It also seems as if the buildings that reduce unrest are there solely to allow you to creep up your tax rate. I played an entire game last night without raising my taxes, and I never had to build more than one of the unrest reducing buildings. It's good that I could avoid that whole group of buildings since I didn't need/want them. Perhaps it's meant to balance out having to pay for upkeeps for large armies by making you have to build intermediate buildings so you can increase the tax rate? I'm not sure exactly what I'm getting at. . . but it seems kind of artificial.

Population now provides no resources, while city levels provide research, production (an inconsequential ammount I might add) and gildar. The tax slider was not rebalanced with the previous unrest levels from increasing taxes, and changing it from 'low' doesn't serve much purpose.

Consequently since population now provides no resources, once you reach a level 5 city it's only purpose is to provide conquering players bigger cities..

It was brought in for beta 5C - tax now affects the entire gold output of the city - markets, city level, enchantments, everything. The percentages are now much higher too - I think 'low' is now 40% as opposed to the 1% it used to be.

So low taxes on a village with a market would be calculated like this:

Village (2 gold) + market (1 gold) = 3 gold

3 gold x 0.4 (due to 40% tax rate) = 1.2 gold per turn from that village

I knew I would not like it, but this is so much worse than I thought. My mod is so screwed now. I will have to spend hours testing out new balances all for the sake of this minor change in the gildar equation. I really liked the old way, especially since I could increase taxes in a given city. Now I have to figure out how to do that with the new system. QQ

But it's strange that a bread roll costs something like 30 guildar, which represents years of output from an entire village. It's just so bizarre, I guess it does the job but it's hardly an elegant system really.

It's all +1*tax rate now

I think it's too easy to completely negate unrest, especially in cities with essence. Really you could halve the values on unrest buildings. Other then that I like it. Your just mad about your mod.

In the change log. .981

"The tax rate is applied to the entire cities gold production, running with low taxes is much harder now."

I agree with you seanw3 that this tax change should have been clarified before it was buried in the change log.  I don't recall much talk about the new tax system, but I do like the new system. It is simplistic and makes sense, although it is not as easy to figure out how much money you will be making if you build such a building. But I suppose this information could be added later, as they are trying this system out.

I like your solution, as this is what it looked like what the dev's did, or close to it. I can't wait for this game to be released, so I can try out your mod.

Out of curiousity how close is the vanilla gameplay vs. your balanced mod? Is it a completely different feel or roughly the same?

The major differences are minute. The devs and I have a difference of vision on how long a battle should last, how scary monsters should be, how many armies each faction should have, weapon balance, armor balance, magic balance, game altering spells and quests, hero progression, using randomness for every game mechanic, faction aggression, starting Sov power, leveling speed, etc. Overall it is more challenging. A design for hardcore players that don't want to give any room to new users for things like learning how to play the game. I will probably break the mod up into content and balance changes after the initial release.

But then why does it take years of taxes just to buy a bread roll!? The money system already requires a suspension of disbelief so we shouldn't dwell on how realistic/unrealistic the tax system is

Err I think when shogun says 'unrealistic' he means that in a strategy game where resources define the actions you can take, being able to 'mostly' ignore the gold aspect of the game isn't lending much credit to it's usefulness. I doubt he meant unrealistic in terms of how much peasants were really brutalized in the medieval era.

Ahem, I do agree that the game runs smoother with a base monetary bonus from city levels, rather than relying on income from population, that was too low to do anything with at the start of the game. Removing population from resources entirely though.. just makes it feel like the mechanic is now an afterthought, or a poor initial decision. As far as the bonus production is concerned... 2 production per city level isn't going to do anything worthwhile. Considering how slowly units and buildings are constructed, I think a % bonus to production from population or city level would have been a much more impactful change.

Sir, you give the US senate too much credit.