I still don't understand how the finances work...

[Xlr8]

I'm getting the hang of the game now and it is starting to turn out really fun, except for when the AI wont attack me, but thats gonna get fixed.

What I'm struggling with now is the finances.

My planets usually hover around a 22% tax rate and seem to do ok with that. Every once in a while I need something built quickly and I'll run the queue slider fully right. My finances will then update to show a shortfall. I presume the shortfall will come out of my 23k purse the empire has. But I'm probably wrong.

My empire taxes, on the other hand, usually stay at 5% empire and 11% system. How can there be 3 different taxations? Aren't the planets being double taxed?

My empirical purse keeps generating money. Even if I set budgeting to "Spend". Also, if I add more finances to Science, Military, and Unrest I will see an empirical shortfall -- but only for a couple turns and then I'm right back to making money again. It seems I can't give my AUs away. What gives?

Lastly, the manual says if you run a planetary queue slider out of the green and into orange or red you will initiate waste of production (from what I got out of it).... yet, i still get what i want in 2 turns rather than 20.... ??? And I dont lose buildings or anything out of the deal. I seem to only lose buildings from planetary shortfalls at random...

Can someone please help me understand this series?

Thanks in advance,
Xlr8

[darcy]

Lastly, the manual says if you run a planetary queue slider out of the green and into orange or red you will initiate waste of production

What they mean is that buying Production Points gets more expensive.

If you have 50 Industry Points, you can buy 50 Production Points per turn for 1 AU each, slider is green. The next 50 PPs cost 2 AU each, slider gets yellow, and so on. Same with test tubes and research points.

About your other questions, no idea. The system tax seems to go nowhere. If I set empire and planet tax to 0 and system to 20%, no money shows up anywhere.

If planetary debts could simply be covered from the imperial treasury just like that, the whole system of two separated banks would be completely absurd. Anything is possible in this nightmare of a design, but it would be more likely that your planet has to pay interest for the debt, somewhere, somehow.

[Xlr8]

Yeah, these finances are way skewed. I can't make my empire go broke at all and in MOO2 it was sometimes near-impossible to stay monetarily afloat!!!

[Harry Seldon]

I think it breaks down like this: empire wide taxes are applied to everyone, system taxes apply to developed systems, and the tax you see on each planet is the combination of these two taxes and the planetary tax, which increases proportional to the ammount of production needed and debt that is passed to the empire. I can't say I know exactly how it works but that is how it appears to me. I was able to go broke by pushing the go-for-broke spending plan and forgetting to turn it off after a major spree. If you leave the setting on balanced, then you'll rarely outspend what you bring in and the AI tries to breakout a small gain. Check your setting and then bump your Unrest spending up a few notches until your yearly balance is a few hundred AU loss. I'll bet within five turns the AI has compensated for this increased spending and you'll be turning a small profit again.

[Xlr8]

Yup. Ive noticed that.

Here, check this out: http://www.nebulanet.net:8080/moo3/f...xplanation.htm

I found that posted in the General forum. If you surf that site more you'll find lots of neat stuff -- including an updated encyclopedia. They have done a great job. The main portion is here: http://www.nebulanet.net:8080/moo3/