This idea comes mostly from the desire for realism though I believe it will also add depth while slightly reducing complexity.
Currently wealth comes from two sources: taxes and financial centres. But what value do financial workers add that isn't covered by services? It kinda seems like their job it just creative accounting
And what do construction factories do while you aren't building any infrastructures?
My proposal is therefore following, completely remove financial centres and make idle construction factories produce additional trade goods (at no mineral cost) which would be automatically sold to civilians.
Why it would add complexity? It would incentivise setting up construction factories on other planets besides few mega industrial centres. Additional trade goods would increase the volume of civilian shipping,
and by keeping import/export balanced you increase the efficiency of civilian freighters, since if a planet only imports goods the civilians only make money, and therefore pay you taxes, on half of their trip.
Very interesting. I like the idea of having a way to balance import/export of trade goods on each planet.
Some initial thoughts:
It seems like this would eliminate some bits of depth:
1) Managing your allocation of workers between wealth jobs (financial centers) and productive jobs (everything else).
2) Creating specialized planets for wealth creation. You could still do this, but the benefit would be far diminished without financial centers providing the big multiplier on worker taxes, unless the wealth creation bonus of civ admins will apply to this trade good income.
How do we make the income from the production of trade goods with idle factories make up for the extra income lost from financial centers?
Right now, one financial center produces taxes for the 50k workers plus extra income equal to five times that amount.
An idle construction factory would produce the same base amount of worker taxes, therefore the trade goods produced would need to be worth five times that amount in order to provide the same income as one financial center.
But now we have just made things much easier for us:
To balance our income vs expenses, we just have to leave some confacs idle. Right now, idling confacs does not reduce expenses. Keeping a balanced budget requires planning ahead and building financial centers to provide enough extra income to keep up with growing expenses.
We can easily spend saved wealth when needed by activating some or all of the idle confacs. Right now, we can't do that. For example, my current empire has one financial center for every two confacs. The financial center income produces about 25% of my total income, and I run a slight budget surplus. With this change, instead of having financial centers, I would have 50% more confacs, and keep 1/3 of them idle. In an emergency, I could activate the idle confacs, giving me an instant 50% boost in confac output at the cost of 25% of my income. If I tend to keep a savings balance of about 1 years worth of income, I could keep up this deficit spending for 4 years. We don't have an option like this in the current game. We need to consider if this is a good thing to have.