Taxation

Natives and colonists can be taxed for money. The amount of taxes earned depends on the taxlevel, the government type (in case of natives), the type of natives and the taxing race (or better put: the taxrate of the taxing race).

Natives
First, host checks if the happiness of the natives allows for them to be taxed at all. If the happiness level is lower than 30, no taxes are calculated and the taxrate is reset to zero; you will receive a messag from the natives stating they can not be taxed. When this happens, happiness is not further reduced because of the taxsetting you had set.

If the happiness level is 30 or higher, first the happiness is recalculated with the given taxlevel. If after the happiness change the happiness level is not higher than 30, the natives will not pay any taxes. Note that although natives can be taxed when their happiness level is 30, they will not actually pay taxes when after the happinss change their happiness level is 30. This means safetaxing the natives at a happiness level of 30 will not yield any megacredits.

So the native happiness level must be 30 or higher to begin with, and has to be higher than 30 after the happiness change is computed. If either condition is not met, the natives will not pay any taxes.

The basic formula for taxing natives is as follows:

Taxes earned from natives = (Native clans / 100) * (Taxlevel / 10) * (Native Government / 5)

The values for "Native Government" in this formula are as follows:

The earned taxes are multiplied by a factor (Player Taxrate / 100). In most cases this results in a factor 1 (since the default taxrate is 100). For the Federation this results in a factor 2 (by default, this is host-configurable).

Next, the Host program checks to see if there are enough clans at the planet to receive the taxes. It does this by calculating the number of clans multiplied by (player taxrate / 100). This is the maximum amount of money that can actually be earned. In other words: one clan is needed for every 1 megacredit collected, multiplied by the player's taxrate. So the Federation with it's default taxrate of 200 only needs one clan for every 2 MCs earned. If a player has for instance a taxrate of 400% he only needs one clan for every 4 MCs.

The next check performed by the Host program is to see if the natives are Amorphous. If they are, the earned tax-amount is reset to 0 and the taxlevel is also set to 0. Note that this is done after happiness calculation: though the amorphous worms will grow unhappy because of the taxlevel, they do not pay taxes.

Finally, if the natives are Insectoid the amount of earned taxes gets doubled. This is after the check for the number of colonist clans; with Insectoid natives one colonist clan can receive 2 MCs (multiplied by the player taxrate). So by default one Federation clan can receive 4 MCs from Insectoid natives, other races' colonist can receive 2 MCs from Insectoids.

The Borg cannot earn more taxes than 20% from their natives. They can set a higher taxrate, and native happiness will go down based on that taxlevel, but if the taxlevel is higher than 20% the actual money earned will be calculated as if the taxes were 20%. There are no limits to Borg colonist taxes.

Finally, there is a host-configurable maximum to the amount of taxes that can be earned on a planet per turn. This is by default 5000 MCs, and this limit is imposed by the Host program after both native and colonist taxing. So if you have taxed the natives for 4,000 MCs and the colonists for another 2,000 MCs you will still only receive 5,000 MCs.

Colonists
Colonists don't really have a government type, or rather their government type is equal to Feudal. So the factor for (government / 5) in the above formula results in 1 and can therefore be neglected in the formula for colonist. Similar rules regarding happiness as for native taxes apply. No taxes are earned if happiness is 30 or lower.

The Formula for taxes earned from colonists:

Taxes earned from colonists  = (Colonist Clans/ 100) * (Colonist Taxlevel / 10)

As for natives, the amount of earned taxes is multiplied by (Player Taxrate / 100). A check to see if there are enough colonists to collect the taxes is ofcourse redundant here.

Income limit
After both the taxes for natives and colonists are calculated, the total amount is limited by the host-configurable maximum planetary income. This is 5000 MCs by default. So if you have taxed the natives for 4,000 MCs and the colonists for another 2,000 MCs you will still only receive 5,000 MCs.