Thanks for the feedback! I hadn't considered how this makes public order dramatically easier to deal with. I wonder if public order penalties want to drop off much less steeply for lower tax levels, or perhaps not at all:

Instead of vanilla (minimal = -1, low = -2, normal = -4) it could be minimal =- 3, low =- 3, normal =- 4, or maybe even make low and minimal same as normal at -4.

In my play so far I haven't found a massive difference in the economics of playing on minima as compared to unmodded: in fact, it should be slightly harder economically than normal even when going for an all-out growth strategy. What tax boosts are you referring to exactly? Maybe there's something I'm not accounting for in my modelling.

If you want to duplicate my spreadsheet from the link above, you can play around with some numbers regarding your idea to make static growth smaller and the % boost bigger and send me what you come up with. It would be fun to collaborate with someone on these numbers.

Hello, I really love the idea behind your mod however i feel like with your mod I always want to keep taxes at Minimal, 15% Tax is not a lot but there are techs and other ways to increase that. And the huge increase to town growth is especially strong when I have around 10 provinces. This kind of destroys the balance of the game since buildings that give happiness literally don't matter, and I don't need to keep provinces garrisoned i can just conquer without worrying about anything. I think you should make it so the static growth is smaller and make the % growth bigger. I mean, you probably don't play the game or care anymore, but I still wanted to share some feedback. Thanks for making this in the first place!

Giving a base town wealth is a neat idea! Then I suppose the growth from every other tax factor, including minimum, would be negative to offset that, but functionally it would be the same as the values above. I'm hesitant to add that feature to this mod since adding a base town wealth will require modifying other tables, and the fact this mod only modifies tax tables makes it incredibly compatible with basically any other mod, including some other tax mods. I may add this solution, though, to my overhaul mod.

Hey Qirn, I also read your google doc, it seems really intresting! I agree with your consensus on regional specialties, but why not add perhaps a passive buff from owning them instead? It would be consistent globally, but weak as well.

Hey Qirn. Nice Mod! Im just wondering, to fix the fact that town growth is higher with minimal and low taxes than without tax, why dont you just create a base town growth amount and vary levels relative to that?

Your design document and ideas give so many great things to geek out over!

I like the idea of province development being a possible way to replicate some of a clan's unique tech tree benefits (e.g., unlocking a mid-game unit earlier). I think province development in general will be crucial, given that your modding journey (and this release here!) seemed to start in economic viability. The economy and province development are such areas of untapped potential within Shogun 2. Generally, I like the notion of acceleration and momentum when talking about bonuses - incentives for stylistic options without making obvious options.

Basically incentivize players to experiment with different ways of playing the game rather than disable them form playing the way they want to. I'm sure in time players would still be able to "solve" a general-purpose optimal strategy for my mod, but at least they'll have fun working out something new for a bit.

For geography/expansion being meaningful, my hope is that having more interesting choices regarding province development makes that more rich, along with having unique specialty buildings in most (all?) provinces. There are lots of ways to differentiate provinces in interesting ways. Like one province could have a higher base tax rate; another could begin the game with A LOT of town wealth; another allows immediate recruitment of a unit-capped mid-game unit; another provides a diplomacy boost, etc. My hope is this allows province expansion to play a larger role in letting players express their strategic creativity.

There will be some small amount of strategic or army composition options that will be straight up inferior or superior depending on clan. For example in vanilla, Oda are be better with Ashigaru upkeep than anyone else; Ikko Ikki can't recruit normal Samurai, etc. In my mod: Mori are the best clan for utilizing Wako mercenary units; the Ikko Ikki have special technology options that reduce upkeep cost of Ronin units; the Tokugawa have special advantages that could help you "play tall", etc. But just as in vanilla, this will be pretty isolated and the goal is to give players MORE options, rather than forcing them down a set of more restricted options.

My vanilla play throughs feel mostly same-y regardless of clan because the optimal strategy for things like army composition or economy is the same regardless of your clan choice. My hope is that clans in my mod allow alternative strategies to at least compete with these ordinary strategies, without making those ordinary strategies bad.

Thanks for checking it out and giving feedback! It's cool to nerd out about something with others that so far has been a pretty solo endeavor.

My current thought about factions is they will present very different strategic "dilemmas" to players, and that players won't be very limited in what they do between clan to clan, except that different clans get earlier access to some units than others and the way each clan boosts their research speed rate incentivizes different ways of playing the game. I am considering allowing some stat bonuses to be part of differentiating the clan technology options or play styles, but I also dislike some of this because bonuses like this are not as exciting as other potential benefits, and because stat bonuses can get kind of whacky balance wise: either it's so minor it's just flavor, or it's so significant it starts to break down the careful balance of how units in Shogun 2 are meant to serve very different roles in combat.

Browsing over your document, there is a lot here that's fascinating! Really appreciate your insight into the game backed by research/number crunching/digging through files (e.g., the general traits). My hope for this that the theme/style provided by faction tech trees/faction general traits don't limit gameplay options too much. Hoping geography/expansion decisions guide a lot of style instead of "these guys are great with swords!" Seems like something you're thinking through.

Overall, a lot of your ideas align with my preferences. I wonder about covering Long yari Ashigaru with upgrades/Oda bonuses. Might help address units being rendered obsolete by mere stat boosted DLC units.

Great to hear you're continuing! Based on this mod and comments I've seen you make, I'm interested in this. Checking your design document out now. CA's development practices are so sloppy, so wading through file after file to make these larger changes must be a nightmare.

Just counted and I'm up to 180 pages of documentation, not counting the spreadsheets lol. A lot of this is the result of testing things as well, and so it represents more work than just thinking up ideas. So the overhaul mod will take me a long time.

"My acts mark the land; time makes ghosts of every deed; as snow hides footprints."

My next step is actually to build some software tools that will help me do some of this meticulous, repetitive stuff automatically. This will make testing and updating values and things a lot faster, too.... but will require an even greater level of testing and development, before any real work can even begin. So ya, I'm in deep. And I've been busy so it's been on hold. But I'm still plugging away at it in the little free time I have, until I get some longer stretch of open time. It's nice to know that folks are interested, though. If you're curious, I have a doc that attempts to describe my goals:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bIEF2mZnF7Kb4suYK5UWT7IVVgi6P1ANj26RHeJdaD0/edit?usp=sharing

It's a bit long (though it's nothing compared to the length of the actual technical and design documentation I've compiled so far).

Hey diessa - ya, I'm still working on the overhaul mod. The mod is massive and has a lot of technical complexity. I've figured out almost all of the tricky technical things I want to do, but some of the weird workarounds I've made up to get some things to work (like different tech trees for different factions) create a crapton of meticulous data-entry type of work.

Sorry Jomar, not sure what's happening there. The mod is definitely still live and active.

Hi, when I subscribe to this mod, I don't see the BalancedTaxes.pack file in the usual filepath "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Total War SHOGUN 2\data". Does this mean that the current version of this mod has been pulled out, & an updated version is on its way?

Hi Qirn. I'm curious if you're still working on your overhaul mod? This mod was refreshing, so I'm curious what a larger project would look like. Alas, I know people get busy! Anyway, hope you're well.

Magnificent ! I was kind of upset that the only viable strategy was to be a robber barron. I like going full economy, and this mod will make it possible. Thank you !

Sure! Let me know when you publish it, would love to check it out

May i use for my mod. As it seems really well done. With all the credit to you of course.

This mod really makes life better - normal economic growth is finally possible, and not a constant game with tax rate sliders. Thanks! Definitely one of the best mods!

I was hoping you saw Matta's post! Really appreciate the type of work done in these types of mods.

After extensive playtesting and modelling, I've found new tax rates I'm happy with that solve the problems we identified here. Thanks for the feedback folks! You can compare the old vs. new rates in the Change Notes, if you're interested. Please keep playing and giving feedback.

Also, shout out to the innovations in the Tax Refined mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3088032327&searchtext=

Matta came up with a script that disables the tax slider for a turn when you change the tax rate, to disable the "slamming every other turn" strategy. In playtesting, I have enjoyed how it makes me think A LOT more about changing taxes since you're kind of locked in for a bit. It manages to reduce the obnoxious micro will forcing you to also think more strategically about taxes. If you want to play with that feature and with my tax rates, you can add both mods and load mine first. This will apply his tax slider disabling script along with these tax rates.

I would like to second this. Please put normal taxes back to 30% and max growth rate at something like +50%

good mod

Excellent idea!

I like the idea behind this mod. I do think I'd have to tweak it a bit, being that I play on the expanded map where campaigns can go several hundred turns long, My main concern is that 30% as a "minimal" tax is too much. I have played campaigns doing minimal only it's not that 10% tax is too low, it is definitely doable. The main issue I found is that the 2 extra growth (compared to normal in vanilla taxes) is just not worth it almost ever. As someone who avoids abusing the swapping-every-turn strategy, that left me with just keeping everything on normal until later in the game when I have so many provinces that I can't even spend the amount I get from minimal taxes.

At the very least though, thank you for the idea. I think I can make this into a mod where I end up enabling my extreme libertarian dream strategy of setting taxes to single-digits and going hyper growth-based instead of feeling like there's not much reward in doing that.

If the AI does leave taxes up, the current rates of the mod should will make it slightly less punishing for the player if the AI leaves it on high since the only difference in growth is a 4 growth penalty in the mod vs an 8 growth penalty vanilla. In the case of leaving it on very high, the growth rates are the exact same as vanilla.

However, I have been modelling very different tax effects for an update to this mod which dramatically alters that. What I'm working on now are rates which nerf all tax effects (because the current version of the mod makes the game easier). The most recent iterations of these updated effects have higher static growth penalties and bonuses, rather than growth% modifiers, and if the AI does indeed leave taxes on high or very high, these new rates would mean provinces managed by the AI will pretty much always lose wealth (since the AI rarely prioritizes growth buildings to offset these penalties).

But I think that does line up with my play experience: sometimes the AI will do okay with province growth (especially with the mod), and sometimes they wont. I think the bigger factor in the wealth of a captured province is that most provinces you capture will have been, at one point, captured by at least one other clan. If the AI chose to loot the settlement, I think it extracts 70% of all wealth in the province after looting. Also, rebellions extract a lot of wealth (though the AI doesn't usually get rebellions, it can happen if an opposing AI incites revolt, or if you incite revolt).

I didn't consider modelling AI management of taxes (and I honestly didn't even know until I just looked it up that the AI is constrained to low, normal, and high). If what I'm seeing in the db is correct, I think it's fine not to model it, but if anyone can confirm that the AI only ever sets it on high or that these db values are not implemented, please let me know and I can add that in my modelling.

I haven't done a thorough investigation into it, but I thought I remembered that the campaign AI has the freedom to change tax rates. Looking at the database, I do see fields here that suggest the AI does change tax rates. There is a "behavior" (aka, an "action" the AI can take) that's called "TAXATION", and there is also a property in cai_personalities_budget_allocations called "minimum settable tax level" and "maximum settable tax level." This range is at low to high for all possible budget personalities. Though I'm not sure how the CAI actually makes that decision.

I believe the AI tends to always have their tax at very high due to them not suffering drawbacks from that pretty much (no risk of rebellion), however, they absolutely ruin their own growth.

Is the AI's selection of tax policy something this mod will address? Though I guess it doesn't really matter too much as you said, they have more than enough money, the only "problem" is that they wreck their growth every turn.

But I agree not to sweat the small stuff - I think that part of the mod is not all that game breaking mechanically. The bigger things I'm trying to fix about the current modded rates are making it so it doesn't make the game too easy; making it so boosting tax rate provides a large change in per turn income; making it so boosts to tax rate (via technologies and Metsuke) doesn't totally unbalance the different tax rates; getting tax rate to matter still when you have a lower growth rate; etc.

I know that there are many people out there who care about the historicity and realism of Total War games and mods, but for me that's like last on the list of my priorities lol. I care most about how something effects the mechanics and gameplay. For realism, my metric is just, "make sure you don't totally break immersion." I do look at history/realism for inspiration when I'm trying to think up something new, but definitely am not limiting myself to it.

Ya, I've found a few funny ways to "justify" tax exemption not contributing to growth, for example, potential migrants would know that a tax exempted place is only exempted temporarily and might be wary to move there just for tax reasons.

But honestly, the historicity or roleplaying of it isn't what bothers me personally, just that it's unintuitive for the player and very unvanilla like in behavior: if your faction-wide tax rate is Minimal, a player would expect that exempting a province from tax should at least retain the Minimal growth boosts, if not make them bigger, and it's unintuitive that it does not (hence the warning).

Not had a chance to look at this in detail yet, but have an immediate observation regarding the lower growth for a province exempted from tax. Leave it as it is. I am sure that in 1545, just as today, exempting individuals and/or businesses from tax, provides absolutely minimal benefit to growth. It just lines the pockets of those at the top of the food chain and they rarely use it in a manner that stimulates economic growth.

The oversight provided by application of even a minimal tax rate, would be sufficient to ensure that the individuals/corporations were fulfilling their civic responsibilities.

Don't sweat the small stuff :)

Looking forward to trying this out.

I'm testing new tax rates to fix these problems in v1:

1) v1 tax rates are higher than normal, so the campaign becomes too easy
2) the "squishification" of the tax rates means that raising taxes is less helpful if you need a "get out of debt quick" button, since tax rates are too similar to eachother

Both problems are solved by having almost totally vanilla tax rates (other than Low and Minimal), and by inflating the growth effects of each tax rate to ensure that each strategy is still balanced and a viable strategic choice some of the time.

Speak now or forever get a new updated version. Here are the new rates I'm playtesting:

VERSION 2 TAXES
Tax Rate | Tax% | Static Growth Bonus/Penalty | % growth modifier
Minimal | 15% | +10 | +140%
Low | 22% | +4 | +40%
Normal | 30% | -4 | -20%
High | 40% | -8 | -30%
Very High | 50% | -17 | -90%

I appreciate this mod. It's nice to leverage a lot of the cool options in Shogun to actually provide viable choices. I'll be curious to see your other modifications. He isn't working on his mods anymore, but the Shogun 2 Enhanced stuff also caught my eye. This has a similar vibe. One thing that caught my eye from that is the market chain being made viable (in that case, by removing the food penalty). Anyway, I'll be keen to see your broader work!

I could do something similar but provide an absurd duration effect (like 1000 turns) via an event that is triggered only once which essentially changes the "base" tax effects and adjust the tax rates accordingly. The biggest downside with this is once you've loaded the mod on a save file, I don't think you could ever remove the mod and load that save without it causing a crash, since you would have an effect applied to your clan but the game won't have the info for the effect (I could test this). I guess even if it did cause this crash, that's not the end of the world - plenty of mods have this problem. But for something as simple as this tax mod and something as small as provinces being untaxed, it feels like a bad tradeoff to potentially bork someone's save file just to increasing the growth rate of untaxed provinces.

I'm still trying to think of an elegant solution, though and I'm definitely welcome to ideas!

As for the idea of fixing the "untaxed" growth rate by adding it to a building chain like castles or farms, that is something I considered and could implement in the larger overhaul mod. I'm hesitant to add it in this stand-alone mod, though, since this very small mod is currently compatible with any other mod that doesn't touch tax rates. If I alter buildings to fix this "untaxed" growth problem it might conflict with other mods in a way that wouldn't be obvious to someone who's just looking to mod their taxes.

I also considered adding an "Incident" that will trigger with 100% chance on any untaxed province. I'm not sure if this is even a condition I can check using events, I'll have to see, but even if I can I dislike that this would spam event notifications at the beginning of every turn.

Yo Bleu - I haven't yet tackled the building chains, but that's definitely on my "to do" list! As I mentioned in the mod description, I'm working on these features as a part of a larger overhaul mod, and fixing the market chain (and other chains) is something I'm very interested in. Ironically, the focus of my overhaul mod is NOT supposed to be economics - it's mostly about unique clan benefits and "fixing" the things which have fun potential in Shogun 2 but weren't implemented well. But it turns out economics is one of those things. Sure, let's swap ideas/data!

Oh, and about the small quirk you encountered where an untaxed province gets less growth than one on "low taxes", consider this possible solution:

Change either the base fort/road/farm building (any infastructural building that will always be there, and at level 1) to provide a fixed income growth and then modify your tax tiers accordingly, so that they all subtract a % of growth and that the net effect to a taxed province when compared to your mod is neutral.

This way an untaxed province will still grow more than one at minimal taxes :)

Best of luck

(cont, 2/2)

I'm guessing the way to go so as not to significantly tamper balance is to simply make the market cheaper, and then adjust the amount so that it makes sense across different points of the admin cost curve, but I'm still researching and I digress. f you're interested in making a colab in this matter, and, why not, experience the adrenaline blast that comes with crunching some numbers on a spreadsheet, feel free to get in touch with me via steam.

Regards

Dear Qirn, great work.

I know that this might sound like a lie but I was planning on making a mod related to this. I was researching how to add a stacking order penalty whenever one went to negative public order when using high or very high taxes, which would discourage the basic winning vanilla tax strategy, but this seems much easier and parsimonious.

On a separate note, I was doing some math related to paybacks in the market chain, by computing turns-to-recoup and internal rate of return %s. Granted, yes, as long as a mod to remove food consumption in the higher tiered markets is used.

(1/2)

Aha! That makes sense: "12 turns per year" changes the start position data and some scripts which a lot of other mods also edit.

I have a lot of mods, and with your mod the game does not start, but when I turn off "12 moves", the game works, I assumed that it was a problem, apparently the problem is in another mod.

i can't escape the taxes

I tested with the 12 turns per year mod and it appears to work just fine on my end. How are you noticing an incompatibility? Are you getting an error, or do you notice in the campaign that one or the other mod is not applying its effect?

Huh, I'm not sure why there would be a conflict with that mod. Thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out.

Привет. Мод конфликтует с "12 turns per Year - For Shogun 2 and RotS"