@Johnclark — Voting opens in 12 days. Ausecko is running against me. If you think I am doing a bad job, you SHOULD vote for Ausecko. I totally understand not wanting max taxes, I don’t really like charging max taxes if I am totally honest.
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Nah man im just messing with you, you seem to be doing an amazing job and idk who the other guy is XD I dont know the government/voting system works in the game haven’t looked into that yet.
SoonTM
Current financial snapshot is below. Expecting around 375K taxes in a couple of hours, which will get us to slightly positive balance, although still down over 500K on the month when you factor in the opening balance.
I am working on FLO and DEC with the intent of building a wellness center once all the parts finish manufacturing. So that should help start to get the Technician happiness up. Looks like we are also closing in on level 5 of the Safety Station. Of course both of those will just further increase upkeep costs.
I am more than open to suggestions 
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Been super busy with work and my thesis, so I haven’t been able to chat with you for a while.
I don’t know how far it’ll take us, but subsidization seems the only way to go to reduce costs and increase production (generate more taxes). The safety station is eating up the majority of the upkeep expenses, and DW contributes largely to that, I think. While the free market is great and all, large non-optional costs like pop upkeep will require some government intervention in pricing (or lacking that, a guaranteed supply of low cost inputs). What would the financial impact be if the cost of DW or OFF were lowered by $5/unit?
Edit: Subsidization is the wrong word maybe. I think I mean, what if there were commitments by DW/SUN/OFF producers to lower prices. Would that help?
Happy Sunday!
Today’s financials will get two ledger snapshots, as we closed out the month of September. First is the final closeout of September…then I find out if my spreadsheet works the way it is intended when I role over to a new month:
Bottom line for September is that Populous was introduced, and upkeep expenses (Populous plus COGC) exceeded tax revenue by over 700K CIS.
And now October (because the spreadsheet worked!!):
I just made sure everything was topped up for at least the next 7 days, so a good bit of Populous upkeep is already paid. Taxes will come in a little later today, but right now it is projecting to be a right around 400K, so it will get us close to being balanced again.
You may have noticed that we bumped the Safety Station up to level 5 recently, so upkeep will go up a bit for it this coming week. I have also started working on building a Wellness Center for us, because the upkeep for that doesn’t look to be crazy. What is holding that up is the lack of DEC supply, so I am making them myself, just need the time to get 40 of them made.
I am hoping that the Devs will adjust the production tax limit such that I can raise production taxes further, as I believe they are the fairest way to handle Populous upkeep. If they loosen those limits, I will immediately raise production taxes. But I can’t do that right now…the only lever available to me is LM fees, and I am afraid raising those would be counterproductive.
Today’s Populous report was not good, not good at all…but the good news is we had a lot of unemployment for the lower tiers of workers, so even with some modest losses there should be ample workforce for everyone. But we need to stabilize the upper tiers soon.
If anyone wants to be a generous donor for the wildlife park or one of the drone centers…it would be helpful and appreciated.
BTW…want to recognize SierraOne and Bigos by Zbic for reaching out and talking to me about ideas for improving Katoa! Love the dialogue and suggestions…and I love the willingness to help the planet. Many kudos to everyone who is donating to upkeep voluntarily!! You all rock!!!
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I am flattered by your continued trust as governor.
This week’s finances look a little better – this was a slightly lighter week for expenses, and I am expecting tax collections to be up by about 125K when they come in about an hour from now. Which is great news!!
This means we will actually have a positive balance this week! Woohoo! Of course, happiness still isn’t where we need it to be. 
We are nearing completion of the Wellness Center, the big remaining thing is for the FLO tanks to come off my assembly line, which should happen on Wednesday.
Lots of folks have been generously donating to both building construction and upkeep. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!
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Are we over-doing happiness at lower levels? Seems unemployment is still very high so we don’t have a shortage of pioneers.
McCowen - This is a great question, and there was a long dialogue about this in planet chat last week.
Several other planets have announced that they intend to try to shrink their PIO and SET tiers to reduce upkeep. I have seen those announcements and made note of them. And their argument is certainly valid.
My fear is that we might be underestimating how hard it is to grow the population in the future. Current mechanics are that your population shrinks if your happiness is below 50%, and it grows if your happiness is above 70%. This leads to a question of how hard it will be to occasionally spike happiness up to 70% so that the population grows.
My goal is for Katoa to grow. I want more bases built on Katoa, and I want the people who are already on Katoa to max out their bases and move up from PIO to SET (and hopefully to TECH and higher down the road). Thus I want to maintain some level of unemployment — those are workers that can fill the jobs as people grow their bases.
The question is how much headroom do we need. And I don’t know the answer to that. What I do know is that Katoa gained 40 bases last week. (We can reverse engineer this from the Population reports — each new base gets 200 PIO, and our population stealth grew by 8000, hence 40 new bases).
If those 40 new bases hang around and grow to 500 workers each by the end of the month…then they would consume 12,000 workers out of our surplus. If other people who were already here also grow by 300 workers…well, that 12,000 can become 25,000 really fast. This makes me want to maintain what might appear to be a high level of unemployment such that we can soak up that growth. And maybe a few months from now, we are advertising “Come to Katoa, we have workers!”
Of course, it is also possible that many of those 40 new bases logged in one time, built a base, decided they don’t like the game and will never be seen again. In which case, they gifted us 200 PIO. This is something we will need to learn from in time.
The other complication is that satisfaction of higher tier needs like comfort cannot be higher than satisfaction of lower tier needs. We don’t have a big surplus of Technicians…so we need to keep every one of those that we can. Cutting off a few PIOs to reduce that unemployment might cause us to lose a significant amount of our Techs and end up shooting us in the foot.
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I get your point about being ready to accept new players and natural base growth, those numbers should drop out of the PIO being used vs unemployed in the pop report, and the bases used number is on the PLI buffer. I still wonder if this is being overdone. As to higher tiers, their happiness is capped at the lowest % of the needs met below their level, so if Technicians get 80% of their higher needs met, we’d only need 80% of the lower, PIO, needs met aswell?
I don’t know the answer to the last question you asked. The mechanic implied by the documentation is that Comfort satisfaction cannot be higher than Safety satisfaction. Since PIO care about safety and either care very little or not at all about Comfort, while TECH seem to care a lot about Comfort, it might mean that it is impossible for us to have TECH happiness at 51% without having PIO happiness much higher.
My current goal is 51% happiness for each of PIO, SET, and TECH to stabilize them. We’ll have to figure out what it takes to hit those targets.
The happiness of one tier is not directly influenced by the happiness of another tier in any way.
The need fulfillment %s do directly influence each other between tiers, however. @I_am_Tex is correct in noting Comfort cannot be higher than Safety (or Health). However, Technician happiness could be higher than Pioneer happiness: imagine a situation in which both workers have all their needs 100% fulfilled, but Pioneers have enormous unemployment, while Technicians have none.
However, practically, higher tier happiness is gated by lower tier happiness. The only way around that is in the unemployment disparity scenario I just mentioned.
But, it seems the unemployment penalty is not that severe. It seems almost impossible to lose Pioneers on a habitable planet. The risk is then runaway Pioneer population, which will make it much more expensive to boost higher tier workers simply bc you have to satisfy 10ks or 100ks of Pioneer needs to get the Safety fulfillment percent high enough to get Tech happiness above 70%.
With 100% Life Support always, Pioneers are stable with zero Safety. But with zero Safety, it is impossible to do anything with Technicians and higher. I’m concerned letting Pioneers continue to accumulate without purpose will just ramp up your costs now with no gain.
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Here’s some numbers I came up with looking at Katoa’s last POPR.
On that POPR, you have around 125k unemployed workers out of a total workforce of 408k. This means the required workforce is about 70% of the need consuming workforce. If you had exactly the required workforce, it suggests your Safety could have been as high as 28.1%, instead of 19.5%, for the same expense.
Limiting the numbers to just the Sets & Techs, it’s 31k unemployed of 61k total: about 49% required workforce. Health fulfillment could have been as high as 47%.
With Safety at 28% and Health at 47%, you might have a stable Tech population without needing additional buildings.
Obviously, you can’t have exactly the required workforce, but this is the risk of allowing some tiers to grow without bound. It’s not free, and it directly hurts the higher tiers who don’t get a freebie 100% Life Support boost.
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Looking at today’s report almost all the happiness scores dropped 10% and there definitely is a need to focus more on the mid-high tiers;
PIO holding steady: 44 new bases of 200 Pioneers, 59% happiness and 125k free workers, so more than enough for new and expanding players.
SET diminishing: 53% unemployment and 46% happiness has caused a small but necessary reduction in Settlers. The happiness will need holding at 50% for higher tiers.
TEC diminishing: 9% unemployment and 31% happiness. At this rate there won’t be enough Technicians in just over 2 weeks.
ENG falling below needed workforce: 4 open jobs now and 24% happiness.
Today’s POPR report shows slight drops in need fulfillment in Safety and Health, with the addition of a little in Comfort. This has led to around 5% drops in happiness across the board. PIOs have increased only because of 30 new bases, while all other tiers are dropping fast. Apart from Engineers, unemployment has risen! For Technicians, this has nearly doubled! Engineers are still needed despite their numbers dropping. Devs, this shows that it still needs to be possible for high unemployment to drop a lower tier while not stopping a higher tier with job openings from growing, and perhaps for 50%+ happiness to not stop a lower tier from reducing in numbers. In short, employment needs to be a much bigger part of the growth equation.
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Weekly financial report is posted below. I am expecting about 560K in taxes later this evening, so the deficit after taxes will be about 170K CIS
Currently I am questioning if the WCE is worth it. I might turn that off next week. We shall see.
McCowen has some good comments on today’s Populous report right above. I don’t know that I have much to add to that.
Feedback for the Developers – Across multiple planets, we are seeing crazy expenses for not that much in terms of worker happiness. Is that what you intended? Or is this possibly more expensive than you expected it to be? From my perspective…we have been trying, and we have not made much impact. I get regular complaints that taxes are too high, yet I am paying more out of pocket than I am collecting in taxes and still losing the workers I am trying to keep.
Oh…one more note: I have contracted with a U-Fab supplier to make the habs for the wildlife park. Those will be a donation to the planet, but then we will need to start Wildlife Park upkeep. I am expecting delivery on those habs late this week or early the following week.
@I_am_Tex I did an analysis recently, comparing PAR + ART to ACA. If you anticipate eventually producing Culture, the ACA is a bit more expensive to construct, but definitely less expensive to upkeep.
However, I would support you in stating that the government will not be producing Culture, since the tax base it benefits is minuscule, and there is no way to target it for incremental tax. I’d say Engineers shouldnt even factor into your decisions much at all. Trying to support Techs is quite kind, IMO.
I seem to draw the opposite conclusions from @McCowen, given his report on the POPR. If unemployment is UP across the board, its time to reduce upkeep support levels. Unemployment is the enemy: it waste resources constantly, and impedes future ability to grow higher tier workers.
I’d probably target an unemployment rate of 10%-20% for supported worker tiers, with a strong skew towards 10%.
Also to @McCowen’s point, he’s absolutely right that the big unanswered question now is: at what unemployment rate will a worker tier shrink even with 100% fulfillment of its “most important” needs?
@777isHARDCORE I think we agree. The big question is - how to shrink a lower tier while growing a higher one. At present you have to satisfy lower tiers at least as much as higher, so they will always be growing faster than higher ones, even with massive unemployment. The satisfaction needed to shrink lower tiers will harm higher ones greatly. Yes PIO need shrinking on many planets. This is why I think employment should be a much bigger factor on tier growth - even overcoming the 70%/50% thresholds. I think if need fulfillment was capped at lower tier need fulfillments but growth was decided by tier, tier employment and tier need fulfillment, that may allow higher tiers to grow while lower tiers with mass unemployment to shrink.
Exactly. Hence the question I posed at the end of my last post: at what unemployment rate will a worker tier shrink even with 100% fulfillment of its “most important” needs?
For example, here’s FO-163b’s last POPR:
100% need fulfillment, but happiness is down around 91.1%. This is the lowest happiness in the last 5 POPR, despite always 100% fulfillment, but corresponds with the highest unemployment.
So the related question is: how high does unemployment need to get before happiness falls below 70%, and growth stops, even with 100% need fulfillment?
This will then inform us on just how much overage population is the most we’ll have to pay for but still be able to build higher tier workers.
I am slowly and reluctantly coming around to this conclusion. I think it is wrong, and it scares me long term, but I am starting to feel like funding upkeep on Katoa is foolish. It will simply be too expensive to support.
But I hate the implications of this for the game over the long term. This means that we will only have PIOs on an exchange planet in time. I think that is a horrible position for us to be in. But the current populous scheme makes it impossible to support SET and TECH and higher on a fertile planet without have MASSIVE unemployment at the PIO level. And that PIO unemployment in turn drives up the needed levels of upkeep to a level that aren’t sustainable without crazy taxes.
Here is my ethical problem — There is a taxpayer on Katoa who uses Engineers. He/She might have voted for me. There are multiple taxpayers on Katoa who use Settlers. They might have voted for me. They actually do deserve some help from the government supporting their businesses. Telling them they are on their own is kind of disingenuous.
Now, what does that mean? Does that mean I need to build an ACA? No, I am comfortable saying they need to build their own ACA. Under your “99% can’t fund the 1% argument.”
But they can’t build an ACA if I am not supporting Safety and Health, because the Safety & Health cap will make their ACA useless.
Now…that said, they haven’t built an ACA yet. And I haven’t gotten a whole lot of help building the Wildlife Park from the Technician owners. So…here is where I am at after thinking about this most of the afternoon when I wasn’t actually working:
As of right now…I’m going to turn off all the Populous buildings on Saturday and quit paying upkeep for them this weekend. And I’ll drop taxes accordingly.
What does this mean — It means the ENG and Techs will die off faster. There isn’t a big unemployment cushion there…so that will be felt soonish.
SETs will also die off…but we have massive unemployment there, so we will be good for a long time. And we can restart things when that cushion starts to get low.
If you don’t think I should do this…please try to talk me out of it. This still feels wrong to me, but 777’s argument is starting to hit home with me. I feel like I am spending a ton of our taxes for nothing right now, because the return percentages are so low.
And Developers — I really don’t think this is what you want us to do. But this is the impact the current mechanics are having.
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