What is the analog in “real life”? Usually there are land taxes, sales (and transfer) taxes, and payroll taxes. The government doesn’t get involved in what happens in your own inventory…
If a bread factory feeds its workers with its produce, what does that have to do with government?
More importantly, it adds another level of planning. which is “OK” in theory because it is a strategy game, but at some point you have to realize that the point of the game is FUN. Having to cater for a variable tax every moment sucks the fun out of it. It would be much better to tax at the time of sale.
Just mho.
I can write more but I want to keep this post short.
I get where you’re coming from with your first point, as a fee on the production itself is unusual compared to the examples for taxes you listed. I’m pretty sure the taxing system will become more sophisticated in the future, probably already with the upcoming Expanse update.
As for your second point, I can’t say that I agree. The fun of the game, to many people, is doing the math, and fees add another variable to the equation if you will. I would agree if the tax were unpredictable, thus making calculations impossible, but it does scale linearly with the order size.
I agree with nigelhenry the fees suck. I didn’t realize how ridiculously high the production fees were on a planet for a while.
Once I saw how little progress I was making due to fees eating almost all of my profits, I wanted to move to another planet. Destroying your buildings hardly gives back any materials and you can’t destroy the core module, so that wasn’t going to work.
My next idea was to start a new account and check how high the fees were on a planet before building. I don’t think there is a window to do this. The only place where I can find the fees is in production after you have built buildings.
This game is a waste of time if some dick head is always just going to steal all my profits and your game mechanics lock me into slavery. It should be easy to check on production fees before you choose a planet and you should be able to pack up your core module without losing the expensive components. It is okay if you lose money on destroying everything else you built, but relocating should be possible if you chose a bad planet.
Also the fees suck. They are just a mechanic that allows one player to ruin the fun for everyone else. If you are going to allow one player to steal then you need to add more mechanics for me to refuse to pay the fees. Right now my only options are to wait for an election, hope someone new wins, and hope that he isn’t a bastard too. Or I can destroy my base and quit playing, which seem to be the best solution.
Don’t be too salty about the fees. It’s roughly about a 1-5% haircut on total net profits depending on a million factors. Pretty small in the scheme of things.