CA: Can you tell us about auto-tax and peasant revolts?

[econ21]

With CA staff are posting a lot of helpful stuff post-patch, I wonder if they could clarify one point about auto-tax and peasant revolts? I've read authoritative sounding statements - I assume from beta-testers or other insiders - that if you use high taxes or auto-tax for a long period of time, sooner or later, you will face a large peasant revolt. The implication is that this revolt will be due to the high tax alone rather than exceptional circumstances such as isolation of king or excommunication etc which push loyalty below 100%. Is this true? And if so, can you avoid such revolts with normal tax rates?

I used to manually maximise taxes subject to retaining 100% loyalty - ie do what the autotax sought to do pre-patch but a little more reliably - and sure enough eventually, encountered a peasant revolt that could not be explained by any exceptional circumstances, religious differences, small garrisons etc. So in my new games, I keep taxes to normal in the hope of avoiding a peasant revolt (I tend to keep my faction on a knife-edge building up with the minimum defence force possible so I would rather lose tax revenue than risk a big revolt). It seems to work - no peasant revolts yet, I just want to know if I am being stupid in denying myself income? Will keeping taxes normal prevent a peasant revolt?

Any insights would be appreciated (e.g. I read one post claiming that you need 200% loyalty for sustained for over 10 years to be sure of no revolt).

[Ktonos]

Well,there is not a fixed answer to your question. Some provinces seem to have greater uprising tendencies from others (eg Scotland and Norway). The fact is that if a province doesnt have a max (200%) loyality is likely to drop to "red" levels within 10-15 years. This usually happens with initially rebel provinces which you have conquered. I usually have very high taxes in my starting provinces and normal-high in the previous rebel ones. Build a fort and have a 100-150 men garrison and you'll be ok .(especially if a close province of yours is one of your armies stack station place).

[Ktonos]

And ofcourse you can always place a governor with high dread instead of one with high accumen. When I was playing with England I prefered one general with 6 dread and 0 accument instead of another with 4 in both for Scotlands governor and he kept them quiet.

[Turbo]

Quote Originally posted by Simon Appleton:
With CA staff are posting a lot of helpful stuff post-patch, I wonder if they could clarify one point about auto-tax and peasant revolts? I've read authoritative sounding statements - I assume from beta-testers or other insiders - that if you use high taxes or auto-tax for a long period of time, sooner or later, you will face a large peasant revolt. The implication is that this revolt will be due to the high tax alone rather than exceptional circumstances such as isolation of king or excommunication etc which push loyalty below 100%. Is this true? And if so, can you avoid such revolts with normal tax rates?

I used to manually maximise taxes subject to retaining 100% loyalty - ie do what the autotax sought to do pre-patch but a little more reliably - and sure enough eventually, encountered a peasant revolt that could not be explained by any exceptional circumstances, religious differences, small garrisons etc. So in my new games, I keep taxes to normal in the hope of avoiding a peasant revolt (I tend to keep my faction on a knife-edge building up with the minimum defence force possible so I would rather lose tax revenue than risk a big revolt). It seems to work - no peasant revolts yet, I just want to know if I am being stupid in denying myself income? Will keeping taxes normal prevent a peasant revolt?

Any insights would be appreciated (e.g. I read one post claiming that you need 200% loyalty for sustained for over 10 years to be sure of no revolt).[/QUOTE]

Some provinces have greater rebellion factors than others. You can see which provinces do by examing the text files in the startpos directory of MTW.

[eat cold steel]

Auto tax sets the tax level on the highest possible without decreasing loyalty to below 90% - 100% depending on you cash flow, pre patch. on v1.1, that level is a fixed 120% or something simular irrespect of how you are doing on money. What it cannot counter is enemy actions, if an enemy drop a spies into you region, attacks and kill your garrison, assassinate your grovenor etc, then you now lower loyalty can cause rebellions. When it says 0% chance of rebellion, it means 0% assuming nothing happens at all.

As a side note, you can change that 120% to whatever you like with the command switch -loyalty:100

[Kraellin]

and from my experience, this only applies to province loyalty, but not count your army's loyalty ratings. you can still get a civil war with your province loyalty showing at 200% if the majority of your armies are low loyalty. so, the province (peasants) can be happy, but the armies can be quite dis-loyal. gotta watch both.

K.


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