Population, Taxation and PP

Introduction
As you'll know if you've read Cities, ZoC and Claims, your population will end up divided into cities (which refers not only to the city itself, but the surrounding rural populations as well as smaller towns and settlements.) The population of each of your cities grows by 2% every cycle, so if you had a city with 100 000 000 people in it, it would have 102 000 000 people in it next cycle. This growth rate can be increased by certain bonuses, but 2% is the baseline.

Currency Units
In the RP, we represent money with Currency Units, or CU. They have the symbol ₡ (typed using alt+8535). So, if you had ₡45, you would have 45 CU.

Taxes
Every cycle, you need to get money from your people. Otherwise, you'd have no money left. To simplify things, we assume that no matter the taxation system you use, you end with with the same net gain. This includes your income from taxation, and any expenses with regards to healthcare and education which you may have to provide if your tax rate is very high. Your tax income in CU is equal to your population divided by 100 000, so if you have 9 000 000 people then your tax income would be 90 CU each cycle.

When your nation is accepted, you start off with 90 CU in your treasury.

Project Points
Project Points, or PP, are used to do things. They represent the industrial capacity of your entire state. A project, such as a building or research project, will cost so many PP. So, you put that much PP towards the project until it's complete. It takes one hour to use one PP, and costs 1 CU to use one PP. For example, I want to build a house, costing 5 PP, and I have 50 PP: I put 5 PP of my 50 towards building the house, for five hours, and I spend 5 CU. In five hours, the house is done and those 5 PP go back into my main pool for use later.

Your base PP pool is calculated by dividing your total population by 100 000. This can be increased by certain bonuses, but this is the base value.

Say you want to build five houses, though. If you were to build them one after another, then it would take 25 hours, like you'd expect. However, since you're only building one at a time, you're only actually using 5 PP over those 25 hours. You still spend 25 CU. This is called doing projects in series. If you build them all at the same time, then you would still spend 25 CU, but you would be using 25 PP over 5 hours. Remember though, you can't use more PP than you have in total, so with this example I could only build ten houses at the same time. If I wanted to build eleven houses I'd have to wait until some of them were done to free up PP.

Projects can also be sped up. This is called doing them at double speed. The project will cost twice as much PP and CU, but will take half the time. Similarly, you can slow them down to half speed, so they will cost half as much PP and CU, but take double the time.

Conquering Cities
So you've conquered somebody's cities. Good for you! Here's what you need to know.
For the next 40 years (that's 10 cycles) the people are going to not like you very much. After all, you conquered them. You'll also have to deal with administrative problems and all that bad stuff.
This means that the population that you gain from these cities will only give you a little bit of the stuff that you would get from a city in your home territory, at least until they adjust to being your subjects.
From the day you conquer a city, you get nothing from it. Zilch. Nada. Zero. No money, no PP, no research points.
When the next cycle cycles, you get 10% of the stuff from its population.
The next cycle, another 10%, bringing you up to 20%.
This repeats until finally, after the tenth cycle, you have 100% of the money and PP from the city. Wonderful!

Conquering cities now has reduced benefit, which slowly ramps up over a period of years to full benefit.