Balanced Taxes

Ever wanted to have to actually think about managing taxes strategically in your Shogun 2 campaign? Well now you can!

In the vanilla game, no matter what your economic strategy is, going back and forth between Normal taxes and Very High taxes every other turn is always your best option. Although the vanilla game TRIES to incentivize you to do something else by penalizing your town growth based on tax rate, it’s not enough to matter in the 60-100 turns that most campaigns last. So what about all the other things you could do with taxes? Minimal? Low? Normal? High? Why aren’t these EVER a viable economic option?

Well now they all are!

This mod makes it so in the very short term you will earn the most money be leaving taxes on Very High (or alternating every other turn to avoid rebellions), but it’s NO LONGER the best strategy in the long term, too. Shortest term, Very High is best. Short-ish term, High is best. In the medium turn, Normal. In the long term, Low. In the longest term, Minimal.

The exact answer about how long it takes for each tax rate to become optimal will depend on the average growth rate and average wealth in each of your provinces. But in general, expect it to be:

Very High – best over 1-10 turns
High – best over 10-20 turns
Normal – best over 20-25 turns
Low – best over 25-30 turns
Minimal – best over 30+ turns

The higher your overall WEALTH in towns, the better a HIGHER tax rate will be in the long run. The higher your average GROWTH rate in each of your provinces, the better a LOWER tax rate is for you. This makes it so there are many more viable economic strategies that wouldn’t normally ever be optimal in the vanilla game.

The idea is the longer you’re willing to wait for the payoff, the lower you should set your taxes to in order to set up a better economy for the future.

I accomplished this by changing tax values:

VANILLA TAXES

MODDED TAXES (v2.3)

Notice that the mod actually BOOSTS your growth rate when you have low taxes, both by providing you a static growth boost and by adding an additional growth modifier to all of your other growth bonuses in the province. This means if you are going for a "bread basket" strategy, it is especially good to try and leave your taxes as low as possible.

Also, the vanilla gain applies a -25 growth penalty if a province was unhappy the previous turn. I’ve modifed this to -7 growth penalty to balance the taxes.

This modification is backed by some INTENSE cold hard number crunching in excel. If you’d like to check my work or play around with these numbers yourself, check out my spreadsheets: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rCPKYvEitkXsk80-0A3EvbSyMf_d9f8DC36Mp_n__W0

This mod works with RotS, Shogun 2, and FoTS, however I balanced it particularly for the economy of Shogun 2.

A quirk of this mod is that, unintuitively, a province that is exempted from tax will actually have a LOWER growth rate than a province which has low or minimal tax, since those low tax rates boost growth while an exempted province wont get the growth boosts from the tax rate. I haven’t found an elegant way to deal with this yet, so just be aware that this quirk exists.

(This mod is a small part of a larger overhaul mod I’m working on for Shogun 2. I will be releasing other similar quality of life, bug fix, and minor game enhancements as I work on that mod. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, follow me or something. I don’t know how steam workshop works – can you even follow people?)

Compatibility
Tax Refined – Compatible. To play with Matta’s tax slider-disabling script but with with my tax rates applied, simply load my mod higher in the load order.

UPDATE v2.3:

• Tax rates were modified over version 1 significantly to fix some problems. Check out the Change Notes to see the differences
• The game is now no longer easier than vanilla when going for a breadbasket strategy. In fact, it is slightly harder overall, and heavily incentives you to actually manage your taxes to eek out the most koku possible.
• Tax rates are a little more spread out now than they used to be, so that there is a more noticeable short-term effect when you are changing tax rates (for example, when you need to temporarily slam taxes to avoid bankruptcy, the income per turn will swing bigger than it did in version 1, but still not quite as big as vanilla)