Kantalla's musings on the economy

This thread is the start of what might turn into a guide on how to manage the economy in Empire. Of the Total War games I have played Empire is by far the most complex economy wise to manage. Previous games in the series have roughly come down to set tax as high as possible and build things as fast as you can, albeit with a few subtleties, like not building too many farms in Rome. Adding in technology, tax rates, government types, trade, and a large number of upgradable town nodes makes it far more complicated to keep track of.

To start with I'm just going to write out some observations, probably there will be a few minor errors, so feel free to help fix those. In time, hopefully things will get arranged into a sensible order, though that may take a while! I'm also sticking purely to the economy, and not covering things like the military, public order and so on. This is likely to ramble a little, with a hopefully more concise version some point down the line.

First up one of the fundamental things to understand.
Tax rates:
Hovering over the tax rate in any province will identify the five factors that affect tax rates.
1) Upper class tax
Based on your tax policy for the theatre, with 5% increments from 5% to 25%.
Higher taxes restrict economic growth in the region, while lower taxes encourage it.

For many nations early in the game most, if not all of your regions have little or no town wealth, so negative economic growth doesn't affect you adversely. If say you are playing as Russia, you should bump up upper class tax until you can just maintain order, at least until you get some enlightenment tech.

The amount of tax appearing as a negative in the tax box has two components. The first is a static -2, -4, -8, -16 or -32 depending on the tax setting, and the second is related to town wealth and development (haven't figured out how to calculate that yet).

2) Lower class tax
Similarly to upper class tax this is a balance between more tax income and slower growth. Raising lower class tax also encourages people to emigrate to your colonies, which can be a bonus. Also when your villages are all fully developed growth is no longer useful, so if you are a nation with few European provinces, with all villages grown to towns (say the United Provinces if you focus on trade and the colonies), then raising lower class tax can be useful.

3) Government building
Government buildings boost taxes, and either help keep order through repression or recruitment.

If you follow the economic building path, the level 1 building gives no tax bonus, but each level after that gives +3% to tax up to level 6 (+15%). You can only build above level 4 (+9%) in your capital region.

Military governor's buildings are useful for troop recruitment, but only count as a level 2 building from an economic perspective (+3%).

4) Governor's effect
This is the combined effect of your ministers. In terms of tax rate, your treasurer will provide +1% to tax in all regions per point of management. Likewise your colonial governors will do the same for your colonies. These do stack, so if you have a +6 management treasurer, and a +3 management India minister then your Indian colonies will gain 9% tax from the Governor's effect.

Be watchful of followers too. Should your treasurer pick up a comptroller they will gain 2 management, and look like a great minister, but steal 4% of your income (a net -2% to tax). A tax farmer on the other hand will gain you an additional 4% tax, on top of any other minister effects.

5) Administration cost
Administration is the Empire way of stopping you getting too big and powerful by burning your funds on bureaucracy. Essentially each time you capture a province administration inscreases, reducing your tax income from all your provinces. There isn't a lot you can do to avoid the cost, other than expect it and plan from an early stage.

Administration is at the same rate for all government buildings of the same level. So all your provinces with a Military Governor's Barracks will have the same tax rate. There are two different rates for your home provinces and your colonies.

I would expect that government type affects the admin penalties, though I haven't checked this out. Admin appears to be the same for all difficulty levels too.

Town Yield / Wealth
Towns come in a number of different forms in Empire:
1) Trade towns (Plantations and Fur Trappers)
2) Industrial towns (Metalworking and Textiles)
3) Resource towns (Farms, Mines and Loggers)
4) Port towns (Trade Ports and Fisheries)
5) Tactical towns (Forts, Schools, Churches, Entertainments and other non-money earners!)

Apart from the tactical towns, each town will have either a wealth (industrial towns and ports) or a yield (trade towns and resource towns).

Wealth ranges from (in improving order) Very poor, Poor, Growing, Prosperous, Wealthy. Yield ranges from (again in improving order) Meagre, Low, Average, High, Abundant. You can identify this from hovering over the town on the map. The wealth or yield has a big effect on the output of the town. If Very Poor / Meagre represents normal returns, then the following are what you get from the different levels:
Very Poor / Meagre 100%
Poor / Low 125%
Growing / Average 150%
Prosperous / High 175%
Wealthy / Abundant 200%

As a general rule, you should invest in wealthy / abundant before less productive towns.

Port Capacity
When exporting goods from a colony, sometimes you wont get all the benefit from your trade nodes, if your port capacity isn't sufficient to export the goods to your capital. The tooltips when you hover over the trade goods in your region wealth bar will show you which goods are and aren't being exported to a limited extent. If you have an inland region the tooltip wont show your goods as failing to export if they leave the region and get stuck waiting at the port in the neighbouring region.

Port capacity for exports is related to building level. A level 1 port can export 30 goods, a level 2 port 60 goods, a level 3 port 180 goods and I have yet to (need to) build a level 4 port.

Port exports are a really crippling limitation to exports from the Americas. A single Low yield trade node with a second level building can produce 31 trade goods, meaning you are exceeding the capacity of a level 1 port already. In a game as Spain, I expanded from Florida taking out the Cherokee, so picking up Georgia, Cherokee Territory and Kaintuck Territory. Soon after in a war with Great Britain, I picked up the Carolinas and Virginia. At this point, I had 5 cotton plantations, 1 sugar plantation and 1 tobacco plantation, and my port in Georgia had only just grown into a town. At this point I had about 150 trade goods being produced every turn, but only 30 able to be exported. The Americas have problems with a lot of regions developing inland towns before their ports and exports are stifled because of that. India generally has a similar number of ports to trade nodes, meaning there is much less of a problem.

That's the first installment, will write some more when I get a free moment or two

Thanks Kantalla

Good job and now that you are a member you have your edit abilities!

Keep going and maybe Monk will ask for it in the Guides section.

:2thumbsup:

Free time has been hard to find this week, and I'll continue to update things when I can.

Farming
Farming is a very useful thing to invest in, particularly early in the game, as it can provide you with both a boost in income and a boost to growth. Most provinces have farms, and those that do not will have at least subsistence farming to provide food for the region.

A meagre yield farm, will provide the following region wealth:
Level 1 (Peasant farms) 100
Level 2 (Tennanted farms) 150
Level 3 (Clearances) 200
Level 4 (Great Estates) 250
Level 5 (Palatial Estates) 300

When spending money on farming, like other building types, you only gain the difference between each level, rather than the full amount in region wealth, so upgrading a Peasant Farm to a Tennanted Farm will net you an extra 50 region wealth.

Technology also has an effect on your farming wealth, with the following advances improving your farming wealth:
Phyiocracy 2%
Improved aminal husbandry 2%
Advanced irrigation 4%
Selective breeding 6% (required for level 4)
Threshing machine 8%
Measuring tools 4%
Machine tools 4%
Interchangeable parts 4%
Mass production 8%
Joint stock companies 4%
Wealth of Nations 2%
Classical economics 6%

The gains from technology are additive rather than multiplicative, so the maximum boost from a full tech tree would be +54% to farming wealth. Because of the combined benefit of growth and wealth, I find farming research is normally the first path I take in the industrial trees.

It is also important to note that you don't get all of the region wealth into your treasury each turn. Your tax take increases by the change in region wealth multiplied by your tax rate.

Ultimately the way I look at what to upgrade first is on a payback period: how long it takes before you get the money you invested back into your treasury. For farming buildings this is generally fairly simple, the payback is the cost divided by the increase in tax you get each turn.

The cost for building farms increases by level of the farm, and costs 300, 500, 700, 1000 and 3000 for levels 1 to 5 respectively. Followers of your leader or minister can also affect farming wealth or cost. Seed planting drill also reduces the cost of building farms by 15%.

Overall
Cost = Base cost × Tech reduction
Income = Increase in base wealth × Yield bonus × Tech bonus × Tax rate
Payback = Cost / Income

To produce something useful for you guys, I'm going to have to make some assumptions to avoid this turning into a huge amount of mathematics. I'm going to assume a tax rate of about 35% and that you've only discovered the minimal techs to upgrade your farms as fast as possible, i.e. you get improved animal husbandry and selective breeding when you are ready to build great estates. That applies up until you have great estates, then I'm assuming physiocracy, and the full farming techs before the Palatial Estates are built.

Here is a table of the payback period for a 35% tax rate region, based on building level and yield:

Farm Level..............Meagre...Low...Average...High...Abundant
Peasant Farms.............9........7.........6...........5..........5
Tennanted Farms........29.......23.......20..........17........15
Clearances.................40......32........27..........23........20
Great Estates.............58.......43.......36..........31........27
Palatial Estates..........172......98.......81..........70........61

What this table tells you is that if you have an abundant yield farm, then building clearances will pay your money back in 20 turns. I tend to find I can afford to upgrade buildings that have a payback of up to maybe 25-30 turns for most of the game, unless there is a tactical reason for upgrading further. Building level 1 farms (like most buildings) is almost always a good idea. However, Palatial Estates are shockingly expensive for the return they give, and really are there for prestige gains.