auto manage

[Foz]

I don't trust the AI with micromanagement. It does a terrible job at that. I only leave it to manage my taxes. However I've noted that sometimes the AI lowers tax rates to low even though my loyalty on v high is 150%. My guess is that the AI is trying to promote population growth, which I don't really want as my population will grow too fast. I'd prefer to turn off automatic taxation in this scenario but it's not practical if I have a large empire to manage.

I agree on the practicality of the matter. I recently noticed that the AI put my taxes to low when they had been much higher, too. Interestingly enough, it did so when my empire hit a huge economic boom - in a few turns I had almost no big buildings to build, and recruit as I may I still ended up many tens of thousands in the black. In that situation, it seems like a very good idea to lower taxes, as the last thing you want is exorbitant sums of money sitting around, and that extra "resource" is probably better spent making population grow faster (and consequently farming some chivalry for governors). I actually think this is smart design on the dev's part, as there's no way I could use all that money that would be coming in from higher taxes - and from looking at the traits file pretty much, I also think there's a goal in mind too. I'm guessing this happens to actively avoid firing the "corruption" triggers.

;------------------------------------------
Trigger corruption1
    WhenToTest CharacterTurnEnd

    Condition EndedInSettlement
          and Treasury > 50000

    Affects Corrupt  1  Chance  1 
    Affects Aesthetic  1  Chance  1 
    Affects ExpensiveTastes  1  Chance  1 
    Affects Epicurean  1  Chance  1 
    Affects Embezzler  1  Chance  1

That's just the first one, it gets worse from there at the 100,000 and 150,000 treasury levels. All of those listed traits are NASTY things for governors to have, the kind of thing that makes them worthless. So if you consider that the game might be lowering taxes to help you avoid making so much surplus money that you destroy your governors, the auto tax manager starts to look smarter and smarter.

When this happened to you KHPike, were you making tons of money? I'm looking for some corroboration here, since I'm quite sure I was starting many turns with 40k or more at the time, and recall a few times trying desperately to spend to get under 50k, lol. I'm sure I failed once, which may in fact be what triggered the tax policy shift, I'm not certain.

[KHPike]

I won't say I was making lots. I had about 23 provinces, several of them still in the process of building up economic structures. I was churning out on the average 25k per turn.

But very late in the game I was producing about 80k per turn, which I'd usually deplete rapidly that turn building stuff. In this case I noted that tax levels in the smaller settlements decreases to low. Hence I believe that the AI tries to boost your population in the short run for long term tax benefits.

I haven't tried to observe what happens when I build farms though; perhaps the growth produced could offset this?

Your point on corruption prevention is valid...but the other triggers make it almost inevitable to get a corrupt governor when you place in a general.

[gingergenius]

sorted, thanks for all your help.

Every city now has had its garrison disbanded, and has six militia units (for free upkeep)

All my castles have a standing army of 1 general, 3 armoured swordsmen, 3 levy spearmen, 6 retinue longbowmen, and 7 English knights. Nottingham has sherwood archers instead of longbowmen, and some have knights hospitaller instead of english knights.

all sorted, and it retrains automatically as well (!! )

[gingergenius]

sorted, thanks for all your help.

Every city now has had its garrison disbanded, and has six militia units (for free upkeep)

All my castles have a standing army of 1 general, 3 armoured swordsmen, 3 levy spearmen, 6 retinue longbowmen, and 7 English knights. Nottingham has sherwood archers instead of longbowmen, and some have knights hospitaller instead of english knights.

all sorted, and it retrains automatically as well