system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] How much did an average citizen notice the influence of the Empire during its reign?

I'm wondering what interaction average citizens on average planets had with the Empire during Palapatine's reign. I'm assuming there may be different answers as to what planet the person lived on. What I've read before is the Empire had less control in the outer territories.

Were there taxes? What did the Empire mean to a moisture farmer on Tattooine? What about a store owner on a planet closer in? Did it really matter to these people whether it was the Empire or the Republic?
gpt
Like you said, it varied.

Some high-profile worlds, like Mon Cala, were brutally invaded and occupied because they were strategically important. This was the kind of thing that didn't *directly* impact vast swathes of people, but happened against somewhere prominent enough that a lot of people would notice.

Some worlds saw a short-term improvement in their security and quality of life, but only because they had something the Empire needed. There's currently a bounty hunter in the comics whose main reason to want revenge on the Empire was that they rolled into his home planet, swept it of criminals, and turned it into a prosperous mining community.... only to *immediately* cut and run when the expense  of defending the colony outstripped the profits made by the mines operation. This resulted in raiders savaging the planet and leaving them worse off than they'd ever been before. Imperial support was extremely conditional.

Some worlds were stripped and turned into industrialized death pits that couldn't support the indigenous population; the empire hired fleets of scouts to seek out worlds that were far enough off the beaten path that it wouldn't be immediately obvious what was happening, but a ton of "rural" worlds were colonized and forced into slavery. It's unclear how many worlds this was done to during the Empire's tenure.

Seperatist space got reamed. As the losers of the clone wars, it was basically open season on their planets- enslaved, made second-class citizens, occupied, strip mined, the works.

The overall catch, of course, is that although the Empire would have inevitably ruined every world in the galaxy this way if it had held together long enough, they reached a critical mass after 25 years due to worlds not immediately in the line of fire organizing the rebellion. So it's not clear how many worlds they were able to sucessfully fuck up, and how likely it would be that any given person was directly fucked by their oppressive policies.