State Spendings

Eclesiar being a sandbox, there are many ways to spend state earnings. Virtually, the only limit is your imagination (and, of course, your coffers – and optionally the approval of your fellow countrymen).


Working economy over the course of past months I wanted to share some of our experiences. But first, before talking about spending, we’ll have to do a quick primer on how that money is earned in the first place...

Country Currency (CC)

Each State has its own Country Currency and regulates its supply. It exists in finite quantity, but the Congress can print more, at the cost of gold. It is VERY IMPORTANT to realize that printing money does NOT generate wealth: it merely increases the amount of CC in circulation, altering its relative value. 

Taxes and Printing

The main revenues of a country – international deals aside – will typically go into two categories: Tax revenues, and Printing/Seeding revenues.


Tax Revenues are what it says on the tin: Country Currencies collected by VAT and Work Taxes. However, in order to make that gold, you have to sell them back on the Monetary Market.


Printing revenues are what happens when there is high demand for your CC: if you want to maintain a fixed exchange rate (we and many use 1 gold = 10 CC), demand for new CC might make it so you have to mint new CC just to sell it to keep up.


From my experience in France with our Tax rates (20% WT, 8% VAT), both are loosely equal, varying over time.

Over-seeding

There are many obvious ways to screw this up: the first is going all IRL Venezuela and printing and selling a looooot of CC for quick bucks, without regard for its value. Look it up on Wikipedia if you want to know just how much of a bad idea it is.

The other one is basically the same one, but less obvious: instead of selling the CC, you’re using it. For example, the country buying 1000 Q5 Weapons on market. It immediately feels like it costs nothing, because you can print more at will – but in reality, you can understand it in that most of the CC you hand out that way won’t be bought up against gold later, so it’s actually paid delayed on your tax income.

Spending methods

Alright so now you dodged the pitfalls, paid all the bills (mostly law costs such as MPP) and have real stable gold to spend. What are you going to do with it? What are your options as a stateperson? 


Let’s review a few interesting options.


Option 1: Economic investment

You can always just buy companies to develop the state's economy, or holding stocks to promote players doing it. It’s boring, but it works, provided you have a clear plan ahead.

Option 2: Tanking subsidies

Option 2 is simply to subsidy individual players to increase their tanking capacity, that is to say dealing a large amount of damage on their own. This goes in the form of Q5 weapons, food, even equipment, boost items, adrenaline and such.


This option is what France was trying to do December 2024. This can prove effective and put select people on the map giving them visibility in wars and let them react with fast damage, but there are high fees involved and some will regard it as unfair. 


If you’ve read my other articles, you’ll probably already know that I favour rather:

Option 3: General public military subsidies

Rather than subsidying specific players, this aims at spreading the wealth wide to maximize player involvement and spending efficiency. This is what we’ve been doing for a few weeks now, and France spent a total value of 340 gold in past 14 days in war subsidies.


However, it is very time consuming to manage and supply – and in addition, it may not be as efficient as tanking if the best supplies are not targeted favouring most efficient players. It also risks waste of supplies if receivers do not follow country orders.

Option 4: Depollution

/! According to people in comments, NPC depollution is actually applied globally. This would make doing it for the benefit of your own country essentially worthless as it's spread out too much over everyone instead.


So you’re not that much into fighting. That’s okay. Maybe you want to maximize your production efficiency instead? Well, you can subsidize NPCs! 


As a refresher, when a NPC buys something, they reduce pollution according to what they bought, neutralizing its production effect. 


This means that in theory, if you were to overpay NPCs drastically, they would in turn buy more goods off the market and use them to reduce pollution. Of course, this only makes sense if these goods were produced outside of your country, or you’d still pollute more to make them due to the need of raw resources.


This is something that I briefly tested in France, but the cost to do so is very high and it would require long term application to have noticeable effects. On the plus side, CC injected that way isn’t completely lost as it’ll be spent back on markets -- so it might have more secondary effects to take into account.




If you’re a fan of the Option 4 idea, watch out for an article about NPC depollution coming in the future that you’ll probably love to read!






These are the most obvious ways I could find to use country budget. But of course as said above, there are bound to be many more.


If you had a country’s budget at your fingertip, what would you do with it?