I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (Full Version)

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Spidey -> I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/23/2015 10:41:29 AM)

Can anyone help me? If the issue isn't immediately obvious, the problem I'm having is that my empire-wide colony tax revenue is considerably less than the tax revenue from my capital world alone.

I've collected some data points by setting colony taxes to 0 everywhere. #1 is what the colony window says, #2 is what I see in the empire summary screen under colony tax revenue.

At my capital world 
Tax %	#1	#2
0%	0	0
5%	41k	0
6%	59k	13k
7%	61k	14k
7%	69k	20k
10%	76k	24k
15%	124k	58k
20%	166k	86k
30%	263k	153k
40%	352k	214k


At a different colony 
Tax %	#1	#2
5%	29k	0
7%	41k	0
8%	46k	3k
10%	58k	13k
15%	88k	33k
20%	118k	55k


[image]local://upfiles/47067/92DED6E731314B5F8466DF3BE89EF2A5.jpg[/image]

And a small note, in case anyone is wondering why there's a difference between the revenue in the screenshot and the data points, I tried wrecking the trade wonder to see if that made any difference but it didn't.



Raap -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/23/2015 12:06:55 PM)

What about corruption?



Spidey -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/23/2015 12:14:09 PM)

Corruption is 0% at the capital world and 3% on the alternative colony but I could have sworn that corruption is taken into account at colony level and thus already subtracted from the number you see as colony tax in the colony window.



Raap -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/23/2015 12:29:22 PM)

I think you're right, I'm seeing the same behavior on 0% corruption worlds. Tax income from my single largest world(Shakturi homeworld, 100% quality, maxed tech) is 2.775 million in the colony screen(100% compliance, but I assume that's already calculated in), but with every other colony set to 0% tax I'm only seeing 1.721 million in the empire summary screen. That's 62% of what should be there, meaning a loss of 38%.

Doing the same division on your income lists, it appears that the less you make on a colony the bigger % is lost.

To be honest, I've no idea where that cash is going.



VorteeX -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/23/2015 12:41:50 PM)

Colony info show how much you earn per year. Empire say how much you earn till date until Year end. And it's 7 month. If you drop taxes for a while, at end of the year empire summary show less then planet info. So to get exacly 100% what colony info say u need to keep same tax/colony development/luxury cargo from 1st january to 31 december.



Spidey -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/23/2015 1:17:21 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: VorteeX

Colony info show how much you earn per year. Empire say how much you earn till date until Year end. And it's 7 month. If you drop taxes for a while, at end of the year empire summary show less then planet info. So to get exacly 100% what colony info say u need to keep same tax/colony development/luxury cargo from 1st january to 31 december.

I am afraid I cannot replicate this explanation. In this very recently started game, colony tax changes are reflected accurately in the empire summary as soon as the colony screen shows the updated revenue.


[image]local://upfiles/47067/6A430AB819E44B22A59907DEBCB6B524.jpg[/image]



Raap -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/23/2015 1:38:42 PM)

That's interesting. Early game it shows identical amounts on colonies and in the empire screen, late game it's way off.. Maybe there's something wrong with either the display or the calculation of corruption(which is the only factor increasing significantly from early to late game)?



Spidey -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/23/2015 5:10:22 PM)

That sounds like a distinct possibility, Raap. Something looks wrong, at least.

I've gone through my numbers and it seems to me as if there are actually multiple reductions going on. First there's an unexplained reduction of roughly 30% of the colony revenue and whatever is left after that is subject to what I would guess is the loss from colonies at 0% tax rate. Their colony screens all suggest a loss of 1k, though this figure is rounded.

But that begs the question of why my colonies are subject to a magic ~30% reduction in revenue that isn't listed anywhere? Or is it the colony screen that is lying and making the colony revenue figure out to be ~40 higher than it actually should be?



Raap -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/23/2015 5:54:24 PM)

Yeah there looks to be one fixed deduction of ~43K, thus no income before the taxes exceed that. Maybe this could be explained somehow with facility maintenance being deducted from the colony screen income rather than the empire window. But even after that there's a loss of 10-40%, with that percentage increasing with income. Which I could only see being either corruption or compliance, one or both of which is thus either calculated or displayed incorrectly.

Well that, or the empire screen income.. Or something to do with leaders.



Spidey -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/24/2015 3:27:47 AM)

It seems like this ghost drain is present even very early in the game, though it is generally masked by the rounding of all the numbers, and then it grows over time.

And I have to say, this is kind of pissing me off. Evidently there is some well-hidden adjustment factor between the colony revenue generation and the empire summation and as a consequence both numbers are now unreliable. This has a certain feeling of being a difficulty adjustment gone horribly wrong, to be honest.

[image]local://upfiles/47067/B225D373170D4E14B366ADFC748E4289.jpg[/image]



Analogical -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/24/2015 4:25:58 AM)

Spidey, I may have something on this for you. If you look carefully at the tax display for the colony worlds at a 0% tax rate, you'll notice a small negative number in parentheses. This doesn't appear to be corruption, as it is the same in my game at zero and nonzero corruption colonies, and it appears to be a constant independent of the colony's development level. In the game that I checked, the sum of these negative tax amounts equaled the difference between the main colony's tax income and the lower number reported on the empire summary screen.

It's not clear to me what the justification for this tax drain is, but at least it's not completely hidden.



Shark7 -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/24/2015 7:22:17 AM)

To be completely honest. I'm a day 1 original game player and I still can't make much sense of the economy in the game. But I have discovered a couple of things:

1. The economy is largely driven by resource shortages. This will affect your maintenance and appears to effect corruption levels. The effect on your tax money collection is notable if you have shortages of needed resources.
2. I have found its best for me to leave the tax levels to the AI. It does a far better job managing that aspect of the game than I do.



Bingeling -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/24/2015 7:51:13 AM)

I am not too bothered by the issue, but I would like to test one theory. I don't think I got enough info from your values.

It could be that the tax revenue is something like.

"Never less than 0".

EmpireRevenue = (Sum_Colony_Tax)*(DifficultyMulti) - (NumberOfColonies)*(ColonyCost)

Of course, ColonyCost could also depend on each colony (larger with larger population and worse quality?)

To make it fit in early game you could have a "rule" that the capital has no cost.

As for the data in the first post, does the colony window agree with the colony list revenue?



Bingeling -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/24/2015 9:12:51 AM)

I went through the early to mid updates from the AAR I did at Universe launch. Each update got a colony list print, and an economy print.

With a look at the sum of revenues in the colony list, and the private colony revenue in the empire summary, I find that.

- They fit nicely with the capital and the first two additional colony.
- They no longer match as a fourth, rich colony is added.
- The new, rich colony is rife with corruption (50%) but the difference is not anywhere close to that.

This is the data:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g81Y4ll9ykadIsJNvBsPnHJhZmIoM5Ex1-50YZDtEU8/edit#gid=0

The new wealthy colony is added in H, needs an update or two to get into shape and receives a regional capital in M. It is always the first colony listed after its introduction.

The top row is the empire summary value, the below the total colony value. Notice how the difference grows a lot in row M when the corruption of the top colony is removed. But there are other colonies added at the same time to interfere with the effect.

Why the effect of the 4th colony? The difference in values is 100 or less, while its corruption is 300-500 (50% corruption), so it can't be that.

There is another corrupted, rich colony added in column I, quickly improving from 188 to 462 revenue.

The data is from:

http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3620058&mpage=1&key=



Analogical -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/24/2015 12:01:03 PM)

Let me flesh out my earlier suggestion with a specific example, so that it'll be a little clearer. In the reference game I was using I have 5 colonies, of which only the home planet has a tax rate greater than 0. The colony display for the home planet shows tax revenue of 60K, but the empire summary screen shows total colony tax revenue of 56K -- the same anomaly Spidey was complaining about in the op, albeit on a smaller scale. The colony displays for each of the four planets other than my home world show a tax of 0% (-1.00k). Those negative tax values sum to exactly the difference between the home planet's 60k and the empire summary's 56k. (These colonies had populations ranging from 184m to 743m, culture scores between 48 and 95, and corruption of either 0 (1 planet) or 1% (3 planets)).

I'm simply suggesting that if Spidey looked at the individual colony displays for his 35 outside planets he might see negative tax revenue entries that accounted for the anomaly. Why those negative numbers are there is another question of course.



Bingeling -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/24/2015 12:27:09 PM)

If you got the game at hand, can you quickly check if the colony list revenue matches the selection panel revenue?

I showed the colony list not matching the empire screen, but it is hard to check the selection panel of a game played a year ago :)

In that game, with the data given above, the difference appeared with a rich corrupted colony (colony 4) some distance away.



Spidey -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/24/2015 9:00:29 PM)

@ Bingeling

Thank you for the dataset. It looks a lot more structured than my hasty notes. And corruption, or some hidden derivative of it, could be a factor. I didn't notice the issue until at a point where my empire spans across 15 sectors and the situation is just after a rather prolonged conflict against the Boskara. Their territory, which I now own, is quite pirate infected and it will take some time for me to get that infrastructure up and running properly.

That said, when you look at the colony screen, the corruption already appears to be taken into account. The shown tax revenue is the figure you would get if you first remove the specified corruption percentage from the colony GDP and then calculate the tax percentage off of that.

And regarding the revenues, as far as I can tell, the colony list revenue values do match the colony window GDPs. But what is more interesting, the sum of colony GDPs does not match the empire summary figure for colony revenue even when I correct for the corruption of the respective colonies. The total sum of GDPs is 2599k, once I subtract corruption on a per colony basis (that is, calculate what is left of the GDP after corruption and sum that up) the total sum of adjusted GDPs is 2222k, and the empire summary screen is telling me the sum is 1823k.

So to recap, the sum of tax revenues from the colony windows does not match the empire summary colony tax figure and the sum of colony GDPs, even when adjusted for piracy, does not match the empire summary figure for colony revenues.


@ Analogical

Thank you for the suggestion. The sum of negatives when setting all colonies to 0% tax is 38.35k. This could quite possibly explain part of the discrepancy but it cannot explain why the amount of missing tax revenue is only a few thousands at low tax percentages and beyond 100k at high percentages.

@ Shark7

quote:

1. The economy is largely driven by resource shortages. This will affect your maintenance and appears to effect corruption levels. The effect on your tax money collection is notable if you have shortages of needed resources.

Given how it appears that the revenue displayed by the colony screens is apparently not the revenue used for the purpose of figuring out how much money I'm making, this definitely could be part of the explanation. If, for some reason, my actual revenue is 30% less than what the colony screen is suggesting then it is a small wonder that the tax revenues also do not match the displayed and expected values.

However, I was testing this on my capital world that certainly wasn't experiencing any resource shortages. Everything is stockpiled in good numbers. Some of the prices aren't as low as they could be and I suspect this causes both civilians and state to pay slightly higher ship maintenance costs, but maintenance is a figure in the empire summary and should therefore not result in any difference between what the colony screens say the various colonies are generating and what the empire summary screen says.



Bingeling -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/24/2015 9:47:34 PM)

It is obvious from my data that corruption is taken into account. That is clear when there is a 400 revenue colony after 50% corruption, which carries the empire economically.

If the colony screen agrees with the selection panel, it is an easier point to look at. It can appear that taxes are calculated from a revenue that is different than the one in the colony screen. The same different revenue that is also displayed in the empire summary screen.



Spidey -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/25/2015 8:19:40 AM)

I would tend to agree with both of those conclusions, Bingeling, bit that unfortunately also leads me to these conclusions:

1) The economic data in the colony windows are meaningless numbers that do not correspond with the economic data the game actually uses.

2) We have no way of seeing any kind of breakdown of the empire summary economic data or of empire corruption. These are magic figures that we can guess at but cannot see anywhere.

3) The user interface, as it exists currently, is broken. It displays multiple values for the same thing and at least one of these values is definitively wrong.



Analogical -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/25/2015 9:18:29 AM)

Spidey, of course your right that my suggestion doesn't explain the growth of the discrepancy for the higher tax percentages, but it seemed to me to be a useful starting point. Taking your observation and mine together suggests that whatever process is behind the discrepancy has both an additive and a multiplicative component, so I took the liberty of importing both of the tables in your original post into an Excel spreadsheet and then running a linear regression on them. The results were interesting.

Discarding the data points in which column #2 is 0 on the theory that the display program likely shows negative values as zero leaves 8 pairs in the first table and 4 in the second. The fit for the first table is:
Y = 0.6867X - 27.679, where Y is your column #1 and X is your column #2, with an R-squared of 1.000 -- in other words a perfect linear fit.
The fit for the second table is:
Y = 0.7128X - 29.24, with an R-squared of 0.9991.

So we have what appears to be a stable pattern, and all we need is someone who knows enough about how the economic model and its associated display algorithms are written to be able to explain to us why its there and what it means for game play.



Shark7 -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/26/2015 4:12:47 AM)

If anyone does manage to figure this out, would you kindly explain in a 'DW Economics for Dummies' way so maybe I can someday understand it too? [:D]



fruitgnome -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/26/2015 10:44:45 AM)

The following refers to only 1 colony that pay tax!

Could it be possible that the value on the colony represents a variable value but a value at one moment - so much tax has this colony to pay this year if the situation will be the same. The situation changes at every time for example through the population and the income of the colony.

And the value in the overview is the average value how much tax get the state empire pro year from this colony?



Spidey -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/29/2015 2:06:24 PM)

I don't think so, Fruitgnome. The main sinner in my dataset was a max pop world with nothing much changing in terms of economic production.

@ topic

It's been a bit quiet due to my work mostly preventing me from looking further into this mess, men I hope I'll get some better gathered this weekend. And if it still remains completely impossible to make sense of what is going on then I hope one of the people one would presume are in the know would be so kind as to comment on whether everything is as intended or if I'm documenting a fairly serious bug in the user interface.



fruitgnome -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/29/2015 2:50:45 PM)

Thery are changings i.e. population grow - max - grow - max and so on. A nother point could be that civilian ships are building and perhaps it affects the tax this would make sense for me.



Shark7 -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/29/2015 4:12:24 PM)

Civilian ship building income falls under other income, namely as spaceport income.

That's the reason that the other income fluctuates so much, as you build civilian ships it goes way up, but when the shipbuilding stops for a while, it declines to next to nothing.



fruitgnome -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/30/2015 10:53:56 AM)

Then I guess it is the changing of the development level or a bug. I'm exited.

Edit: Maybe this explains it:
(Galactopedia Colony Taxes)

"The population of each colony goes about their private business, generating wealth. Your empire then taxes this revenue generated by your private citizens." - Then the tax on build private ships could play its role.

And this describes it only in short:
(Also Galactopedia)

"Colony Income = Total Population × Development Level" - Or this is the reality.



DeadlyShoe -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/30/2015 11:35:11 AM)

you should check if your problem is in GDP or in tax rate.

namely, add up your colonies gdp and see if it matches what is reported on the empire screen for imperial and civilian income put together.

i would guess there's an inefficiency applied to the GDP of very large colonies that isn't showing up on the front end.



Spacecadet -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/30/2015 7:30:16 PM)

I think I went over this a long time ago.

The problem here is that you don't show enough information.


Let me address the 1st Post (OP) :

Your Summary Screen shows your Colony Tax Income = 372K (STATE), this is also what your PRIVATE Sector lists as Colony Taxes under expenses (as it should).

You've also highlighted your Capital Colony, showing that it is collecting 507K in Taxes, and this is where a lot of the confusion comes in.
You said that all other Colonies are set to 0% Tax rate, so these Colonies are most likely going to have negative Cash Flow.
There are also other pluses & minuses we don't get a full picture of to see why the 507K is down to 372K in the Summary.

We really need a picture of the Colony Screen to see what the values of each Colony are, but with 36 Colonies it's not going to be an easy picture to put together.












BlueTemplar -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/30/2015 9:29:07 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Analogical

Let me flesh out my earlier suggestion with a specific example, so that it'll be a little clearer. In the reference game I was using I have 5 colonies, of which only the home planet has a tax rate greater than 0. The colony display for the home planet shows tax revenue of 60K, but the empire summary screen shows total colony tax revenue of 56K -- the same anomaly Spidey was complaining about in the op, albeit on a smaller scale. The colony displays for each of the four planets other than my home world show a tax of 0% (-1.00k). Those negative tax values sum to exactly the difference between the home planet's 60k and the empire summary's 56k. (These colonies had populations ranging from 184m to 743m, culture scores between 48 and 95, and corruption of either 0 (1 planet) or 1% (3 planets)).

I'm simply suggesting that if Spidey looked at the individual colony displays for his 35 outside planets he might see negative tax revenue entries that accounted for the anomaly. Why those negative numbers are there is another question of course.

Why doesn't it show for me then? Is the Homeworld different? Is it just a rounding error?


[image]local://upfiles/34953/405EF57FCA974259AE9C70264B778B94.jpg[/image]



Analogical -> RE: I thought I understood DW economics but I can't explain this (5/30/2015 10:58:10 PM)

In part it does, BlueTemplar – your colony display shows the same (-1.00K) entry for “Tax” that I was highlighting in my post. Where your example differs from ours is that you have no colonies with a tax rate greater than zero. As to why the empire total doesn’t then report the negative value, I see two possibilities: One is that the empire “Colony Tax Revenue” entry isn’t set up to display negative values, so it reports the total as zero instead; the other is that this whole issue of a mismatch between the colony tax reports and the empire total is related to the difference in reporting intervals – snapshot for the colony screen, annual totals for the empire summary.

Does anyone know the exact definition of “Annual” used in the empire summary? Calendar year? Year to date? Last 12 months? Projection for current year based (say) on year to date?



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