The best settings for morale

[Landlocked]

I always just figured taxes should be set so morale is at an even zero. Now I'm wondering under what circumstances is it better to set taxes higher or lower?

[Zak0r]

spontaneously:
Lower if that morale boost let's you finish a building or research earlier.
Higher if you need a few more credits to upgrade or rush something.

[Ail]

I just recently had discussed this Topic with Hans Lemurson, who made excel-spreadsheets to actually calculate the most efficient tax-rate.

It is totally not trivial and indeed depends on a lot of factors. One of the more important ones is how productive the population is in avaerage.

So a city with only 2-mineral-mines, 2-food-farms and neither observatory nor xenite-flowers as well as no Engeneering-Bays or field-labs will be more effective at a high tax as the increased production from morale isn't that big compared to the increase in credits-income.

Cities with high average productivity of the individual workers benefit from lower taxes and thus higher morale.

Available buildings also play an important role. If you don't have Stock Exchange, taxes are worth less.

The most important factor is the base morale. Once you increase it to a point where your morale still is positive at 100% tax, it's almost in any case more efficient to actually run 100% tax.

However, the differences between the best and the worst tax-rate actually are not as big as you might think when it comes to general efficiency. On average it's only about 5% difference.

So I'm usually just sticking to the old rule-of-thumb I had followed before knowing of these calculations: Tax as much as possible without dropping into negative morale. Mathematically not always ideal but never far away from what is ideal. Also credits have a flexibility that regular production does not have.

But always make sure to set tax-rate to 0 on freshly conquered cities. The lower the base-morale, the more imporant every additional morale is. The higher the base-morale, the better to increase taxes.

Getting morale in most cases it the most efficient thing to increase overall productivity. This, of course, also includes preventing negative morale. Hans for example showed how forests are overall the better option than mines as long as you otherwise would have to deal with pollution.

I have also concluded quite some time ago, that in the lategame it often is better to slightly underproduce food in order to halt population-growth when overpopulation and thus a reduction of moral can not be prevented otherwise.