Quote Originally Posted by andrewt
I also turn auto-tax off. First, you need around 120%, IIRC, to prevent factions from reappearing. Second, I've heard that higher tax rates have a bigger chance of giving some bad vices. The main reason I don't use it is that the loyalty of a newly conquered province gains slower when using higher tax rates. My armies have to be in garrison duty longer and that slows down my conquering. Also, if a king with good happiness virtues dies due to old age or the province gets blockaded from the king, even taxing it on very low might not prevent a rebellion. I always want a good degree of safety on newly conquered provinces.
uhm, VI 2.01 has the autotax threshold at 120. So you can use that.
secondly, I am not aware of higher odds of getting bad vices if taxes are higher. I am really not convinced that is ture. Again, using as an example my current Turkish campaign, I've had very high set everywhere for the last 120 years. Very, very few of my generals have bad vices (and those are totally ignoreable, e.g. Greed +1 acumen -10 happiness). Oh, and they haven't been in a war in those 120 years either.

You are right about having to keep garrisons longer in, and slowing you down, but I find that is only the case when I'm really blitzing or going on a rampage and getting several provinces per year for several years in line. Otherwise it's usually not a problem, I only ever use peasants for garrisons and only in situations as the above I may not be able to keep up with my peasant production.
Also, unless it's _really_ early in the game, and you don't yet have spies, they do a _great_ job of boosting loyalty. AFAIK this has not been verified, but most people seem to agree that the same formula for decreasing loyalty in enemy provinces applies to your own provinces, except of course it increases loyalty: 40% + spy_valour * 20%. So a vanilla spy would give you +40 loyalty...which is more than enough usually.