Taxing and Patrolling... is it worth it?

[krpeters]

Originally Posted by Kobal2

However, it is still very puzzling to me that G3 makes overtaxing less (relatively) effective, when you'd expect the pop regrowth would mitigate the pop loss from overtaxing and thus keep the overtaxing gravy train going a bit longer.

You're looking at this backwards... look at it from a long term vs. short term perspective.

The purpose of overtaxing is to improve your short term at the expense of the long term. With a growth scale, your overtaxing is hurting a really good long term, so the short term gain comes at a high long term cost and hits breakeven quickly. With a death scale, your long term sucks anyway, so you're sacrificing little for what you gain, so breakeven occurs later.

[thejeff]

To take the extreme example, with LA Ermor's death dominion you want to overtax everywhere. The peasants are all going to die anyway, get some money out of them while you can.

[Mardagg]

Originally Posted by krpeters

You're looking at this backwards... look at it from a long term vs. short term perspective.

The purpose of overtaxing is to improve your short term at the expense of the long term. With a growth scale, your overtaxing is hurting a really good long term, so the short term gain comes at a high long term cost and hits breakeven quickly. With a death scale, your long term sucks anyway, so you're sacrificing little for what you gain, so breakeven occurs later.

it really isnt that simple.
The main purpose of overtaxing is to improve your short term income while still in Early game/early midgame.This is where any income advantage pays out fast on multiple levels.
(Think about it: how much could you do with 500 gold extra on turn 12,compared to 500 extra on turn 70? )

Since it is impossible to overtax many/all provinces that early,due to lack of patrollers for one of the many reasons,your whole example growth/death scale is basically nothing but theory since for most provinces the growth scale still has a big longterm gain.
In other words: you boost your early game start while still remaining competetive for the late game.

Another purpose of overtaxing could be in late game,when you know the final war starts soon and thus you dont have to worry about longterm pop loss.Taking a death scale here makes even less sense though,since you would have suffered already a lot until you get to the endgame.

[Mardagg]

Originally Posted by thejeff

To take the extreme example, with LA Ermor's death dominion you want to overtax everywhere. The peasants are all going to die anyway, get some money out of them while you can.

Ermor: yes,good example where overtaxing always makes sense.Can be a bit annoying though,if you are unlucky and your chaff troops cant deal with the unrest,since you only got very few turns to squeeze out the money.

@Krpeters
one more thing:
Growth positively affects your provinces before you switch them to overtax,which may take quite some time.Likewise Death negatively affects them.

(The Death scale+overtax rush idea is a fail,since,again,it is impossible to get enough patrollers going early on,while expanding at the same time.)