Randmax

This little utility manages all my planetary stuff. It uses a pretty simple to edit ini-file in which you can determine how much mines, factories and defenseposts you want built on your planets, and how you want to tax the natives and colonists. It is the ultimate taxing-tool, because it's very accurate in using the growth-method. I have it tax my natives rigorously for one turn, at a rate that either the maximum amount of taxes are earned by my colonists or the natives' happiness drops to 70. After that it doesn't tax for a couple of turns, until happiness has reached 100 again. This method ensures maximum growth of the native populations and earns more money than the so-called 'safetax'-method.

The only thing you have to keep in mind is that you have to add a line to the ini-file for each planet you colonise. It's not such a big deal if you don't, because Randmax will then use whichever default order you've set. But when your default order is to build 50 mines and no more, Randmax won't build more than 50 mines on planets without an own line in the ini-file. So have a look at your planets and your ini-file every now and then, because you don't want to mine that very mineral-rich planet with only 50 mines. It is also still possible to build mines yourself: you can let Randmax automatically build 50 mines on each planet, and then check your planets and build more mines on planets with decent minerals. (These 50 mines I'm using here is an example).

One thing Randmax doesn't take into account is the 200% Federation taxrate. Randmax does have a line with the maximum income per planet (default hostconfig = 5000 MCs) to which it neatly sticks, but on a planet with a lot of natives with good government and 5000 clans or more Randmax yanks up the taxes so that you'll earn a nice 4000 or so megacredits, possibly even 5000. This nicely gets doubled by Host, and then harshly cut down to 5000 MCs. So what you'll end up with is 40% taxing earning you the same amount of money 25% taxing would. An easy way to prevent this from happenning is adjusting the 'maximum taxes we're allowed to collect'-line and put half the maximum value there.

Also read: using randmax and randgen by Dirk Fischbach

*NOTE* - Any bugs reports should be sent to Thomas Voigt, who is now maintaining Randmax.