Developer Diary 11

This developer diary was first posted in the M&T forum here, and team members answered some questions in the thread. It was further posted on the M&T subreddit here, and team members also commented there.

Dev Diary #11 - Taxes
Taxes have been in the name of our mod since its very beginning, yet we’ve never actually had any sophisticated tax system to speak of. With 3.0, we aimed to change that, by having the tax system be one of our main focus points during development. It has gone through several iterations, and we’re finally in a state where we can comfortably say that it’s mostly done.

New tax works with two main concepts, which is that tax should be raised as a result of an active choice, and that such choice must cost resources. Let’s get into an actual example.

Suppose you own Paris. It has some nice development values, which is to be expected from Paris. If it was vanilla, then for owning that province, you would simply gain whatever resources that province provides, with no cost whatsoever that you must pay on your end.

In 3.0, that’s not the case. Paris will not provide any resources unless specifically told to. You tell the province to give you the resources that you want, mainly tax and manpower, by installing a set of special ‘tax buildings’ in a province, and only then it will provide you with resources.

Tax buildings have a price tag involved, and it's not ducats. Each year, every tax building installed in your provinces will incur a cost in monarch points. It is dynamic, influenced by various factors, but that’s beside the point. What really matters is that, combined with the fact that the province will not give you any resources unless specifically told to, any resource that you squeeze out of your provinces will cost you some monarch points.

These tax buildings come in three levels, “low”, “medium” and “high”. Choosing between them is not as straightforward a choice as one might think. There are dynamics involved, and one is not just better than the other. That is because tax cost is calculated as, “Taxed Amount * Tax Level * Tax Cost Malus”. Higher tax levels will make the tax cost to be just flat out more expensive, while making various tax cost factors to increase their impact on the tax cost. Even at 100% LA, the cost of a low tax will usually increase by only up to 300%, while in the same situation high tax will increase its cost by up to 1500%.

This leads to three interesting consequences. One is that it opens up a new set of experiences for the player. You can try to squeeze out every ducat out of your provinces by heavily taxing them at the cost of monarch points, or save up on monarch points by going easy on your people.

Another is that it naturally creates a difference in playstyle between large and small nations. Since monarch points do not scale, large nations become more and more starved for monarch points, unless they relax taxation on their provinces. Small nations, on the other hand, can utilize far greater share of their resources and mobilize them for war and governance. Big nations are still formidable and strong, especially if they expand their bureaucracy, but small nations now have a good chance at punching above their weight.

Last but not least, it makes conquest a totally different experience. Picking up a province that is difficult to tax from your capital is discouraged no matter how good that province is. Expanding your borders, beyond a certain point, also becomes discouraged as provinces further away will cost more of your already limited MP to properly tax.

Before we finish this DD, let’s also get into some of the technical details of the tax system.

What is tax exactly?

Tax is a flow of resources from the province’s classes to whoever is doing the taxing. What this means is that tax is never free money. When you tax and get income, someone is losing exactly the same amount of ducats by being taxed.

How is tax impacted by other systems?

There are many things that impact tax, but key influence is Local Autonomy, as you may have already guessed. LA will still negatively impact tax, but in a different way.

Before, LA had a direct hit to tax income, as in high LA meant you get a directly reduced amount of income as its consequence. Now, LA impacts the ‘cost’ of tax buildings and not their effects. If you want to tax high LA province very heavily, you have the freedom to do that, and you will get your income accordingly. But, that will exponentially increase the cost of that land tax, and you will lose a lot of monarch points as a result.

Does tax affect unrest?

Tax does not, at the moment, directly impact unrest. But high taxation on poor people, like poll tax, can decrease their purchasing power, which could lead to them not getting enough goods to fulfill their needs, which could lead to unrest. Low taxation will have the opposite effect, with high fulfillment reducing unrest.

That’s about it for today. I’ll end this DD with a list of all tax types and their description. Peace.

https://imgur.com/a/k0mWLjd