Taxation tweak suggestion

HonoredMule wrote: @Brids17: your prestige spending habits sound a bit strange to me.  Basic resources are easy to acquire by free methods, especially if you're in an alliance.  The quantities young cities need is so minuscule that plenty of people will happily give it away.  Even mid-to-upper-range developing players can usually find a lot of aid, presuming they even need it.  All my prestige goes toward instabuilding those multi-day construction projects that would drag out development into the next ice age.  Most lvl 14+ advanced buildings take so long to build that my resources would overflow a lvl 20 warehouse+storehouse if I waited for them to finish naturally...and that's at high taxation.

I wait until most of my cities reach near max resources (so 650k+) before activating prestige on my account and like you, use it on buildings that would take entirely too long to build. The problem is that when a building starts taking 200k+ of each resources per level, you run out of resources very quickly. While I'd like to believe there's players that would happily give me another 700k of each resources (and maybe there are) I'm not going to ask for it. I can usually empty my resources once from the time I starting using prestige then maybe again in my main two cities just before the 7 day period is over. If my basic resources didn't suffer from taxation, I wouldn't have to renew as often.

I vote for HM's idea.  Not because I understand it, which I don't.  Not because I read it, which I tried to do.  I agree because HM's track record, as I see it, is much higher than my own level of understanding.  I have no idea what any of this means so I will vote yes and hope the problem goes away.  As long as it doesn't cost me anything, and even if it does we'll deal with that later in the next post that I won't understand.

Taxation income comes from population (both currently and in my version, meaning how much gold you actually get is decided solely by tax level and population count) and incurs a slowdown in production somewhere either way (but this is more like an incidental than an equal trade.  In that regard there's no change.

New players currently need as much basic resources as they can get, so they set low taxation.  In my system, they might as well crank up taxation and use gold to buy equipment they aren't yet able to produce, because the basic resources the need most will flow just as heavily anyway, and equipment you can't produce won't come any slower.  Young cities already have dismal production rates even when they can produce their own equipment, too.  So the most substantial change I'm suggesting against new players is actually that they'd get on their feet much more quickly because they'd have more flow of basic resources to keep them developing (leveling up equipment buildings) and producing what equipment they can even as they increase gold income from the population they're also increasing (most population comes from leveling up equipment production buildings, which are also cheaper but take longer to build).  And leveling up production buildings will increase production much more than lowering taxation.  Small cities will be boom towns.  Then as they get big like mine, the balance settles toward a state quite similar to now, just slightly more rewarding of diversity/specialization.

Also, to put things in perspective, I'm suggesting taxation apply to advanced resources in pretty much the same manner as they currently do to basic resources.  That means even at 100% taxation your equipment would take 4 times as long to produce, but at reasonable rates like 35%, you're looking at a 10% drop in production rates.  It's not that dire.  I'm undecided whether you should be allowed to boost production up to 25% by dropping taxation to between 0 and 25% (as basic resource production behaves now).  The positioning of that "break-even" threshold (where taxation doesn't affect production either way) could be adjusted to something more appropriate for the new tax tradeoff.

@Brids17: your prestige spending habits sound a bit strange to me.  Basic resources are easy to acquire by free methods, especially if you're in an alliance.  The quantities young cities need is so minuscule that plenty of people will happily give it away.  Even mid-to-upper-range developing players can usually find a lot of aid, presuming they even need it.  All my prestige goes toward instabuilding those multi-day construction projects that would drag out development into the next ice age.  Most lvl 14+ advanced buildings take so long to build that my resources would overflow a lvl 20 warehouse+storehouse if I waited for them to finish naturally...and that's at high taxation.

I do spend to boost food production, but under the new tax tradeoff, I would continue to do so (but manage my taxes, population, and production differently).

I wouldn't really care about basic resource loss to taxation as a developed player (except for the annoyance of trying to make population thresholds for founding city n+1 in the face of food deficits--and by the way, the trick with that is just to cheat your peasants out of food by leaving the stockpile empty and the production queues full).  Removing the impact of taxation on basic resources is much more about benefiting new players and bringing them up to speed more rapidly than anything else.  Otherwise, I'd say cut production of everything.  But then I do prefer to stick with systems that make real-world practical sense, because that tends to be more intuitive and more predictably balanced, since it's more similar to the real-world constructs which do work and are balanced.  That means economics should revolve around and trade value against the items of greatest intrinsic (and concentrated) wealth--systematically, not just within the "trade system."  And in this game, that's definitely equipment.  Also this game already mimics real-world economics in that staples/natural resources are only valuable in industrial volumes, the transportation of which further constrains the value of such high-traffic commodities.  When people give away 40 caravans worth of wood, they're not caring about the wood, but the time spent without the use of those 40 caravans.  The wood itself is just something that annoyingly needs to be moved.  It's so cheap that when you buy it, you're actually mostly paying for the service of having it delivered.  If it were actually valuable, people would be stealing trees from your yard and the unsecured local park.


Edited by HonoredMule - 28 Feb 2011 at 13:43

I think your idea makes sense but wouldn't taxing adv res make it harder on new players? 
building an army would take a new player months if his adv res is being taxed? not to mention the high posibility of adv res being expensive to buy.
and wouldn't a new player  be making 0 gold if tax was on adv res cos they don't have the buildings to make them (not sure if im reading that correctly or not)

Most of your suggestions and comments are focused towards already established players or players that are in  an alliance.
That is the impression i am reading from your post.


could you please clarify where new players would fit into your suggestion  or ones that choose to play solo/independently.
Im just not sure if what your suggesting is fair






Edited by STAR - 28 Feb 2011 at 12:03

I should also note that regardless of the sinks draining basic resources, keeping equipment production queues loaded is never really a problem for a reasonably developed city, no matter how fast it's being produced.  Resource costs of equipment just aren't really that substantial.  An exception of course is when sovereignty is being heavily used to increase equipment production, but then you're not going to want to tax that city for an even stronger reason than saving basic resources--retaining that equipment production capacity.

So currently, the food drain is a real issue and a pain to balance, but the other resources are basically always overflowing anyway, once a city is done being built.  Sovereignty is limited by gold and research long before natural resources get strained, so it feels like the "cost" of taxation isn't really felt except by people trying to reach high populations.  Instead it should affect something more universally valued.


Edited by HonoredMule - 28 Feb 2011 at 05:27