Stay under it by spending the money on ships and buildings, until you have enough weekly income to make it worth your while to absorb the loss.

Because a treasury that is under 20k is worthless if you need to buy a few capitol ships in a hurry. You could spend twice that easily on a single ship.

I don't understand why people say that you should purchase ships to lower your treasury every turn.

I simply let it continue to increase, albeit at a slower rate.

It's not a bug.  If your treasury goes above a certain point then new income loses some income due to graft.

It's not a bug. If your treasury goes above a certain point then new income loses some income due to graft.

That being the case, then, perhaps there could be some sort of indicator to the player that this is happening? Maybe income being shown in red on the tax screen, or a "Graft!" message next to the treasury figure when it goes above the limit?

I have never lost a game and thought I did well economically, even breaking 200,000 saved. Apparently, that's nothing, folks claim well over a million with income that seems to border on a fairy tale. I try to keep 6 econ bases near every planet as far as sector lines allow. I, like everyone else, build ten trillion galactic stock exchanges. Are these folks running their empires at 10% or what?

Hi!

If your treasury goes above a certain point then new income loses some income due to graft.

I know two tresholds: 10k and 20k. At 10k it seems graft is about 5%, at 20k it gets another 15%, to ~20% cummulative. And it is in a game from 1.0x.

BR, Iztok

I usually follow mumbles advice and spend the extra on improvements. I always seem to have something to build. Of course, by the time I get that far, I usually don't have to worry about bc too much.

I have noticed one game where I spent down below 20000 every turn, and then my end game said my average income was some negative number(I was making about 50k a turn near the end). I thought the two may be related, but I am not sure. I never looked through the forums for that. Anyone else ever see that or know why it happens?

Whats graft? newbe here

Whats graft? newbe here

Graft is what reduce's your income if your treasury gets too high. Just keep your treasury below 10K as Iztok mentioned and you'll lose nothing.

The flat 20k thing seems a tad arbitrary.

It is arbitrary but I don't see it as any big deal as long as you're aware of it. If you save your money from turn to turn it affects you eventually no matter what the size of the game. You might have to deal with it a bit more often in a gigantic game than in a medium game, but in the larger game you have more money so you can spend 40,000 bc each for a few dreadnoughts each turn. I don't see this as a disadvantage.

The fixed 500BC debt limit does not make sense when your economy gets large! If I am turning in a surplus of >1000BC per turn then why is my production shutdown if while spending my surplus I accidently exceed the 500BC debt limit! The debt limit should be relative to GDP!

Graft is where: 1) The politicians steal your money for their own personal use so it doesn't get into the treasury 2) People (or companies) bribe treasury officials to not tax them at the proper tax rate 3) People (or companies) simply don't pay their taxes

First off, "graft" is a slang or jargon term, not a formal one, so meaning is fundamentally fuzzy. Plus, from what I can tell, the GCII math is really about corruption in general and not graft in particular. Revenue that goes into any "black market" context like that is lost to the legal system.

Re point 1, that's just stealing--graft is a mutual arrangement. Same thing applies to point 3, that's just cheating on taxes. Re point 2, graft affects far more than just treasury officials--many cops are on the take, as are health inspectors, labor union officials, etc.

Put somewhat differently, the econ penalty in GCII is a very plausible attempt at modeling the results of extremely large, relatively open economies (we've talked elsewhere about GCII's weakness re assuming everything in a galaxy full of aliens works from an Adam Smith world view). Regardless of my desire to see more sophistication (differentiation) in species economic models, I really like this "graft" penalty now that I've come to understand it.