Is Town Growth worth it?

[Sneakimus]

I'm currently playing through a Fall of the Samurai campaign, and I tend to racket up my taxes one turn, then decrease them the next; then repeat in order to maximize my tax income while avoiding rebellions.

It is working fairly well, however I also notice that a casualty of this is Town income.

Is Town income worth investing in by having low taxes and avoiding angering the population, or is it best to max out your towns then let growth pile on like a side bonus?

[Telvido_cat]

It probably balances out if you reinvest to boost farms, commerce or mines. But it's just a pain in the arse and you don't need to do it not even on legendary - just sell access.

[StrangeLittleMan]

Growth gets more usefull the longer you play. If you play short campaigns it can easily be ignored. But if you like to turtle a long time then growth can have a substantial impact on income.

[StrangeLittleMan]

I wrote a guide on economy, perhaps you should check it out. Growth is also mentioned and discussed in the comments.

[eyecarrot19]

Growth is not worth it at all in Vanilla game. In ROTS and FOTS it is really situational, almost not worth mentioning on Legendary run, where you always short on money.
To take max of the growth and let it be good you need huge investments such as:
Low taxes ( low income means it’s very hard to survive )
Technology (additional growth/lowering corruption debuff and it requires a lot of time)
Buildings (in fots usually they comes with a angry population, which means a need to buy and pay for additional garrison troops).

In the end we have a very fragile system that needs babysitting. Growth less than 10 is too meaningless, growth above 10 gets useless with every new province captured - because of balance debuff as you make your empire stronger.

Only use of lower taxes is just getting faster population calm down for a fast expansion.

[Red Spot]

It is a tactic used on higher difficulties to get the most out of the tax system ... and if it is a good practice on higher difficulties I'd put money on money being more important (when you lack it) then population.

[BastardSword]

All I know is that when I focus on getting as much growth and food as possible, I always end up making way more money than I need.

In the early game when you barely have an economy but need 2 full stacks of ashigaru just to survive, growth and food surplus are pretty pointless.

In the mid game when you have more provinces but are turtling a lot while researching tech and maxing out your unit producing towns, then you need as much money as possible so you can afford at least 4 full stacks of quality units to stave off invasions and prepare for RD. This is when growth and extra income is most useful.

In the end game after RD when you are constantly taking new provinces, then focusing on more growth is pretty pointless because you don't need any more money. HOWEVER if you previously neglected growth during the mid game, you can easily run out of money because you have no trade, you have several expensive armies, and you need to exempt a lot of provinces from taxes until "resistance to invaders" settles down.

[BastardSword]

For me growth is basically to offset other choices that I make.

Lately in S2 I've been more willing to sacrifice food surplus for bigger castles and rice exchanges in the early and mid game. However I will still eventually max out all my farms which ends up more than compensating for this. The thing with food surplus growth is that it is global, and it mainly benefits your poor garbage provinces that don't really have any opportunities for growth or increasing base income. However it is still a small number. I think it's better in the early game to focus on maxing out the income of individual provinces that have very fertile farms or a gold mine.

Also in S2 I don't like depending too much on naval trade because it becomes an achilles' heel that the AI can easily shut down. I don't ever take the naval trade nodes because I find I waste all profits on protecting my trade ships with medium bune spam. If I instead focus on growth and farms I more than offset any trade money I'm missing out on.

In FOTS my strategy now is to always completely neglect the naval game because the AI will just endlessly spam ships no matter what and I don't have time to waste my life in endless boring naval battles. I lose out on a lot of trade income and port income but instead I focus on getting as much growth as possible. I upgrade all growth buildings, I go for building options that give the most growth, I max out all farms starting with very fertile and fertile farms, and I get the two tech upgrades that give +2 growth. As a result I am always swimming in cash fairly early on in the game.

[Sn3z]

Its a shame no one at the time this game was alive and kicking spotted the fact that growth needed changes, atleast shogun 2 base campaign, in the campaign growth is too good from the end game where its really not needed, re balancing it to effect more of the low-mid tier buildings , whilst nerfing the amount gained in late game would have made it more impactful.

[markeason]

Originally posted by BastardSword:

. . .
In the end game after RD when you are constantly taking new provinces, then focusing on more growth is pretty pointless because you don't need any more money. HOWEVER if you previously neglected growth during the mid game, you can easily run out of money because you have no trade, you have several expensive armies, and you need to exempt a lot of provinces from taxes until "resistance to invaders" settles down.

The solution to which is to create vassals of some of the provinces you capture. They are guaranteed trade partners and, if you have a few resources to trade, they will yield a lot more than the tax revenue from the province would have.

Your tax revenue from every province also decreases with each province you take due to the increasing administration costs.

So late game, I don't develop provinces (other than to ensure religion / happiness issues addressed) and go for lots of vassals which allows me to move through more quickly and make more money.

[Sn3z]

Pursuing growth in high yielding provinces I think is the way to go from the early game but you need to set low tax rate(asap) to mitigate the -4 to growth to actually kick start it, building Rice exchanges(in only high yield) and getting Metsuke to oversee should be a priority as well. Some factions I will add can do this more easily than others, Hattori as example have potential access to like four exceptional high yield provinces.

Lowering the tax bracket to low is not necessary a bad thing to do at the start you just need to be in a position to take a small hit, try to blow your income up on normal tax to say 1400 and set it down you will probably lose like 4-500 but can rebuild, also make absolute sure you have some koku in the bank to spend in order to make back that loss in income.

With lowering tax you also don't need to worry about sake den although you could stack it with the sake den if you want very fast expansion.

[markeason]

Sake den is more about getting access to your ninja than happiness or income in the early game. Getting two or three ninja out early means they will likely survive the whole game if used and levelled appropriately.

Failure to do this puts you behind the curve with these agents and struggling to catch up later in the game.

I find my 5 ninja as much value as two or three full army stacks by the end of a (domination) campaign.

[Enigmatic]

I'd say so. if I can afford to lower taxes I will. It pays off in long run.
Actually early game if you can lower taxes really early and keep them low. While still managing to expand a bit it makes income pretty nice later.

[BastardSword]

I never put taxes lower than normal and I always have plenty of money. Sometimes I will bounce it to very high in the early game if I am strapped for cash. Again doing something pro-growth like lowering taxes is something you could do to compensate for not doing other things, like upgrade roads and farms for extra growth. I always do those things anyway so I just keep taxes at normal and make tons of cash.

[Sn3z]

The thing with low taxes is your basically restricted to using Metsuke in high yield provinces and how ever many your diverting into that means your even more reliant on Metsuke for your income so its very fragile, you can't really move them out of the town governing role because your income will collapse, at this point you may aswell even transition into very low taxes to try and get the settlements growth rate up.

For governing Metsuke its best to take retainers that have -% to assassinating attempts if your giving that role. Hanafuda cards and duelist.

[markeason]

Originally posted by Sn3z:

For governing Metsuke its best to take retainers that have -% to assassinating attempts if your giving that role. Hanafuda cards and duelist.

Firstly, there is no reason to use metsuke for anything other than overseeing towns. They will bring in an additional 1000koku/turn each once levelled up. The first choice of retainer for them should be Kabukimono or Yakuza which give bonus to overseeing town. Each +1 bonus is 5% on the tax rate applied to that province.

If those retainers are not available, I would go for apprehending, because the rare occasion that I need a metsuke to leave town is to take out an enemy ninja - and I want to be sure he succeeds. After that I would go for bonus to avoiding assassination. The metsuke are invariably in towns so far behind the frontline that the only way they can be reached by enemy agents is through failure of your ninja and monk types that should be dealing with them.

A monk appropriately levelled up is as effective at converting enemy agents as a metsuke is at apprehending them. And the monk does not charge you for the service.