Auverne's Taxation Strategy
written spring of 1998, edited spring 2000
and again winter 2001
There are two types of tax strategies that I follow:
bleed down of population and build up of population
Gentle Bleed down:
| Initial Tax | |
| This strategy works with all maps, but especially well | 1160= 56% |
| with maps that have little or no farms. I never | 1170= 56% |
| purchase farms on those maps that don't include them | 1180= 67% |
| unless I will benefit strategically. My goal after initial | 1190= 69% |
| taxation is to have the farmless cities at a population | 1200= 69% |
| of 1150 for the second round. Once at 1150, I set tax | 1210= 78% |
| to 56% which allows me $5 for the next two rounds. | 1220= 78% |
| On the fourth round I set tax to 100% so that the | 1230= 78% |
| resulting population equals 1000. In round five I set | 1240= 87% |
| tax to 56% and round six to 55%. For cities that have | 1250= 89% |
| initial populations between 1020 to 1120, I set the | 1260= 89% |
| rate to 63% to receive $5, then alternate this with 50% | 1270= 95% |
| until the fourth round where I find the tax rate that will | 1280= 95% |
| leave me a 1000 population for turn 5. | 1290= 96% |
The main point about bleeding down farmless cities is to have at a population of 990 by turn six, while squeezing out as much tax income as possible.
When I first wrote this tax strategy I rarely found myself using this "gentle bleed down" approach, rather I used a combination of gentle and aggressive bleed down. I could write a whole new page explaining in detail what aggressive bleed down means to me, but I am not going do this, instead I will say that it is "finding the marginal return without over taxing and therefore allowing for future taxation". Overtaxing would be to tax a city 100% for the first round and then not have any population to tax in the third round.
In the long run "gentle bleed down" avails greater returns, but often there is no time for it.
