The attached graph represents the unrest generated by taxation.
In the current system, the values are as follow:
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- 1) Current unrest and taxes
- Taxes 0 2 4 6 8 10
- Unrest 10 26 40 52 62 90
- DeltaUnrest 16 14 12 10 28
Why is it broken? Because it makes the first taxation steps the harshest (except for the last one), when they should be the least penalizing ones.
It makes the unrest curb curved in the wrong side :
It means that if you need to collect 40 taxes (out of a 100 Gildar equivalent econmy) in 20 turns, the optimal taxation rate is to do as follow :
turns 1-15 : 0 taxes : total unrest = 15*10 = 150
turns 16-20 : 8% taxes (62% unrest) = 5*62 = 310
Total unrest = 460%
Average unrest = 23% (each turn).
Trying to maintain the same tax rate would have caused a greater unrest (26% average).
This does not make sense at all : the optimal way of taxing is to let the treasury go broke, and set the tax rate at the highest level before punishing, and then reset it to 0, unless you were able to find something to sell in the meantime.
If you are going broke next turn, it is better to set the tax rate at its 8% level (1 step below maximum) for a few turn before going back to 0%.
If you are not going broke, you SHOULD NOT set taxes to any value above 0.
Not only does it not make any sense, but it rewards poor planning, It makes planning taxation completely irrelevant, as the optimal way is not to plan for anything and see wether you will be broke or not the next turn.
The only case in which it does not apply is when you need to set the maximum tax rate that causes huge unrest. BUt in every other situation, stupid planning is completely irrelevant.
On top of that, it increases the micromanagement hurdle for no good reason (as you should not keep the same tax rate everytime).
For the taxation system to make sense, the tax should at least be flat.
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- 2) Minimum correction needed for a flat tax rate.
- Taxes 0 2 4 6 8 10
- Unrest 10 23 36 49 62 90
- DeltaUnrest 13 13 13 13 28
At least, trying to set a sustainable tax rate would not hamper the player in this situation. But lack of planning is not penalized in any manner, and it still would be better to let taxes to 0% as long as possible (as you still have a chance to find another way to fill the hole in the treasury, and when you are about to get broke, no big deal, you can still increase taxes), otherwise, you would be missing on a few points of production, as you cannot be certain you would not have found some way to get money before going broke.
To reward planning, we could at least put the unrest increments so that they make sense :
I think it was the initial plan, but the unrest values must have got messed up.
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- 3) Corrected system
- Taxes 0 2 4 6 8 10
- Unrest 10 20 32 46 62 90
- DeltaUnrest 10 12 14 16 28
I'd rather have increasing penalties, and lower overall taxation penalties as it is too high now (and it is one of the reasons why upgrading troops is so expensive) so that the player is not tempted to change taxes every month (each increment is 150% of the previous one), so that setting some taxes is no big deal, but the higher the tax rate, the higher the penalty :
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- 4) Corrected system
- Taxes 0 2 4 6 8 10
- Unrest 10 15 23 35 53 80
- DeltaUnrest 5 8 12 18 27
Any of the last two systems would work (the last one is purely a personnal preference of mine), but the unrest = f(taxation) function needs to be changed to one of these two systems.
anyway, if the percentages are REALLY the value of production=>Gildar, then the unrest is totally off, as it incurs an average penalty of 6% production lost for every % of production converted into tax.
That is on average, for every 7 production converted to Gildar, you only get 1 production worth if gildar
That is huge, and explains partly why you never can upgrade troops, as you'd need to waste 6 times the difference of production cost of the troops in unrest to upgrade them instead of creating them from scratch.
Maybe the percentages are not directly production percentages, but some abstract value. In this case, my comment is unfounded, but it makes it harder to balance, when sometimes, there is an equivalence between production and gildar (upgrading troops for instance), and sometimes not.
I'd much rather have tax unrest apply only to production and not research, so that it is much easier to balance, and have the taxation waste back to a much reasonnable level (like at most 50% taxed prod lost, maybe 66% if going punitive, with the percentage of production lost increasing with taxes).
The added benefit is that we would even be able to afford building upkeep instead of almost never building anything with an upkeep cost.
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- 4) Rebalancing Taxation and production
- Taxes 0 10 20 30 40 50
- Unrest 10 15 23 35 53 80
- DeltaUnrest 5 8 12 18 27
After all, there is no reason why they would be less willing to pay taxes after a cataclysm, during wartime, when we routinely pay around 50% taxes in most industrialized countries without going on strike 62% of the days.
Edit :
As I came to notice in my second post, the tax level is not a problem in itself : compared to production from population, taxation levels are on par.
That is, the current 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 tax levels already represent 20, 40, 60, 80, 100% of population related production.
The problem is that you only get tax from your population, but the unrest affects both the production generated by population AND by materials (which can be as 10 times as high, in low pop hig yield cities). That creates a discrepancy that makes Gildar and production not coherent at all.
There must be a simple relation between production and Gildar, because otherwise, it will make upgrading troops impossible to balance (as the costs are based on production, but paid by taxation). The last part of my proposition (table 4 : rebalancing taxation and production) should be ignored, but there still is a simple fix :
Either make taxation income depend on production from material too, at the same base ration (that is 20, 40, 60, 80, 100%), or make production from materials unaffected by unrest.
Both would make production and Gildar (and thus upgrade costs and shopkeeper prices) more coherent.
