Store Page
Total War: SHOGUN 2
All Discussions Screenshots Artwork Broadcasts Videos Workshop News Guides Reviews

Total War: SHOGUN 2

Store Page
Total War: SHOGUN 2 >  Workshop > Qirn's Workshop
73 ratings
Balanced Taxes
Description Discussions1 Comments48 Change Notes
   
Award
Favorite
Favorited
Unfavorite
Tags: mod
File Size
Posted
Updated
35.529 KB
27 Oct, 2022 @ 7:56pm
22 Nov, 2023 @ 1:04pm
2 Change Notes ( view )
Created by
Qirn
Offline
See all 161 collections (some may be hidden)
8,387 Unique Visitors
1,598 Current Subscribers
212 Current Favorites

Subscribe to download
Balanced Taxes

Description
Ever wanted to have to actually think about managing taxes strategically in your Shogun 2 campaign? Well now you can!

In the vanilla game, no matter what your economic strategy is, going back and forth between Normal taxes and Very High taxes every other turn is always your best option. Although the vanilla game TRIES to incentivize you to do something else by penalizing your town growth based on tax rate, it's not enough to matter in the 60-100 turns that most campaigns last. So what about all the other things you could do with taxes? Minimal? Low? Normal? High? Why aren't these EVER a viable economic option?

Well now they all are!

This mod makes it so in the very short term you will earn the most money be leaving taxes on Very High (or alternating every other turn to avoid rebellions), but it's NO LONGER the best strategy in the long term, too. Shortest term, Very High is best. Short-ish term, High is best. In the medium turn, Normal. In the long term, Low. In the longest term, Minimal.

The exact answer about how long it takes for each tax rate to become optimal will depend on the average growth rate and average wealth in each of your provinces. But in general, expect it to be:

Very High - best over 1-10 turns
High - best over 10-20 turns
Normal - best over 20-25 turns
Low - best over 25-30 turns
Minimal - best over 30+ turns

The higher your overall WEALTH in towns, the better a HIGHER tax rate will be in the long run. The higher your average GROWTH rate in each of your provinces, the better a LOWER tax rate is for you. This makes it so there are many more viable economic strategies that wouldn't normally ever be optimal in the vanilla game.

The idea is the longer you're willing to wait for the payoff, the lower you should set your taxes to in order to set up a better economy for the future.

I accomplished this by changing tax values:

VANILLA TAXES
Tax Rate
Tax%
Static Growth
% growth mod
Minimal
10%
0
-6%
Low
20%
-1
-14%
Normal
30%
-2
-25%
High
40%
-8
-50%
Very High
50%
-15
-90%


MODDED TAXES (v2.3)
Tax Rate
Tax%
Static Growth
% growth mod
Minimal
15%
+15
+45%
Low
21%
+1
+10%
Normal
27%
-10
-20%
High
34%
-20
-60%
Very High
40%
-50
-90%


Notice that the mod actually BOOSTS your growth rate when you have low taxes, both by providing you a static growth boost and by adding an additional growth modifier to all of your other growth bonuses in the province. This means if you are going for a "bread basket" strategy, it is especially good to try and leave your taxes as low as possible.

Also, the vanilla gain applies a -25 growth penalty if a province was unhappy the previous turn. I've modifed this to -7 growth penalty to balance the taxes.

This modification is backed by some INTENSE cold hard number crunching in excel. If you'd like to check my work or play around with these numbers yourself, check out my spreadsheets: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rCPKYvEitkXsk80-0A3EvbSyMf_d9f8DC36Mp_n__W0

This mod works with RotS, Shogun 2, and FoTS, however I balanced it particularly for the economy of Shogun 2.

A quirk of this mod is that, unintuitively, a province that is exempted from tax will actually have a LOWER growth rate than a province which has low or minimal tax, since those low tax rates boost growth while an exempted province wont get the growth boosts from the tax rate. I haven't found an elegant way to deal with this yet, so just be aware that this quirk exists.

(This mod is a small part of a larger overhaul mod I'm working on for Shogun 2. I will be releasing other similar quality of life, bug fix, and minor game enhancements as I work on that mod. If you're interested in that kind of thing, follow me or something. I don't know how steam workshop works - can you even follow people?)


Compatibility
Tax Refined - Compatible. To play with Matta's tax slider-disabling script but with with my tax rates applied, simply load my mod higher in the load order.

UPDATE v2.3:
  • Tax rates were modified over version 1 significantly to fix some problems. Check out the Change Notes to see the differences
  • The game is now no longer easier than vanilla when going for a breadbasket strategy. In fact, it is slightly harder overall, and heavily incentives you to actually manage your taxes to eek out the most koku possible.
  • Tax rates are a little more spread out now than they used to be, so that there is a more noticeable short-term effect when you are changing tax rates (for example, when you need to temporarily slam taxes to avoid bankruptcy, the income per turn will swing bigger than it did in version 1, but still not quite as big as vanilla)
Popular Discussions View All (1)
5
18 Aug, 2024 @ 12:27pm
I want to re-rebalance the mod. Any feedback?
Qirn
48 Comments
< >
Qirn  [author] 20 Jul @ 11:48am 
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.
Smiley 18 Jul @ 8:44am 
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!
Qirn  [author] 2 Sep, 2024 @ 7:35pm 
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.
iamthesrc 18 Aug, 2024 @ 12:30pm 
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.
iamthesrc 17 Aug, 2024 @ 4:14pm 
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?
diessa 29 May, 2024 @ 3:08pm 
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.
Qirn  [author] 25 May, 2024 @ 10:44am 
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.
Qirn  [author] 25 May, 2024 @ 10:43am 
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.
Qirn  [author] 25 May, 2024 @ 10:43am 
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.
diessa 20 May, 2024 @ 10:51am 
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.