the recent topic by Pds314 had me thinking, while the current wealth system can work for small galaxies, having rich empires in larger ones is pretty much non-existent unless many of their stars are on a popular trade route.

what if the wealth within an empire (or maybe alliance if they're in one) got more evenly distributed over time? for example, an empire's stars with a good number of stars on a trade route would all gradually become richer due to constantly gaining more wealth.

i don't believe this should happen too quickly though, should probably be subtle in the speed. perhaps the smaller the empire (maybe compared to the other empires to compensate for different galaxy sizes?), the quicker the distribution occurs, but not by too large of a margin.

i think this would make some interesting side effects too, like an empire merging with a richer empire would have that wealth distributed after a while, and an empire taking over a star with a financial center would be more beneficial!

Hi, interesting ideas! There is actually already a mechanism for wealth distributing to neighbouring stars, so you gain some wealth from richer neighbours and lose some from poorer ones. But it isn't tweaked for galaxy size, which is probably fine until you get up to rather big galaxies. I may tweak around with this for a while if I have time.

Right now, trade and distribution of wealth is largely apolitical, opportunistic traders will happily send their ship through dictatorships, cults or ALL WILL BE ASHES crews, moving between borders freely.