I was curious about the ideal tax rate. What would be the most efficient setting for a Rep Casher? And does the best rate vary depending on NW and population growth?

Thanks in advance :)

Nevermind, I'm blind... I'll refer to the other post about this.

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Having a low tax rate increases population and per capita income. The drawback is that the higher population will consume more food. It might work well for a player that provides their own food to try a lower tax rate.

per capita income doesn't increase with low tax%.

uh

is there a population calculator which will give you the government and tax sliding %?

I struggle iwth different government types, with enough tech to sustain negative incomes.

36% tax is good for all govts and strats except cashers which use 35% tax.

neg. income is expected (and avoidable if invests to business and residential techs) on non-casher strats since income comes from sales not taxes.

I use 35% as well.

yeap 35%

i just leave it @ 35%. maybe lower it at the start to encourage pop growth?

early (1st 10-20) turns your income and pop is so low that lowering tax% doesn't help much and more like hurts your country.

I don't bother touching it. Too much effort for a micro-amount of benefit.

In fact, lowering your tax rate will not make your pop grow faster, pop grows at the rate of +1.5% (or is it +3%, I can't remember the formula) of your existing pop, until it nears the maximum pop, then it slows down. While your pop is lower than 80% of max pop, you suffer production % penalties proportional to the amount of missing pop from the max.

So lowering tax rate has the effect of increasing your max pop, which actually makes you suffer a higher production % penalty, and collect less tax on top of that.

I ran mine at 40 most of the time with no issues.

if you are non-casher then 40 is fine.

A lot of arithmetic was done on this back at the turn of the century - and Xinhuan's conclusion was reached.

Because of the change made which links production to the proportion which population has to 80% max population, should you suffer a very large loss of population and need to maintain production while recovering you need to sell Residential and set tax to 70% (to drop your maximum population). A rather strange (and I am sure unintended) thing but true.

35%

hi im a new player i just started my country and im using 55-60 tax and im only in first 120 turns, is that too much tax

yes it is, that high tax rate suits only on 1st 2 turns.

ok thanks so 35?

35 for cashers and 36 rest, commie can use 40 if bushels price is high.

thanks for the info

Take it with a pinch of salt.

Just out of Curiosity, if you were running a Farmer, wouldn't it be better to have the high taxrate? More income from taxes, and less people eating the food?

you lose pop if tax is too high and that way pci drops, not a big deal for farmer if production wasn't depending on population.

I thought it was depending on % of maximum population? Is it different for farmer?

if your population isn't x % of max pop then your production drops.

Right, and raising your tax rate lowers your max pop correct?

Yes.

The answer to Nightling's question is that, leaving aside the special case of a population severely reduced by attacks, leave tax rate at 35% because the gain (if any) from making tiny changes is so minute that you have got MUCH more important things to occupy your mind.

The special case of a much reduced population is worth some academic attention because extended gs/br/sow dissention/chemical misile runs have become more damaging than they used to be and are growing more common. So if you want to know how to combat the drop in production that goes with the drop in population you can look at tax rate and the other factors which influence maximum population.

This, however, is a subtlety. For start ups and normal play just leave tax rate at 35% and you'll do fine.

Many do this - to reduce inital expenses, before your very 1st turn set tax rate to 70%, and before your 2nd turn drop to 49%, before 3rd to set to 35% and leave there. this will drive away a bunch of the Pop. for your 1st 99 turns - you'll need/use less bushels

And you will save $3.

Instead cut down the number of keystrokes involved in your start up. The objective - quite a tough one - is not to go to sleep and not to hit any wrong keys.

Invest the time and energy you save by cutting down the keystrokes in making good decisions about how to cope with the period of play after you get your first tranche of goods onto the market.

A fast start in this game makes subsequent play a lot easier.

The $3 won't get the fast start for you.

if you guys were paying 35% tax, would you be happy?

I don't pay taxes :-)

You live somewhere without Value Added Tax?

in here if earns ~18k per year then ~35% of that goes to taxes.

I keep high (40-45%)

That is a mistake Billquad. Higher tax drops your population so less people are paying tax. I am not an enthusiastic arithmetician and have not done the arithmetic but this game has, over the years, been played by a very great number of people who love to do the arithmetic and every one who has ever done it agrees that somewhere between 35% and 36% maximises the return. This allows for bushels.

You probably are not harming your game a whole lot but the small loss is made on every single turn after about the sixth to the end of the set. I suspect the edge you are conceding your competitors - allowing for the myriad of other matters (principally the amount of military you carry) involved - may be down in the hundredths of a percent. But why concede them anything? And, as I said, it is cumulative turn after turn.

Look at your spy reports and you will find not a single strong player who doesn't, in ordinary circumstances (by which I mean no recent gs/chemical weapon/stir rebellions attacks) have their tax set at 35% or (a very few) 36%.

K

Maybe a silly question, but isn't it viable for a (non casher) to have a very low tax %? To make you harder to pop kill in case of war :)

nope, that extra population you get isn't that high that it covers other losses (for example techer and farmer has positive income from taxes) and that extra population also consumes more bushels and that way drops income.

Curiously, Theaisa, it turns out to take much the same number of turns to kill a country whatever its starting population. That is because with higher population more civs are killed by each hit. It usually takes between 300 and 400 gs hits to kill a country (leaving chems and stir rebellions to one side) and for a TINY country 200 hits may be enough, so this point is not 100% correct. But it is broadly true.

Cutting tax to zero does help population recover so if you are stonewalling a kill run or rebuilding a country after a series of attacks which reduced its population drastically then putting tax to zero is a good idea. That reduces production quite a lot, however, so if you need to produce units/bushels/tech points you may have to go the opposite way - put tax to 70%. That will slow the rate at which pop recovers but will increase productivity (quite a lot) in the meantime. I tend to put tax to zero while pop is below about 8,000 and switch to 70% when it reaches 8k to 10k. If you have enough money so that production doesn't matter leave tax at zero until pop is fully recovered.

In either case you have to watch the population a bit so as to know when recovery is complete. At that point you put tax back to 35% and continue normally.