Taxation in the X Universe

[spankahontis]

I was wondering, will there be a feature in place for continual payment of staff?
Rather than what we saw in X:Rebirth where you paid a one off fee for their services based on their skills, the higher the Rank the more they cost?

I'm thinking in line of that mod that gave your staff a weekly wage deducted from your net wealth in the game to pay for them.. Like a timer mechanic that deducts every so amount of hours played. The mod worked in X:Rebirth like a charm.

Will we see a fee imposed or tax to having stations in an area owned by another faction like the Argon?
Basically you buy the License to build in their Space and they deduct a certain amount from you every say for example 10 hours of gameplay speeded up by SETA.
You miss a payment, your license is revoked and you have to buy another one.
Thinking that the Argon Navy need a way to subsidise their Navy, you're paying for their protection in the end.

Encourages you to venture out of Argon protected space to build your stations in a more free market friendly area of space.
But paying Staff to fly your ships, operate your stations would make managing your finances, to THINK before spending like there is no tomorrow more essential.

[X2-Illuminatus]

Gameplay

• Do you have to pay the crews?
  You have to pay a hiring fee once, but don't have to pay them a daily salary.

[spankahontis]

Gameplay

• Do you have to pay the crews?
  You have to pay a hiring fee once, but don't have to pay them a daily salary.

Baaah! So it's up to mods to add this in then.
Makes no sense that you just pay a one off fee for a life of service.

[fcth]

Will we see a fee imposed or tax to having stations in an area owned by another faction like the Argon?

Sounds like there is just the license fee (and fees if you need to expand your station's available area), not an ongoing fee. A little simplistic, but doesn't bother me much.

If you need a justification for how the Argon afford their fleets, just assume there's a VAT on trade goods or something (that is apparently worth paying to someone even in uninhabited or pirate space).

[csaba]

Gameplay

• Do you have to pay the crews?
  You have to pay a hiring fee once, but don't have to pay them a daily salary.

Baaah! So it's up to mods to add this in then.
Makes no sense that you just pay a one off fee for a life of service.

Simplifies things.

Stations are already a slow turnover anyway. You need to invest 100s of millions into a station that will make it's build cost back in a dozen hours in SETA. Now imagine you make even less cause you pay all these fees. Developers already said that to think about it as if you only see the clean profit in the end, meaning wages were already deducted. Of course this doesn't make sense once you only have a few combat ships that don't generate any profit.

The thing is the fees have to be minuscule (and a waste of coding time) or they would be just an annoyance and hinder gameplay. When you constantly have to think about upkeep the game changes to something different from what it is. You can see it in action in Avorion where crew fees exist but are quite uninpactful outside the early-game where they are an annoyance and forces you to farm rather than spending those resources on a bigger ship.

[Miniding]

Better to pay one-time for salves… Totally agree!!

[radcapricorn]

Simplifies things.
Stations are already a slow turnover anyway...
The thing is the fees have to be minuscule (and a waste of coding time) or they would be just an annoyance and hinder gameplay...

There's a neat compromise that quite a few of RTSs employ: unit cap. You only pay for an asset once, but until you meet such-and-such conditions you're only allowed to have X assets. Once you've met those conditions, you can have extra Y assets, and so on.

[csaba]

Simplifies things.
Stations are already a slow turnover anyway...
The thing is the fees have to be minuscule (and a waste of coding time) or they would be just an annoyance and hinder gameplay...

There's a neat compromise that quite a few of RTSs employ: unit cap. You only pay for an asset once, but until you meet such-and-such conditions you're only allowed to have X assets. Once you've met those conditions, you can have extra Y assets, and so on.

Which you have in X4 with habitation modules, storage modules, docking bays. Remember stations are not prebuilt now. Heck even building just a station without assigning transport and mining ships to it will slow down your progress in earlier X games.

[radcapricorn]

There's a neat compromise that quite a few of RTSs employ: unit cap...

Which you have in X4 with habitation modules, storage modules, docking bays.

Ah, that's interesting.

Remember stations are not prebuilt now. Heck even building just a station without assigning transport and mining ships to it will slow down your progress in earlier X games.

Here I could argue, but most of it comes down to play style in those games, so I won't.

[Karvat]

Better to pay a hiring fee once, and nothing else later. Absolutely.

[Alci]

Better to pay a hiring fee once, and nothing else later. Absolutely.

no, the best thing is having weekly salary but paying a hiring fee once, and nothing else later.

[vadiolive]

Lack money sink and difficulty rating in XR
make the game after 1 day or 2 day played pure playground , not sandbox or living universe

[BlackDog]

Lack money sink and difficulty rating in XR
make the game after 1 day or 2 day played pure playground , not sandbox or living universe

No TV and no beer make homer something something...


Not entirely sure what your getting at but I can see why its a one time payment, but at the same time do wish it had a salary system.

Mods to the rescue!

[Karvat]

Better to pay a hiring fee once, and nothing else later. Absolutely.

no, the best thing is having weekly salary but paying a hiring fee once, and nothing else later.

Only if this salary has to be paid rarely or it's not too much expensive
But i still prefer nothing

[Tenlar Scarflame]

Yeah, I understand the decision to keep it simple but I'm personally on Team Payroll. If I'm not pushing any wares, I should be *losing* money, not just not making money. Also gives me reasons beyond the upfront cost of buying a ship and hiring a pilot to keep my fleets as slim as possible. Wouldn't even have to be a *major* money sink, just more than zero to keep me paying attention.

But, I recognize that there are plenty of players that would find it irritating to keep track of that at all, so, yeah. Mod is fine. ^^

[nemesis1982]

One time fee. Wouldn't want all the hassle of having to stop what i'm doing to procure funds since my cronies which are doing nothing atm on the cap ships I boosted not satisfied with wathever they can scrounge up themselves.

[Alci]

Honestly, paying for people is not what I would like. But maintenance payment for ships and stations would be my mod of choice.

There is no restriction on how many ships you have. Once bought there is no reason to care about ROA or efficiency. I like games where you need to think if more ships will make enough money to pay for themselves. Optimizing trade routes because some ships are not making enough (without maintenance it doesn't matter, if they bring 10credits it's a still a plus). And deciding if every hauler really needs maxed shields/weapons/cargo. In X3 all my ships were eventually automatically maxed no matter how small amount of commodities they were transporting.

Where number of battle ships needs to be covered by constant income so it can't grow above all limits.

And stations without materials consume resources to the point of being better to abandon them completely. (And I want to see NPC do that. Abandon/destruct station if it doesn't make enough money - AKA non fight takeover.)

[Sandalpocalypse]

The principle problem with payroll & maintenance fees is that if you want to go off and do a mission or explore for a bit you get sharply penalized if your assets arnt profitable. Even going into SETA too long cuz you went to the bathroom becomes problematic.

[Alci]

The principle problem with payroll & maintenance fees is that if you want to go off and do a mission or explore for a bit you get sharply penalized if your assets arnt profitable. Even going into SETA too long cuz you went to the bathroom becomes problematic.

then you would not do that I don't go to bathroom without pausing Hitman as well. But I think that is not a real problem and is kinda of point. Buying and setting profitable businesses. It works in all other games so it shouldn't be real problem. It's just having profit range 0-XXXmil doesn't contain any risk. You only go higher and higher. And you can't convince NPC to pack up their efforts non violently.

I always liked when NPC removed theirs train stations and sold trains in Transport Tycoon

[Zetoss]

Pay once and be done is what I strongly prefer for numerous reasons, but one thing I wouldn't be all that opposed to is an "income tax" of some sort. As for how it would work though? I don't see a way it would be even remotely friendly to the average player to use a bunch of profit-based taxation formulas in different places and at the same time it would require excessive programming that can't really be justified for a feature that would only matter to a limited percentage of players and just as many may even actually hate it for any of a number of reasons.

So yeah no, generally cough up a significant investment and be done, simple is best.

Those who absolutely HAVE to roleplay can imagine the employee takes a continuous interest rate from the sum agreed upon because it sits in a special type of locked bank account that neither employer or employee can tamper with, if their contract is terminated (for reasons other than a legal fault of the employee) the full sum is transferred to them instead and stops generating interest.