A simple chart of Admin Cost

[Maltz]

This article provides a quick look at the administration cost of the game.

Administration cost makes a crucial impact on tax income. For each province, tax income is:

(Base Tax Rate + Arts tax bonus + Agent & Character tax bonus + Building tax Bonus) x (1-Administration Cost%)

The same admin cost applies to all provinces in the clan. Admnistartion Cost increases with the number of provinces. Here is a plot of the data collected over a campaign (V1.1 4768, 5346 both applies).



You can see that administration cost starts at 0%, but increases gradually with the number of provinces. At the end of the game, the administration cost goes above 60%. At 60 provinces it goes to 64.0% (not shown on the graph).

Now just a few additional thoughts on administration cost:

(1) Due to the rise of administration cost, each additional province adds less overall tax income to the clan.

(2) Generally speaking, taking an extra province ALWAYS improve the overall income of the clan, as the admin cost rises rather slowly. If we assume all provinces have the same income of 1 unit, at 1 province, taking the extra 2nd province improves the clan income by 0.72 unit. Even at 54 provinces, taking the extra 55th province improves the clan income by about 0.22 unit.

But not all provinces are equal. In late game, when all provinces in our clan has very well developed towns, taking a very poor province with absolutely no extra income from towns (the AIs are very poor at developing towns) would actually reduce the overall income of the clan. But at that point we should be too rich to care about the small loss.

(3) Due to the above, nobody should complain that "my clan is eaten up by admin cost!" Overspending is more likely the cause of the financial failure.