reason.

Tax morale also dropped as a planet got more populated.

There was also a "temporary" boost to morale if you successfully defended against a "ground" invasion.

Optimal strat on original game I found was to have one of each morale building, police station per 15k people and set tax to demanding (2nd highest level), if set to oppressive (highest level), tax morale dropped and overall tax gained was lower, alien planets wouldnt even tolerate lowest taxes, even with many police stations.

Also to note how happy people were had some correlation with tax morale but the two things were not hard linked so e.g. things like churches increased happiness and tax morale, however police stations only increase tax morale not happiness.

I will comment on open-ig economy after I play it for bit.

[DrakonAlpha]

I am glad that you play Open IG. Although akarnokd can take a more qualified stance, since he probably inspected the "old code", I would like to say something about your observations.

In my observation, the effect of police stations is never stacking. The amount on which the police station acts, is also not dependent on the tax level set.

For the other (moralizing) buildings, the more different moral buildings you build, the greater the effect. That means, if I build two churches, I have no greater moral bonus than if I built only one church. But building one church and one recreation center, both values stack.

It may be - I am not sure - that any moral-enhancing building has only an effect on a certain amount of population, resulting in having you build more of every morale building as the population grows.

About your further remarks, I have no idea.

[akarnokd]

I haven't looked at the original code, it is a compiled, non-annotated Borland C code so it would have been pretty difficult to figure out which assembly instruction contributes to what invisible number.

I played the original as much as possible but I never got something consistent out of the changes in the morale and taxed amounts, so I decided to evolve a somewhat simpler scheme for Open-IG.

Each relevant building has a morale score and the score is simply summed up for all operational buildings. Then the score offsets a neutral morale and available/missing services can change it further.

On a side note, many such adjustments were added because alien tech is considerably unbalanced, i.e., they don't have equivalents of Churches so Police stations had to double as morale boosts for them.

So you can build many buildings and eventually the morale will max out. Perhaps the cheapest is to build many Churches.

This scheme is definitely not perfect, but involves enough trade-offs (lack of early-game money, limited build space, speed of constructing items/buildings) to not cause too much trouble.

Since the mechanics in general are and were complicated, there hasn't been a good set of overall re-balancing and the current numbers and logic is mostly the "good enough" and "playable" outcome.

Yes, over the years many suggestions were offered, but most of them are too narrow and focus on a few cases and configurations that would trip the overall balance and feel of the game to the worst.

[chrcoluk]

DrakonAlpha you cant stack above the 25% or so affect it has on morale true, but I meant they stack in their operational capacity, so once population gets large enough tax morale boost drops (on highest tax level's the capacity is massively reduced, I dont understand how you dont notice this), and you stack extra police stations to counter this so they run properly again.

Whilst the standard morale buildings dont seem to have an operational capacity they just work fully with single building so have absolutely no stacking effect.

However the police buildings seem to force tax payment compliance, (like real life), they dont make the population happy, but do increase tax morale. So for this reason they cannot stop aliens revolting in the original game when you try and tax them, it will raise their tax morale but not happiness.

The neutral morale on the original seems to just drop as population increases to large levels. Once you reach 50k or so people it starts affecting tax morale with no way to counter it, so its an advantage to have the population grow very slowly once over 40000 people to maximise the time you can charge at demanding tax levels with 95%+ tax morale.

I have played on open-ig a bit now played it for about 2 hours yesterday before going sleep and it is interesting to say the least.

In terms of the economy here is my early views.

1 - The game pace is very fast e.g. rescuing traders happens every day, on original was 3-4 day gaps. This means if you had the same economy as original it would clearly be too hard. You would not have enough time to get all the money needed.
2 - you are required to keep all original key buildings so e.g. if you sell the military spaceport, your destroyer isnt repaired and also you cannot pass the objective to rebuild/repair that building, in original game was no such requirement.
3 - Power stations are hugely nerfed,and require upgrades to be as good as the original game, so money spent on power is hugely increased. Even by the time of my first promotion I had 3-4 power stations on each planet.
4 - Police stations however are significantly buffed, able to provide a force to manage nearly 40k people on the highest slavery taxation.
5 - Repairs seem buffed, they faster and overall cheaper.

I tested on easy as I read its similar to old normal level.

A clear obvious balance change is to make it so when on higher taxation levels, policing is under more stress so like the original game more police stations are needed.
I would support stacking of morale buildings but with diminishing returns on stacks. Also add a balance element to further diminish so e.g. if you have a ton of churches but no bars, the churches become less effective, real life would be like this, people would be complaining there is no where to get drunk whilst all the do gooders have plenty of places to pray.
It is certainly alot easier to sustain max tax levels vs the original game, if you set oppressive on achilles in original game, then its game over as it would revolt, all 3 planets would revolt in fact. It also wouldnt be generating tax of 10k per day either. Even setting to high one level above moderate would drop tax morale to low enough that after a few days you get less than moderate and people would be leaving the planet.

But this is all interesting because the original game now when replaying it is nothing to learn its all predictable. This game changes so much its a fresh experience.

I love the trait system and achievements by the way.