Wisdom on Pyrithum killing?

[Saxon]

Graeme,

In your experience, what is the best figure for high taxes which will not gut a province? I like to take the sea provinces mid game and tax farm them, if no aquatic races are about.

Thanks!

[Jasper]

That would be 100% taxes, in my experience. I toyed with higher taxes during, but the combination of population destruction and needing to patrol made it seem not worthwhile to me.

I'd only over tax populations if I was desperate, or knew I couldn't keep the province.

[Saxon]

I agree, 100% is safe, but I want to push it higher. Patrolling is not so expensive, particularly in sea provinces where the units are often flying. You do not need many of those to be effective and if you can boost taxes 20 or 30 pieces a turn, you rapidly cover your costs. Throw in you have a ready to go reaction force and it is a pretty good deal. I saw in another thread that one person uses wounded units to patrol. That is a bit more micromanaging than I do, but it is a good idea. The wounded unit is a liability in combat, but can give you good value patrolling.

So, any suggestions on a nice percentage where you do not reduce your population too much?

[apoger]

>So, any suggestions on a nice percentage where you do not reduce your population too much?

There is none.

Your choice is just to savage the province fast or slow, but it will get savaged. It's only worthwhile to raise taxes if you are totally willing to sacrifice the population for a slight boost *now*.

There are a few nations where it's worthwhile to open the game with a bit of high taxing at the capital. This is clearly a trade of gold now versus heavy loss later, however getting a boost on the first few turns is sometimes worth the trouble. Other than that... taxes might as well be set in stone at 100%. The only other time I change taxes is too purposely damage a province that I don't intend to hold.

IMHO it's sad that you don't have much option to cultivate the gold economy in Dom2, but that's the situation. I suggest practicing blood hunting with scouts, as that's the only economy that can be controlled/cultivated.

[ December 30, 2003, 15:00: Message edited by: apoger ]

[Gandalf Parker]

100% is safe. 200% in the first couple of turns is a tactic if it will get you mercs and major mages. Major Mages become important since getting them as early as possible allows for as much research as possible but that is the trade. Population for research, or population for mercs.

testers: With 100% as safe and 200% as bad, does 0% promote growth? As noticably as 200% promotes decline?

[Teraswaerto]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:

testers: With 100% as safe and 200% as bad, does 0% promote growth? As noticably as 200% promotes decline?

The ingame tips say having taxes at below 100% only reduces unrest, no effect on pop growth. So 0% has the same growth as 100%.

[Pocus]

you can go up to 130%, which costs you 0.9% of total population each turn. If you lay down the figures on a spreadsheet, you will see that doing this for 3-4 turns is worthy of interest for the extra gold taken, but only if you happen to have units standing by in the provinces and not dedicated patrollers (eg waiting for an army of sufficient size to be gathered).

Note also that growth is not that bad in this respect, as you get +0.6% growth for the +3 scale, compared to say -0.6% for a 120% tax rate. On a maximized econ (250 gp roughly in your home province), thats net you 50 gp more a turn without change on your population. Your initial army can handle the 3-4 pts of unrest w/o problems too.

So to disgress a bit : order 3 give +21% gold income, and growth 3 +26% gold income (+20% from taxes, +6% from scale). Growth is not that bad in places where you can patrol for the extra taxes.