The Levy and the Ledger
Income, taxes, bills, bill-lock, and the two stages of auto-pay — what it does when it can cover the ledger, and what it does on the fifth day it can't.
Income
Every citizen contributes a base income plus a happiness bonus each tide:
per-citizen income = $34 + 1.2 × happiness
That's before your levy (tax rate) is applied and before any resource, wonder, or improvement income multipliers stack on top. A happier flotilla isn't just pleasant — it's a direct, linear income lever.
Who actually pays it
The levy is charged against your working population, not your headcount. Out of the pool: children under 5 tides, anyone in uniform (Marines and their crews), the enslaved — who are worked for the treasury directly instead — disabled veterans convalescing, hands away on a shoal trawl, and everyone in the infirmary. A sick soul pays nothing and musters with nobody that tide, whether or not a bed was free for them; the count is the same one the Dashboard's infirmary tile shows you. Poor health also drags on the output of the people who do turn out (a separate multiplier on the breakdown), so an outbreak bites twice: fewer earners, and each of them earning less.
The tax sweet spot
Your levy is a real Laffer curve, not a straight percentage of income you can max out for free. Up to 28% tax, citizens are content and the happiness effect is a simple linear bonus. Push past 28% and the penalty turns quadratic — each additional point costs disproportionately more morale than the last. Over-taxing past the comfort line provably collects less net revenue as morale, and eventually population, falls. There's no cheat here: find the rate that keeps citizens content and hold it, rather than chasing a bigger percentage of a shrinking pie.
Bills
Your daily bill is built from what you've actually built, not a head-count tax: infrastructure, platform, technology, improvements, wonders, and every unit in your military each carry their own per-unit upkeep rate. Several of those rates are progressive — infrastructure, platform, and technology all step to a higher per-unit rate once you cross full thousand-unit brackets, the same shape as an income-tax bracket, so a small flotilla pays only the flat base rate and a sprawling one pays noticeably more per unit to maintain. Growing your throughput beats trying to shrink the bill directly — an austerity-focused build that attacks upkeep head-on still ends up behind a build that just grows faster.
Bill-lock
Bills are real debt, not a suggestion. Go 3 unpaid days — or carry any arrears at all, even a single unpaid dollar left over — and your flotilla is bill-locked: most actions freeze, including purchases, spying, military buys, and non-ground attacks.
The arrears themselves don't grow — they're a flat number that only ever gets bigger from a new unpaid bill or bond shortfall, never from sitting there. Left to sit across even a month-long absence, the debt is exactly what it was when you left. One thing claws you back out automatically: any tide you run net-positive, the leftover surplus after that tide's own bills pays down old arrears first; and the Sovereign Debt card (below) stays open even while you're locked, so a bond is always an escape hatch, never a door slammed shut.
Harbormaster's Receivership
For a flotilla whose bills structurally outrun its income — no war, no bad luck, just a ledger that can never balance — there's a real last resort, found in Settings, right beside the re-found/reset controls. It's only available while you're bill-locked: surrender 80% of your infrastructure, platform, and technology, plus your entire military (every Marine, hull, spy, and mine, with no refund), and every dollar of arrears is wiped along with the bill lock. No cash comes back to you — the surrendered estate IS the payment, not a payout. Wonders and improvements stay yours untouched. It's behind the same typed-flotilla-name confirmation as founding a new flotilla, and once filed you can't file again for 365 tide-days.
Before you type your flotilla's name in, Settings shows the real projected outcome — infrastructure/platform/technology before and after, roughly how many souls will depart, and your projected net per tide once the decks settle. It's honest about the downside, too: a flotilla whose bills are carried mostly by improvements and wonders — which the receiver does not take — may see filing surrender the fleet and four-fifths of its works without actually fixing the ledger, because the levy-paying population shrinks toward the reduced housing while that flat upkeep never moves. The preview will say so plainly rather than let you find out after.
Auto-pay
Auto-pay is the single most important toggle in your first week. Each tide it settles the whole ledger out of your treasury, quietly, with no feed line — the bills card and the econ ledger already show the movement, so an automation that works needs no announcement.
What matters is what it does when it can't cover the lump, because that used to be a trap and no longer is. It works in two stages:
- Days 1–4 — it waits. The bill goes unpaid, auto-pay retries next tide, and you get one warning naming the amount due. Only one: a flotilla already struggling doesn't need the same notice every tide, and the bills card carries the state from then on. Note that at 3 unpaid days the bill lock has already closed (see above) — the lock does not wait for the fallback.
- Day 5 — it stops waiting. Auto-pay switches to exactly what the manual Pay button does: it pays whatever the treasury honestly covers and books the remainder as arrears. Same math, same result — pressing Pay yourself from here gains you nothing auto-pay isn't already doing.
Why the five-day fallback exists. Waiting forever for the full lump was a silent ratchet. The unpaid lump has no ceiling, but your levy jar caps at 20 days of collection — so one bad stretch could put the bill permanently out of reach and the toggle would simply never fire again, with nothing on screen saying so. In a 20-commander test world, 14 of 20 seats ended bill-locked while holding millions in idle cash. With Pay-style settling, 4 of 20.
The five days are also deliberately well short of the 20 days at which the avoidance fee starts (4% of the overdue amount per day beyond it). An auto-pay user converts to self-healing arrears long before that fee can ever fire — which matters, because the fee eats the very levy that would fund catching up.
Arrears are not a debt spiral. They do not accrue interest — the figure only grows from a genuinely new unpaid bill or bond shortfall, never from sitting there — and every tide you run net-positive, the surplus pays them down automatically. What they do cost you is the bill lock, which stays closed until the last dollar clears. So the practical advice is the opposite of what it once was: leave auto-pay on. Spend your attention on the ledger that produced the shortfall, not on remembering to press a button the automation will press for you.
Reserve interest
Idle cash in your treasury compounds every tide — but only if you've built Banks. Each Bank adds 0.1%/tide interest, capped at 0.5%/tide with 5 Banks, and only the first $250,000,000 of your treasury earns anything at all. It's a modest hedge against holding cash, not an income engine on its own — don't bank a fortune expecting it to grow meaningfully past that cap.
Bonds
The Dashboard's Sovereign Debt card floats three bond series against your own future levies — instant cash today, a coupon bled out of every tide's bills until maturity, then the principal due in one lump:
- Short Cutter — small, 10 tides, the cheapest rate on offer.
- Long Keel — bigger, 30 tides, a gentler per-tide bite but the largest total interest paid over the life of the loan.
- War Issue — only available while at war, 6 tides, the worst rate of the three.
How much you can raise is capped against your gross levy (income before bills, not what's left after), so a flotilla whose bills eat its whole paycheck can still qualify — even while bill-locked. The rate you lock in gets pricier the more you're already leveraged, or the higher your readiness posture: cheap money in peacetime, expensive money at DEFCON 2. Miss a maturity payment and the shortfall folds straight into the same arrears/bill-lock consequence as any unpaid bill — there's no separate credit score to wreck.
When not to borrow. A bond is a tool for bridging a genuine, known, short-term cash-flow gap — never a growth strategy on its own. Rolling a new bond to service the coupon on your last one is the single most reliable way to bury yourself in arrears you didn't notice piling up while you're distracted by the debt on top. You can retire a bond early for the principal plus half its remaining coupon — never free, but always an option if a leveraged position turns sour.
Starting aid's 30-day cliff
Every brand-new flotilla receives a flat $100,000/tide starting-aid subsidy for as long as
ageDays < 30. It's a founding-month cushion, not a permanent income stream — on
day 30 it simply stops, no taper, no warning beyond the calendar. Plan your economy to stand on its own
before that cliff arrives, not after you notice the income gap.