50% Tax Plan Vs. 100% Tax Plan

I have done a little bit of analysis of both Zenrax's (50%) and Lord Wellington's (100%) tax plans.

In case you are unfamiliar with these tax plans, I will post links.
Zenrax's 50% Tax Plan
Lord Wellington's 100% Tax Plan

Here's my 2 cents:
These are both great tax plans, however the deciding factor is going to be how much you play on an average 24 hour period.

For both scenarios, lets assume a 10,000 population maximum.

• The 50% percent tax plan will give reach equilibrium at 2500 gold/hr
• The 100% percent tax of course never reaches equilibrium but with constant Disaster Relief comforts you keep your loyalty at 100 you get 10,000 gold/hr minus what you spend on food for disaster relief.
• The 50% plan give you roughly 1/4 of what the 100% tax plan does.
• The 100% plan will not work when you are offline. you must reduce the tax rate to 5-10% when you are offline otherwise you will log on with zero loyalty and population.

So my thought is that make the hours of play the deciding factor of which plan to use.

Point 1:
These plans reach equilibrium (more or less) at 6 hours of game play in a 24 hour period. (they will make you the same amount of gold.)
Less than 6 hrs of game play/day, the 50% tax plan will make more gold.
More than 6 hrs of game play/day the 100% tax plan will make more gold.

Now the next question is it feasible to do both plans. (Switch back and forth)
The answer is that I don't know for sure.

Point 2:
My initial thought is it depends on your max population size. Population doesn't seem to grow on 100% tax rate. Even if your loyalty is to the max. It seems you need to lower your tax rate to get your population to grow to maximum. Letting your population grow to maximum consumes a lot of time where you get minimal tax. Then only to let it decline again when you log off. For small population maximums this is not so much an issue.

Point 3:
You can apply the same principals of the 100% tax plan maintaining a constant 50 loyalty while you are online using disaster relief comforts. Then when you are ready to log off switch back to a 50% tax rate. In fact, this hybrid of both tax plans is probably the most cost effective way to tax your population for those playing an average of 6hrs or less per day.

Point 3:
I would definitely say that anyone going on an extended vacation should use the 50% plan regardless.

There you have it folks.
JAZZ

There is an additional tax plan that you should compare those two methods with, its simple and has great gains.

Assuming you are at 0% rate with 100 loyalty (otherwise skip down to your current rate below):
1. Set your rate at 100%
2. Rake in the gold until loyalty gets really low, I stop at below 10.
3. Set rate to 80% until loyalty reachs 20.
4. Set rate to 60% until loyalty reachs 40.
5. Set rate to 40% until loyalty reachs 60.
6. Set rate to 20% until loyalty reachs 80.
7. Set rate to 0% until loyalty reachs 100.
8. Go to step 1.

You can also do this in increments of 10, but it requires more micromanagement, you can also stop at 10% rate before going to 100% so as not to lose money due to hero costs.

Recently I've stopped at 50% rate to be safe with all the lag and server outages. Its no fun to forget or not be able to get on while your rate is 100%.

Unique, you must have alot of cottages or really low production since getting your loyalty to 10 doesn't effect other things in your cities.

You seem to have forgotten the best tax rate plan of all that I came up with.
I'm a nice person so I'll explain it again for everyone.

Loyalty changes every X number of seconds. For the purposes of my explanation, X number of seconds will be referred to as a 'tick'. The best tax is obtained by starting with a loyalty of 50. Now make your tax rate to 100% for one tick, your loyalty should go down to 49, now change tax to 50% again for another tick, and repeat.

Lets look at it mathematically.

20% tax rate
.2 tax * .8 pop = .16 efficiency per two ticks

50% tax rate
.5 tax * .5 pop = .25 efficiency per two ticks

100% tax rate
1 tax * ~.9 pop = ~.9 efficiency - (cost of food) per two ticks

Not to mention most people will occasionally forget to use disaster relief and end up having to pray to raise loyalty, or even worse, forgetting to change it back when logging off or having it on 100% during a server crash.
All of this unpredictability and cost of food makes 100% tax rate very unreliable.

50%/100% tax rate
((.5 tax * .5 pop) + (1 tax * .49 pop)) per two ticks
(.25 + .49) per two ticks
That comes out to a whole .74 efficiency per two ticks.
I think this is more then conclusive, this is the best tax rate possible.

100% tax rate is still inconclusive and 50% tax rate has just been mathematically owned. Epic Win!

I was thinking we should call it the "Darwin Tax", but that would just get things all confused again like with the Darwin Tactic.
We can call it the "Alternating Tax Plan" instead. As in, "I believe you should use the Alternating Tax Plan."

If high tax rates aren't kept in check through comforting your population starts to dwindle and that limits the soldiers you can train.

I have all the materials need to recruit but am still getting "0" in the Max box.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sague

If high tax rates aren't kept in check through comforting your population starts to dwindle and that limits the soldiers you can train.

I have all the materials need to recruit but am still getting "0" in the Max box.

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I Say don't do this until you have 10kplus of people

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Darwin

You seem to have forgotten the best tax rate plan of all that I came up with.
I'm a nice person so I'll explain it again for everyone.

Loyalty changes every X number of seconds. For the purposes of my explanation, X number of seconds will be referred to as a 'tick'. The best tax is obtained by starting with a loyalty of 50. Now make your tax rate to 100% for one tick, your loyalty should go down to 49, now change tax to 50% again for another tick, and repeat.

Lets look at it mathematically.

20% tax rate
.2 tax * .8 pop = .16 efficiency per two ticks

50% tax rate
.5 tax * .5 pop = .25 efficiency per two ticks

100% tax rate
1 tax * ~.9 pop = ~.9 efficiency - (cost of food) per two ticks

Not to mention most people will occasionally forget to use disaster relief and end up having to pray to raise loyalty, or even worse, forgetting to change it back when logging off or having it on 100% during a server crash.
All of this unpredictability and cost of food makes 100% tax rate very unreliable.

50%/100% tax rate
((.5 tax * .5 pop) + (1 tax * .49 pop)) per two ticks
(.25 + .49) per two ticks
That comes out to a whole .74 efficiency per two ticks.
I think this is more then conclusive, this is the best tax rate possible.

100% tax rate is still inconclusive and 50% tax rate has just been mathematically owned. Epic Win!

I was thinking we should call it the "Darwin Tax", but that would just get things all confused again like with the Darwin Tactic.
We can call it the "Alternating Tax Plan" instead. As in, "I believe you should use the Alternating Tax Plan."

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This too is a good plan, but is dependent on a strong server. You could be within the 100% "tick" and bam, down you go. Odds are low, true, but still. It could happen.

Really, the design behind every "plan" is activity. If you can be on and be active (barring any distractions or server problems) you can pull off any plan.

I've tried both and I must admit i prefer the 100% one. What i do his that i keep it at 25% when I'm offline because I know I'll be from 2 to 2 1/2 hours, so after 1 hours you're back at 100% loyalty and you've let the time to the population to growth back,
5-10% doesn't give you lot of gold and his good for the 1 hour per day type of player who wants to maximize gold when he's on.

The 50% Tax rate his cool, you don't need comforting population each hours.

Ohh another cool thing with that strategy; it's easier and styll show a larger increase in the income (compare to the 20% i use to have). It's a good alternative; it help a lot to buy specific ressource because you got more money.


100% strat positive.

Helps A LOT for the growth, the money his beautiful and when you've kept population 100% with comforting, it helps a lot for the Population Growth Bonus.

50% strat positive

Let's say 100% strat didn't prevail putting back the tax rate to his 5-10% because he got dropped off the servor: Thanks for the lagging conditions. If the servor is off 2-5 hours, it's tough to get it back at 100% loyalty quickly (takes time!). Therefore a Tax rate of 50% his so easy: no need to think about it.

Unless you have a lot of cottages and thus a lot of people, your tax rate really doesn't matter. The most money can be made when loyalty is at 100, which is another way of saying you have the max population your cottages can support. Taxing then at 100% will garner the most amount of money, even if you were going to move to a 50% tax rate all the time, you would still want to tax at 100% until loyalty reaches 50%, or else you are just throwing away gold.


If you wish to worry about full employment then stop at any rate you wish. Me, I know that gold far outweighs all other resources. But evenso, I stop at 50% or thereabout as I mentioned above.


Each segment of time is however long it takes for loyalty to go down by 10. Someday when the servers aren't so laggy I'll figure that out.

Anyway as a direct comparison.

50% all the time
t1 - 2500
t2 - 2500
t3 - 2500
t4 - 2500
t5 - 2500
subtotal for first sequence = 12500
t1 - 2500
t2 - 2500
t3 - 2500
t4 - 2500
t5 - 2500
subtotal for second sequence = 12500, and total gold = 25000

100% down to 50 loyalty (loyalty change in parens)
t1 - 10000 (100 -> 90)
t2 - 9000 (90 -> 80)
t3 - 8000 (80 -> 70)
t4 - 7000 (70 -> 60)
t5 - 6000 (60 -> 50)
total for first sequence = 40000
t1 - 2000 (50 -> 60, pop 5k * .4)
t2 - 1800 (60 -> 70, pop 6k * .3)
t3 - 1400 (70 -> 80, pop 7k * .2)
t4 - 800 (80 -> 90, pop 8k * .1)
t5 - 0 (90 -> 100, pop 9k * 0)
subtotal for second sequence = 6000, and total gold 51000


That's almost double the gold income holding it at 50% all the time.

I just reposted this in a thread of its own.

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Originally Posted by Darwin

The best tax is obtained by starting with a loyalty of 50. Now make your tax rate to 100% for one tick, your loyalty should go down to 49, now change tax to 50% again for another tick, and repeat.

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You were led astray by the OPs math which imply a stead state condition, 50% tax rate is not the *BEST* nor 50 loyalty which you seem to be mixing here. I'm not sure what you are saying really but the best tax income comes from taxing at loyalty 100, with a 100% rate.

The most income, and thus the most taxes comes from something like taxing at 100% until loyalty reaches 95, then giving the people food to raise it back to 100. Does loyalty drop slow enough to do this constantly. But you have to figure out the food cost, which is low right now because the cost doesn't match the description.

The determination of 'best' really boils down to (as the thread starter mentioned) how long you're going to be playing in a 24 hour period. But in addition, I would add, how much attention you're willing to keep reserved for your loyalty maintenance.

If you're going to be online for a long time, and willing/able to keep a near constant tab on the loyalty while keeping tabs on everything else, then the 100% tax + disaster relief is best. Sorry Darwin, if you're going to spend enough of your focus on switching from 50% to 100% at each 'tick', then you're better off with the 100%+ disaster relief plan.

If you're going to be online for a relatively short time, or not willing/able to keep a near constant tab on the loyalty while juggling everything else, then 50% tax is better.
I think this plan will become more dominant as people expand to more towns ... just thinking of the 100% + disaster relief plan with, say 7 cities, and the constant buying of food, and waiting 30 minutes if and when someone else sells theirs (and hoping that nobody else puts a higher bid than yours while you're tweaking another one of your towns). And don't forget that the amount of food needed for disaster relief increases with your population.

Overall, those who are willing to do more micromanaging, and spend more time online, will benefit more from the 100% plan ... only in their early game. As their game develops, they're more likely to switch to the 50% plan.

As for your taxing idea UniqueName, it does show it's better than the 50% plan ... from the 100% down to 0%. But the two biggest flaws in your taxing idea are:
1. the rate of population drop; you're assuming that the time it takes for your loyalty to drop by 10% is the same length of time that your population will drop 10% (the population lags behind the loyalty, and although I haven't experimented, I think that the higher your max population, the slower the % change).
2. the other half of your example; how much gold income you'd be getting while your population is going from 0% back up to 100%. To maximize the gold income, you'd have to change your tax at every 1% change in your max population (and I don't really want to calculate that). To minimize effort, you'd put the tax at 0% on the way back up, but that also means 0 income during that time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by UniqueName

You were led astray by the OPs math which imply a stead state condition, 50% tax rate is not the *BEST* nor 50 loyalty which you seem to be mixing here. I'm not sure what you are saying really but the best tax income comes from taxing at loyalty 100, with a 100% rate.

The most income, and thus the most taxes comes from something like taxing at 100% until loyalty reaches 95, then giving the people food to raise it back to 100. Does loyalty drop slow enough to do this constantly. But you have to figure out the food cost, which is low right now because the cost doesn't match the description.

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A lot of people missed the point. Loyalty changes by one point up or down every number of seconds. I haven't measured it with a stopwatch, but lets use 10 seconds as an example. If your loyalty is 80, and your tax rate 81, then after 10 seconds your loyalty will drop to 79. If your loyalty is 80 and your tax rate 100, then after 10 seconds your loyalty will still drop to 79, but you just made a lot more gold. My system is using this mechanic and you would be changing your tax rate between 50% and 100% every 10 seconds.

That said, yes, my plan is quite impossible. The point was only to prove that 50% tax rate is not the best hypothetically.

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Originally Posted by Pocket

the other half of your example; how much gold income you'd be getting while your population is going from 0% back up to 100%. To maximize the gold income, you'd have to change your tax at every 1% change in your max population (and I don't really want to calculate that). To minimize effort, you'd put the tax at 0% on the way back up, but that also means 0 income during that time.

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I'll give you your numbers to play with.

Every tick is 6 minutes.
You gain/lose 2.5% of your max population per tick.
You gain/lose 1 loyalty per tick.
1 loyalty allows for 1% population gain or causes 1% population decrease.

Thus, when loyalty is decreasing, it won't decrease your population at 2.5%, it will decrease it at 1% per tick. 2.5% figures in when your population is far enough above your "stable" number to allow for such a drop.

When loyalty is increasing, it will only allow for a 1% increase in population. To get 2.5%, you must inflate your loyalty far enough ahead of the growth to accommodate it.

Further, on the new tick, you recieve 1/10 of the new number, IE, the tax is applied after the tick happens, for better or for worse. When loyalty/pop is decreasing, you get the lower number. Upward trend is the reverse.

Enjoy the number crunching.

I've posted a new thread describing in more detail my proposed tax plan.

(http://bbs.civony.com/showthread.php?t=1445


At any rate, from what I can tell, and Mandolin nicely gave us the important details some of which were unknown, the pop and loyalty scale together.

I won't be splitting hairs here, and variance between increasing and decrease is small compared to the overall question which is, over the 5 hours going from loyalty 100 to loyalty 50 with a 100% tax rate is almost three times more than the income you will get from just keeping it at 50% all the time. This erodes slightly on the trek back up from 50 to 100 loyalty but still ends up being double over the total 10 hour period.


I'm going to elaborate more in the other thread on the specifics of using the two loyalty raising comforts.

yea very nice.

gold is useless. set ur tax to 15-20% to pay for most of your heros salary and leave it be.u can use the extra population for training troops.

On my (rather new) server nothing is above 0.3g ea, making gold the most valuable resource.

As far as the "A-hah! my tax plan beats the 50% tax plan!" I don't believe I've ever heard anyone say that 50% was the best without the Specific stipulation that it was over about 12 hours with *NO* user intervention. So it's only the best when you're not at your desk for an extended period.

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Originally Posted by geezuss

gold is useless. set ur tax to 15-20% to pay for most of your heros salary and leave it be.u can use the extra population for training troops.

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He's right for the most part. Gold from tax rate doesn't matter, just farm NPCs and you'll have all the gold you can handle.

0% tax... anything higher is just not worth it for soooo sooo little... just sell lumber and iron for gold.... 37 lvl 9 sawmills make 166.5k lumber per hr (base rate).... add 1% per politics stat point (let's figure at least 103 pol = +103%), and don't forget all your valleys as well (9x lvl 10 forests = +207%).... oh and at least lvl 9 tech (+90%)

so that's the 100% base rate + 103% hero + 207% valley + 90% tech = 500%... so 5x base rate...

166.5k * 5 = 832.5k

so that's 832.5k lumber (or iron if u wanna use ironmines) per hr...... now look on your marketplace on your server and see the current price for iron or lumber... multiply that by 832.5k to find out how much gold per hr you could make

(and remember.... an even higher pol hero can get you even more... and you can do this per city, with no regular tinkering w/ settings)

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Originally Posted by shuehawj

yea very nice.

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You terrible necromancer....

who bothers about gold. u get tons of it from npcs anyways :p

tax... 0 % plix. helps to get back pop faster after u max out barak queing by setting production 0 and then que then prod 100 and then pop raising comfort :p ...

When I first started in bp, I also thought that I could generate a lot of revenue from taxes and followed the population quest and built lots of cottages. After some time, however, I realized that any revenue from taxes is nothing compared to the revenue generated from (1) focusing on either iron production or lumber production and selling off the excess and (2) farming lots of npcs. I discovered the best tax rate is clearly 0%, since in this light, the only purpose of cottages is to have enough idle population to train troops. Keeping the tax rate at zero allows you to reduce the number of cottages to the bare minimum of 6 or 7 in each city and max out on the number of barracks.

I set my tax rate to 0 because the money is not worth the loyalty loss. :)

Um sorry to seem arrogant but 100% tax plan is obviously the fastest/best way to generate gold.. since 100% tax gives more gold than 50% tax, and switch to a lower % while offline then when you are back slowly rise your tax back up to 100% as loyalty increases... But yes, to agree with the others... it depends on the amount of time you spend online.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by soul sky

Um sorry to seem arrogant but 100% tax plan is obviously the fastest/best way to generate gold.. since 100% tax gives more gold than 50% tax, and switch to a lower % while offline then when you are back slowly rise your tax back up to 100% as loyalty increases... But yes, to agree with the others... it depends on the amount of time you spend online.

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all i'm going to say is go back and read this post from the 2nd page of this thread... and tell me if you can get a single city to out-do that amount of gold strictly from taxes
http://bbs.evony.com/showpost.php?p=581246&postcount=19

(on newer servers that are probably only 2-4 weeks old.... maybe!... but after a month or so, lumber and iron prices go well above 1 gold a piece...)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by soul sky

Um sorry to seem arrogant but 100% tax plan is obviously the fastest/best way to generate gold.. since 100% tax gives more gold than 50% tax, and switch to a lower % while offline then when you are back slowly rise your tax back up to 100% as loyalty increases... But yes, to agree with the others... it depends on the amount of time you spend online.

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I agree that 100% is good to a point, but I think you forget about the cost of food. Let's make an example. This does not take into account the amount of time you spend getting your loyalty up to 100 or time when you leave your tax low to keep loyalty up when you are not playing. This is simply what you earn when you are at 100% tax.

Okay let's say we have a population limit of 100 to make calculating easy.

Disaster Relief(DR) uses the same amount of food as your pop. limit. We must use DR every 24 mins. or more to keep loyalty from going down more than it is restored(I read this but have not tested the time myself). So if we use DR every 24 minutes, we use 250 food every hour (100 per 24 mins.).

Now with 100 pop. limit, we will stay at about 95 population because when loyalty drops to 95, population will do the same, but pop. will not go back up even when loyalty does if tax is still set to 100%. So with 95 population and 100% tax we get 95 gold per hour.

So we spend 250 food to get 95 gold.

Here are a few calculations of food cost based on different market prices-
Price Amount Tot.Cost Net Gold per hour
0.01G x 250 = 02.5G Net:92.5G
0.05G x 250 = 12.5G Net:82.5G
0.10G x 250 = 25G Net:70G
0.20G x 250 = 50G Net:45G
0.28G x 250 = 70G Net:25G
0.38G x 250 = 95G Net:0G

So as you can see, on a new server when prices of food are low, you can keep most of the gold you make, but if food gets up above 0.38G/ea. in the market, you actually lose gold by using DR with tax at 100%.


Now let's see how much we make at 50% tax so we can figure out when it stops being AT ALL worthwhile to use DR.

Leaving tax at 50%, population evens out at 50 using our hypothetical pop. limit of 100. 50% of 50 is 25G per hour. Looking at the calculations above, we see that when food gets to 0.28G in the market, we don't make any more money at 100% than at 50% tax.



SO IN CONCLUSION:

You do not make ANY gold using 100% tax and disaster relief every 24 minutes if food cost is 0.38G/ea.

You make as much gold per hour by leaving tax at 50% as using 100% tax and disaster relief every 24 minutes if food cost is 0.28G/ea.

50% and 100% for MY OPINION, is not what you should follow, you get tons of gold just by farming, and it's not like you're heroes would need that much gold as do archers need that much food. well all research are finish or you are near finishing them all, gold is virtually worthless unless when you go to battle and heal some, but other than that nothing.
I wouldn't say resources because it's not really advisable to buy resources especially wood and lumber even though they are sought after.
you can produce tons of it, if you just know your way.
just MY OPINION ^_^

In early game stages, especially while you're in BP, manipulating tax rates like this is a useful tactic.

Once you get enough ballistas built to start NPC farming, however, you're better off relying on that for your gold, and leaving your population for military.

not really when you are still in bp or fresh out from it, money is worthless ^_^, what worth is money to upgrade stuff if you don't have that population to produce troops to defend and expand your empire ^_^ like you said when just wait till you have a lot of ballistas to farm ^_^ just my opinion ^_^ I'm not saying this true though. =p

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Originally Posted by PU239

not really when you are still in bp or fresh out from it, money is worthless ^_^, what worth is money to upgrade stuff if you don't have that population to produce troops to defend and expand your empire ^_^ like you said when just wait till you have a lot of ballistas to farm ^_^ just my opinion ^_^ I'm not saying this true though. =p

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Gold is worth plenty in bp on a new server because resources are cheap so you can build more troops and get a second city going quickly.

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Originally Posted by evolnayr

Gold is worth plenty in bp on a new server because resources are cheap so you can build more troops and get a second city going quickly.

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oh didn't notice that coming, sorry I sat corrected :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PU239

not really when you are still in bp or fresh out from it, money is worthless ^_^, what worth is money to upgrade stuff if you don't have that population to produce troops to defend and expand your empire ^_^ like you said when just wait till you have a lot of ballistas to farm ^_^ just my opinion ^_^ I'm not saying this true though. =p

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How are you going to get those ballistas without spending the gold on the relevant researches? Technologies are critical, because you never lose them. Even if all of your developed cities are taken and you're left sitting with a crappy town with no resources and 0 pop, you still have your techs.

Gold is quite valuable in BP, because you want to get as far as you can within that seven day limit. Because of the limitations of BP, the only way to get gold is from your population. (Yes, I know you can sell resources on the market and get gold that way, but in the early stages, doing so handicaps you more than anything).

people actually use tax?..
3k gold an hour, 300k every 4 days, thats about 550k a week, for all that effort?
ill keep my 0 tax and loose a little gold, without even slightly risking my citys

Quote:

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Originally Posted by barrows ownz

people actually use tax?..
3k gold an hour, 300k every 4 days, thats about 550k a week, for all that effort?
ill keep my 0 tax and loose a little gold, without even slightly risking my citys

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Early game, tax is necessary.

Once you can start training ballistas, tax is useless.

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Originally Posted by Snuffy from 67

Early game, tax is necessary.

Once you can start training ballistas, tax is useless.

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i started playing on server 1, and have never had tax

and ive been playing for months now, im going alright..

I've read a lot about taxes on these forums and the constant variable is how much you play, and servers going down.

I only play a few hours a day, and here's the SIMPLE way to make the most gold if you only only play a few hours a day:

1. While you're playing, strategically get your pop to 100%. I lower my taxes in intervals of 10 until my pop reaches 100%. But you could do it however, just get your pop to 100% while you're playing.
2. When your pop reaches 100%, change your tax rate to 50% and log off. The only key to this working is that your labor force is at or less than half your pop limit.

-This isn't the best way to make lots of gold, but it's simple for the moderate player, and certainly makes you more gold than just leavingyour tax rate set at any certain percentage.

The only other key is this: more people=more gold. Period.

So that's my SIMPLE tax plan.