Sudden end game plummet in Colony Tax and Tourism?

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BobD62
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jan 06, 2023 11:34 pm

Sudden end game plummet in Colony Tax and Tourism?

Post by BobD62 »

Hi guys

This is my first visit to this forum, so I hope this is the correct place to discuss this.

I just finished my first full game of Distant Worlds 2, which I really enjoyed … though it has left me totally exhausted as the game is so addictive! I achieved the Human VCs but carried on playing for a bit as I wanted to get to 1 trillion population, but then had a very strange late game experience which I just have not been able to figure out: I was wondering if one of the experts here could advise.

I played on a spiral galaxy with 1000 systems (which, as warned, my laptop struggled with towards the end so I won’t try again), and had left pretty well everything other than fighting and facility building on automated. Close to this end game point I had 200 colonies; still in the game were 5 colonies owned by the very hostile Haakonish (from whom I had nicked about 150, after they had taken loads from the Mortalen, who had been eliminated), a dozen or so colonies by the very friendly Teekans and Xenox, one by the super unfriendly but harmless Boskara; and then probably 50 or so owned by the also very advanced but very friendly Yaros Empire. So at this point the hostiles were harmless, and everything else was super friendly and the game was just ticking over peacefully.

I had a healthy net state income of a couple of million, with colony tax at about 6.5m, boosted by several millions in private contributions, principal among which was ship building at about 1m and tourism at about 2m.

Rather unexpectedly, the Yaros suddenly declared war on the rump Haakonish state so, to prevent them expanding, I attacked the Haakonish as well, and conquered their capital just before the Yaros got there. That was their final planet so they were eliminated and their 250 or so mainly civvy ships switched to me. And then it went odd.

I suddenly started running at a massive loss, and it never recovered. I thought maybe the mass of ships switching to me had caused a problem, so I replayed from a prior save point and let the Yaros kill off the Haakonish, but I saw the same result.

At this point I started going back to the save point again and re-running the scenarios to examine in a bit more detail what the finances were like before the Haakonish bit the dust, and what happened to the money afterwards.

In all cases, and no matter who did the Haakonish in, from pretty well as soon as it happened I could see the ship building income drop to a few hundred k (perhaps understandable); but then there were two big factors:

1) Tourism dropped off massively, in my case from 2m or so to perhaps 500k, but looking at the tourism flow I could see that the flow to the Yaros declined hugely as well, and it never recovered; and then

2) My colony tax fell almost instantly from 6.5m down to under 4m, and never went back to more than 5m after leaving the game run at 4x for several years with me just watching.

The net effect was to run at a several million loss every year, so I could no longer build anything.

The drop in colony tax income was not due to losses from the captured Haakonish planets, as those losses were more than compensated for by the large tax incomes of the biggest colonies, and the captured colonies in any case quickly went into profit after building Planetary Admin and the population had got over their annoyance at having been conquered. The net losses from a dozen or so newly founded colonies were also tiny in comparison to the income from the established colonies - and, in any case, they had been founded some time before this event, - so the overall reduction was genuinely from a huge sudden drop in *existing* colony/tax income rather than due to the addition of new loss-making colonies.

Apart from conquering that last Haakonish planet and building a planetary admin on it I changed and built absolutely nothing anywhere, and I have been completely unable to figure out what was causing these massive changes. But there has to be a reason for it!

I know I have no real game evidence now to go on, but does anybody have any clues as to why this might have happened, and so precipitously?

Cheers

—Bob
AKicebear
Posts: 616
Joined: Sat Jul 26, 2014 2:11 pm

Re: Sudden end game plummet in Colony Tax and Tourism?

Post by AKicebear »

Does the luxury resource abundance on your top planets decline? That could lower tax revenue significantly. That's the risk of adding planets too quickly.
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