Why is my corruption so high and how can I fix it?

[fistfullobeer]

My home planet, no other races, no pirate raids, tax rate 15%, not over populated, a Republic, yet 35% corruption? (And rising!) I added an admin building but there was no reduction in corruption. How can I fix this? Thank you.

[BTAxis]

35% is honestly not too bad. Your administration building is reducing it - delete it and see what happens.

To reduce corruption, either improve your administration building or switch to a government that has better corruption reduction if one is available. Characters can occasionally help as well.

[fistfullobeer]

35% is honestly not too bad. Your administration building is reducing it - delete it and see what happens.

To reduce corruption, either improve your administration building or switch to a government that has better corruption reduction if one is available. Characters can occasionally help as well.

35% is not bad? 35% of my budget draining into a black holeisbad. I started a new game and within 5 weeks my corruption was up to 25%. That seems extremely fast. It feels like this is some artificial contrivance to control the player's income and limit growth. Maybe they should just call it "Player Tax."

Question: Is that $41k value a cumulative value or current loss value? I mean, is that how much has been lost over time since the beginning of the game, or am I losing $41k every year? Thank yoju.

[BTAxis]

Well, I meant it isn't bad relatively speaking. Everyone is having these corruption values. You can stress over it, but there's not much point.

The revenue lost to corruption shown in the colony details screen is what you lose on a yearly basis.

[blarglol]

In DW2 "corruption" isn't truly corruption, or at least not exactly that. It is the game's way of letting you know how much of the local, planetary economy is beyond your greedy government hands. The stat basically shows how much of the private sector wealth isn't being taxed. Some of that would be tax evasion and stuff like that, but it isn't just "officials stealing money" or something. It's generalized and abstracted. The manual game encyclopedia can explain more.

[jRides]

'Corruption' probably is a bad word for it. The manual states on Page 76:

Corruption in Distant Worlds 2 really just means anything in your economy that is outside the control of the State (you). Planetary Administration facilities are important to build on your new worlds to make sure you have a good presence there and can maximize your income. Such facilities can be upgraded with further research. Corruption is even more of a problem on large densely populated worlds and improved administration facilities there can result in a significant jump in income.

There is a post on the Steam forum by a fellow called ChaosHorizon that's worth a read in itself ( For those having trouble with Economy (Mostly) ), here he advocates making sure you are controlling your tax levels yourself - and I can confirm, I'm doing this and sitting around 30% corruption:

First go to your Factions flag in the upper left corner on your screen tab then click on Policy Settings.

From there you will need to click the drop down for Colonies and taxes. Then Set those three options to Manual.

And covering the relevant point here:

The next thing you will want to do is go to your colonies tab. At the start of the game you will really only need to worry about your home planet. But what you can do to mitigate most of the corruption from spiraling out of control is set your Tax to 20 percent. Setting it to 20 percent will not trigger corruption increase because if you hover over the corruption tab you will see that it says (Above 20 Percent) to receive the corruption trigger effect.

To mitigate corruption you will need to stay on top of getting your Planetary Research going as soon as you can. And will need to finish it as soon as your able. Finishing it will more or less set your corruption to be forevermore around 31 percent. While its not great its not terrible.

[BTAxis]

Not going over 20% tax isn't really good advice as such. With colonies you're optimizing for tax income, not for corruption. If raising taxes gets you more income for the state even if it also raises corruption, it's still what you want to do. As long as the population doesn't rebel.