Revenue Adjuster Mod

Revenue Adjuster Mod

For those of you who think the game is either too hard, or too easy…
A mod to simulate taxes and government subsidies.
Or: a plausible way to make the game waaaaaay more difficult.
Use the CommonAPI (or manually edit ‘settings.lua’) to set either a tax or subsidy rate.
Either of these is calculated on your gross revenue. The numbers showing up in blue on the screen when units arrive at stations won’t change.
However, if you open up your financial statement, you will see, at the bottom, a line called ‘Other,’ which will be accumulating in either red or blue, depending on your choice of rates.
Just like government policy in real life, the tax rate can be changed over time. If you change the rate during a game, when the in-game calendar year next changes, the config file will be read again and the new rate will be applied.
This means that if you are playing the game with the date frozen, and you want to apply a new rate, you will need to manually change the date to reflect a new year.
You can then change it back if you want – the mod doesn’t remember old rates, it just uses the change in year as the method of allowing rate changes without wasting CPU cycles by constantly reading the config file.
The default value is -5, which represents a 5% tax on your revenues. If this doesn’t represent enough difficulty, you are free to choose something harder. See if you can survive if you set the value to -25.
If you set a value greater than zero, the government will be paying you a subsidy, again as a percentage of the revenue paid by your clients. A value of 7 will be a subsidy of 7% of the revenue you would otherwise earn.
Nobody is going to need to government subsidy are they???
I don’t actually consider myself a particularly good player, so I won’t offer any advice as to what values will represent an appropriate challenge at any given level of game difficulty.
I will note that in my mature test game (year is currently something like 2170) I was still accumulating income with the default tax rate of 5%.