Garrison/Low Taxes : What's best ?

[_Tristan_]

What do you usually do ?

Keep garrisons in your cities and raise taxes to the max or lower taxes and keep only a token garrison or even none ?

I generally keep a large garrison with taxes on high or very high...

[FactionHeir]

Taxes as high as the place can support.
For huge cities, sometimes increasing taxes a notch in return for an additional militia unit can still be worth it, so I'd do that.

Overall,maximize your taxes unless you run into danger of having much more than you can spend, in which case you can reduce them.

Early game, low taxes are advisable so your settlements expand faster and allow you to achieve higher tech. Note the AI's settlements grow at double your rate, and the only way to catch up is by having low taxes and/or a chivalrous governor.

[ReiseReise]

Beyond the free upkeep units, it takes a bit of time and fiddling around moving units in and out of cities, but it is possible to figure out if the added upkeep of an additional garrison unit is more or less than the additional income from raising taxes. There are other considerations of course like population growth, governor gaining good/bad traits etc. Maybe I will write more later.

Edit: FH posted while I was typing. Didn't know about the AI advantage. Early game cash is so important for being able to build all the basic +pop, +$ buildings that I think it is worth it to keep taxes as high as possible at that stage so you can develop your cities properly. What good is being able to upgrade earlier to Minor City (or whatever) if you haven't even had the cash to build the basic farms, trade, etc.

You will be conquering the AI anyway, right? Higher pop for them = more sacking $$ for you.

[Cheetah]

Depends on whether I need cash or not. If not then only the free upkeep garrison with low taxes, preferably with a high chiv governor (which favours city growth). If I need the money then I might raise the tax level till my citizens turn blue (but mostly up to yellow only), but not further, also if possible still do not have more than the free upkeep garrison.

[Jason X]

low taxes till the city gets to huge, then bump up the taxes

[Flavius Merobaudes]

AI settlements grow double the player's rate? But that would mean they would grow too fast, resulting in public order issues. I sometimes have problems myself with keeping up with population growth. From large city level on, building times are too long and I've got to lower taxes which will make them "exponentiate" even faster.

[FactionHeir]

Yes they do, and the AI has no problems with it because of some hardcoded script that bumps up their PO whenever it falls low, up to a certain threshold (around 80% or so). This is why you notice a huge AI city with a maxed out spy inside and 0% own religion can have 25% PO one turn and 90% after 2 turns with no building added and at times even smaller garrison (and no governor).

[DVX BELLORVM]

Depends wether I need more money, or higher level cities, but generally speaking I usually keep only free upkeep garrison (unless it is a frontier settlement), and adjust my taxes to keep the happiness around 100%.

Note the AI's settlements grow at double your rate,

That certainly explains why my town militia fights against the AI's DFKs

[Ramses II CP]

It's too situation specific for a good general rule to hold up. There are some regions that I accelerate to a huge city by keeping taxes down (Antioch, Atnwerp, Stockholm, etc.), and there are some where I'd rather have them stay small longer (Arguin, Jedda, etc.) so I push the population to always be at 80% happiness.

[WhiskeyGhost]

If only the AI would build an infrastructure to go with the double growth rate, they might actually have some sort of an economy (rather then the "Cheat" based one. You know what im talking about, like how a single province faction can field 5 full stacks without losing money )

[Shahed]

Almost always low taxes, unless war emergency funding required.
Encourages growth and chivalric governors.

[Hellenic_Hoplite]

Usually normal taxes because my economy is built up enough to the point where I don't need outrageously high taxes to make extra cash.

[Anonymous II]

What do you usually do ?

Keep garrisons in your cities and raise taxes to the max or lower taxes and keep only a token garrison or even none ?

I generally keep a large garrison with taxes on high or very high...

Small empire (early game) = usually high taxes and chivalrous governor in the biggest towns.

Big empire (from turn 40 and onwards) = low taxes. The economy is strong due to trade and looting of enemies' big cities - I don't need the money.

Another thing is that my oldest cities probably are built up with happiness-buildings at this stage, so there are just small (and thus low-income towns anyway) and/or newly aquired towns that have trouble with low happiness. Thus normal taxes would be the lowest taxlevel in the developed cities.

[Yoyoma1910]

Low taxes will often cause governors to gain negative taxing vices. If you have a governor, and you want him to gain chivalric virtues, using high as opposed to very high is often adequate.

If your going to use low or normal, you may not want to have a Governor in the province. This also occurs alot in castles.

[Ciaran]

On high tax levels the governors might get dread, or lose chivalry (they even lose chivalry from the "fair/noble in rule" line on normal tax level, or when stationed in castles).

Early in the game I tend to need a lot of cash right now, so I tend to set the taxes as high as I can get away with when using upkeep-free garrisons only. It´s the castles I try and get up to speed rather than the cities since early in the game the castle units are way superior to the city ones. I offset it by keeping a rather low castle/city ratio (one castle per four or five cities).

[ReiseReise]

Your governors lose chiv/gain dread when they complete a building, based on the tax rate and happiness. I don't remember the exact numbers and I am not going to look it up, but high taxes, 100+ happy = chiv; high taxes, low happy = dread; low taxes, 100+ happy = chiv but also bad taxman traits. Justice/judge traits also figure in their somewhere. There is a Trait Guide somewhere in this forum, look it up or unpack and read the files, you will gain so much knowledge it will change your life, like when I was age 12 (now 23; damn, almost half my life ago) and learned that websites were nothing more than text files.

[ReiseReise]

PS high taxes = high or very high.

[TheLastPrivate]

It's a LOT better to keep it at the lowest until it reaches huge city/citadel because not only low garrsion = low upkeep on garrison = more mobile forces, but more heads = more taxes. And having MORE to tax will always be better than stunting growth with tax rate. Also you tech fast = faster trade buildings and guild upgrades and better agents as well.

Once it hits huge raise the tax so it benefits from the increased population more.

I'm pretty sure somebody with an economics degree can present us with a graph showing the marginal benefits of tax rates according to population...

[ReiseReise]

The controversy however is do you need immediate income for early expansion, or can you afford to have lower profits now to benefit more later. And, what if stunting the growth of your 5 current provinces allows you to raise armies to take 5 more provinces? The "economics degree" would probably advise you to do a cost/benefit analysis. What the conclusion would be I cannot guess, the cost of endless wars vs having more provinces, etc.

[Jason X]

if you're rushing, whack em up. if you're turtling, keep em low till you get to huge.

if turtling, keeping taxes low is particularly important as russia, as your population is so low and you don't get to bump up chiv by (ab)using crusades.

[ReiseReise]

Doh, posted then answer my own question, this is edit.