oops - tax rate / happiness

Just realised I may be playing in error. What happiness level should I be aiming for at my settlements?? I always went for 100% before and if it just so happened to be higher than 100% at 'very high' tax rate then ignore it.

But it occcurs to me that certain governor traits can only be gained when you complete buildings and the 'face' is blue (like 80% or whatever). i believe these are the 'good administrator' line of traits which is definately something I want to try and trigger. And 'very high' tax seems to get me the 'miser' line of traits, is this true or coincidence?

So what happiness % should I be aiming for and is there any reason to not aim for very high tax? (assuming I dont care about city growth).

You should go for 75%. Only disadvantage of very high taxes is that governors can gain a -5% happiness trait after a very long time, but it's not really much of a problem.

I try and keep it at 80-100%. If you're constructing the right buildings at the right time, then very high taxation should not be a problem.

There is no advantage at keeping PO at a barely even keel at 80% except for getting the good taxman trait.

In RTW the goodadministrator trait has a 3% chance of happening (per round) when taxes are very high and a 7% chance when taxes are very high and a building has completed.

I run all my cities at the maximum tax rate I can. I will accept 70% public order (red face). It takes 65% before a riot occurs.

In the turn a building completes I have the governor stand still and ensure tax is at least 'high'.

The downside/or upside is that town growth is slower. Smaller towns are easier to control yet produce less trade income.

Tax income per head of population is higher in smaller towns...even with the same tax rate. A 20k population town wont produce 10times the tax as a 2k town...it will produce more overall but tax income almost levels off as cities get very big.

Another factor with tax/population growth is the unit scale you play on. 'Huge' and you need 160men in a hastati unit. 'Large' = 80men, normal = 40men. Those men come out of the city population. If your town has 2000 people and rasies lots of troops it may loose so many people on huge that you cannot build more troops there for ages. Thus in 'huge' scale settings you may want to run at a lower tax rate to encourage population growth in order to man your 'huge' size units.

I play on normal unit size now because fighting in cities makes a hell of a lot more sense at normal unit size!!
I used the default suggestion of large without thinking about it since i got the game. What a difference a menu option can make...