DD/Economy/Settler taxing
From Unknown Horizons
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Proposal
Summary
The only way to get money aside from selling resources is by taxing the settlers. This is the main part of the income and therefore most important for a player. The taxing is tightly coupled with the happiness of settlers. The more goods they get, the more tax will they pay.
Detailed Description
Each settler pays taxes regularly. The amount of taxes is calculate according to this formula: happiness * tax_rate. It will be different for each settler, since the happiness is per settler. Yet the tax rate is equal for every settler (of a settlement), no matter to which increment level they belong. The tax rate can be normal or high. The corresponding values of these rates will have to be defined. A normal tax rate will leave the settlers' happiness as is, a high one will decrease the settlers happiness over time. As one can see in the formula, the amount of taxes paid will decrease when set to high, so this setting is to be used only for short periods of time (when the player urgently needs money).
A small tax rate is also contemplated. It would increase happiness, which could make settlers level up, even when certain needed resources are missing.
Implementation related note
Every increment has a base tax (it's 2 for pioner).
Since happiness is an integer ranging from 1 to 100, it would influence the tax amount too much if we used "happiness * tax_rate". Therefore, we will use "(1 + ((happiness-50)/200))" as modifier. This way, the modifier stays between 0.75 and 1.25 and at medium happiness, it's 1.
The user can set a tax_setting of 1.0 (medium) or 1.5 (high). this tax setting works as a multiplicator.
Taxing and Happiness
The influence to the happiness of the tax_setting this extend: "difference to 1.0 times 10" ( -(tax_setting-1.0)*10 ). This way, the influence is 0 at medium setting and -5 at high.
The acctual decrease of happiness is calculated by this formula: acctual_tax_payed + base_tax + -(tax_setting-1.0)*10 . (i'm not sure about the base_tax part, but it seems to give reasonable values -totycro)
Open Questions
| Open question: Should there be individual tax rates for each island, housing increment or both? ~eoc. 20:09, 11 April 2010 (UTC) |

