Higher tax vs higher population (TA)
Making sense of it all
GalCiv2 Forums
If you have any rules of thumb that apply to this stuff, please share them!
Increasing the population of a planet reduces morale and reduces the effect of morale boosting structures.
Increasing the tax rate reduces morale exponentially, noticeable especially beyond 30-40% tax. It gets worse fast.
So which is better when? High pop and lower tax, low pop with higher tax, or both at "medium", avoiding the extremes of both? Where is the sweet spot? (Obvously high population with high taxation is best but that simply annihilates morale, so we have to find a balance.)
Going with higher tax and lower population planets (opposed to lower tax and higher population planets) means you get more out of captured planets that are still building up their populations, populations that haven't maxed out yet. This seems important.
On the other hand, higher populations with lower taxation gets you more income from your biggest planets. Because you avoid the worst of the morale hit that comes with high taxation, you can increase population by more % than what you would be able to increase tax by. But apparently this is only true up to a point, see:
Example:
My 16 billion pop home planet has 37% approval at 59% taxation.
The population's effect on approval is -48%.
My morale planetary improvements happen to add 36%. (They add 70 -48%).
Going from 16 to 20 billion:
This makes the approval penalty -60% instead of -48%. A loss of 12.
Morale planetary improvements now 28% instead of 36%. (They add 70 -60%). Loss of 8.
That's -20 approval compared to the 16 billion population.
Lowering tax from 59 to 49 fully compensates for this approval drop.
We've increased population by 25% and reduced taxation by ~17%.
A profit!
Going from 20 to 25 billion: now this doesn't work anymore:
Effect of pop on morale and morale planetary improvements is now -80% not -60%.
The morale planetary improvements now 14% instead of 28% (70 -80%). Loss of 14.
We lose a total of 34 approval (20 + 14).
To get those 34 back, we have to lower tax further, from 49 to roughly 29. (!!)
We've increased population by 25% again, but this time reduced taxation by ~41%.
A loss!
Of course if I wasn't running this crazy high tax (59) to start with at 16 billion (if I wanted morale to sit around say 50% instead of 37%) then going to 20 billion already might have been a net loss because at lower tax levels, lowering tax further doesn't have as much of a positive effect on morale. Meaning, tax would've had to be reduced quite a lot to keep the morale unchanged.
This is all a bit much to think about ingame.
Any rules of thumb you'd like to share?
This comes to my mind:
When you have lots of smaller planets, set a high tax to benefit from them and don't build farms on your biggest planet(s) so those don't lose too much morale. When you have mostly big planets, make sure you get them to 20 billion pop and run a lower tax?
