Davidicus Rex

To be honest, I really haven't paid at super high wages to see if it would counteract high taxes. I seem to have thought that there was an upper limit to the people's sentiment for paying higher wages. Maybe I am getting confused with C3, most likely I am. Using your observation, you could actually achieve a way to offset a -6 tax sentiment. The only way I could figure out to offset that much negative vibes was by the tax switch during the month. I can see now that I have a task for today to see if I can duplicate what you did. Then we need to figure out if it is worth paying super high wages to bring in even more in tax income. I have a great city to test some ideas like this on, so I had better get busy.

Also, I don't know any model tables that give us the data on the exact positive effects of paying above standard wages. However, that is not to say that by testing many different ways that we can't come up with the formula simply by observation.

Bradius

Ok, here is my first table! It lists the effects of taxes, wages, and a few other things on city sentiment. The setting is for hard, and tax coverage is assumed to be 100%.

Here's how you use it: add up the factors corresponding to the tax/wage regime you are using. This is the number of steps your sentiment will move in a five month period. They start from indifferent, and in the positive direction move to pleased, very pleased, extremely pleased, love you, idolize you as a god. In the negative direction they become annoyed, then very annoyed, and start leaving your city.

--Jimhotep

p.s.

if you notice any errors, please let me know!

Weird, I removed the style one and it didn't change...

[This message has been edited by Jayhawk (edited 05-07-2000).]

BTW... What do you mean by Vacancies?

Thank you! I've been wondering about the specifics of this for a while.

As always , I have a couple of questions.

I think that there's an additional positive step, "very pleased", between pleased and extremely pleased.

Did you check for any effects of crime on sentiment? How about health?

Is some minimum level of entertainment required for the bonus, or will anything do?

Thanks again. This is very helpful stuff.

-- JWorth

An excellent set of tables. I can't fully verify everything in the table, but it looks close. I was able to safely tax at 21% with like 95% of my population with a tax rate of 39 debens (+9 over kingdom rates). I seemed to have a slight problem at 38, but then I needed more housing, so maybe the vacancy rule gave me a plus one. What I guess we are seeing is that with careful management, you should be able to take a -6 sentiment hit and maybe even a -7. If you can take a -7 sentiment, then you could tax between 90% and 99% of your population at 24% on hard difficulty!, Though I would suggest limiting it to 21% tax on 90%-99% of your people on hard difficulty, which is a -6 sentiment hit.

Also, Jimhotep, did you have to have everyone receive food and water to get the +1 effect?

JWorth, you are right, there is very pleased rating in there. I am not sure about health and crime as I had both well covered in my testing. When I taxed high though, I did have some minor crime problems even with good police coverage. This just seemed more an effect of my extortion and reflecting the fact that the people were ticked with me.

Also, they left in droves at annoyed or very annoyed and came back when it rose to indifferent - I think

Da Pharaoher, in most all cases it is cheaper to pay higher wages to get more tax income. This of course depends on the level of housing that you have. What I tend to do is to increase wages in the labor advisor and see how much extra it is costing me in expected wages, and then go to the commerce advisor and see how much more I expect to get in increased tax income.

Also, I can verify at least that I did not get any benefit for taxing above +9 debens from kingdom. I am not sure about +8 from my tests.

Moquel, by vacancies, Jimhotep is I think referring to a "for sale" lot sign. However, he may just mean that there is some room for immigrants in the city. It did seem to me that people were slightly happier when there was a for sale sign, but I couldn't measure it really - just a hunch.

Bradius

[This message has been edited by Bradius (edited 05-06-2000).]

I think the vacancies and underemployment bonuses are mistakes.

You see, I had let a city's sentiment run down until the people started leaving in droves. Suddenly, the city sentiment changed from "very annoyed" to "indifferent." I interpreted this as being due to the huge shortfall in workers (if unemployment causes a sentiment penalty, why shouldn't a worker shortage give a bonus?).

But I think what I saw was something different; what I didn't realize was that for populations between 200 and 300, the sentiment is always "indifferent." Further work determined that what I thought was an effect due to houses filling up was actually the population increasing to 200.

I've amended the table accordingly.

Most of the data was derived from a test city of 396 people; but when I withdrew food, I think my population may have fallen into the area where the "small population cap" gives out.

Hmmm. That means that the result of withdrawing food will be bad, since the population will have dropped below 300...

I'm taking out the food/entertainment thing, until it can be verified.

JWorth,

My block had physician and police coverage. When it had entertainment and food, the entertainment was a bandstand with entertainers. (Overkill, but I was fighting unemployment!)

Bradius,

You will notice that crime indicators rise much faster when city sentiment is low. I think crime is a side effect of city sentiment, not a contributing factor to it.

--Jimhotep

[This message has been edited by Jimhotep (edited 05-06-2000).]

Bradius

Well, I tried it again. I ended up going from extremely pleased to pleased over 1 year and 5 months paying 39 debens and taxing 96% at 21% with near full employment (2%). And I ended up going form extremely pleased to pleased over 2 years paying 38 debens and taxing 96% of the people at 21% using the same starting point. I am now not sure there really is much of a difference between 38 and 39 debens. This time I held no festivals at all and none had been made in some time, if at all.

[This message has been edited by Bradius (edited 05-06-2000).]

A city of 9000!?

I suppose if I hadn't bogged down in my own campaign, I'd be making those kind of cities too.

I don't quite understand the food/entertainment thing. The last map I looked at made me think it is only food that you need to get that point- not entertainment. Nobody actually has to *get* any food- the sentiment dropped until I built a hunting lodge, then stayed firm for about a year. Hmmm. Maybe something else is going on?

Whatever else is going on, it will certainly be going on in your city of 9000. So that's +1. If you have 99% tax coverage at 21% taxes, there is only a -6 hit? I thought it had to anything over 90% would be a -7. -6 it is...

+1 (food) +5 (high wages) -6 (high taxes) = zero = no change in sentiment, as you have observed.

I have the feeling that I'm close with this sentiment model, but not dead on. Thank goodness there are folks like you in the forum to help get this thing the rest of the distance!

Regards,

Jimhotep

[This message has been edited by Jimhotep (edited 05-06-2000).]

In regard to this trick about upping the tax rate on the last day of the month- how can you tell when that day arrives? Do you count how many squares a walker goes? Or do you keep a constant eye on a factory's production percentage, or what?

--Jimhotep

I went back to the tax sentiment model text file to check it out again. It is strange on hard it is -7 for several places, then -6 from greater than 90 to less than 100 and -7 again for equal to 100. I just saw the -6 in the percentage of population I was taxing and figured that might be possible. I do know that I was still getting a slight drop in public sentiment at 38-39 debens - basically 2 categories over 2 years. I am guessing that with some festivals that this can be overcome (hopefully not the lavish). But maybe that is the extra minus (i.e. maybe I am getting a -7). I do feel certain that I am not oberving any benefit going to higher wage rates on sentiment in my testing so far. I finally found out though that wages can go up to 100 debens! Wow.

Don't get too excited about the size of the city, it is just one of several. This one is just nice and stable with a good mix of luxury estates and other housing (mainly fancy residences). I have a few around 20,000 people. I haven't gone for a huge population map of say 50,000+ people. I will say that the logistics of building that size of a city can get interesting and create whole new sets of problems. The problem with using a large city though is that so many other things may be affecting the results. However, it is good in that we are testing things using vastly different cities.

In regard to the tax loophole. I just kept my city at a fairly slow pace (60% on my computer) and just kept track of the time myself. However, when doing other stuff it got easy to forget wha was going on. Usually I would boost it back to 12% a little over halfway through the month (so I wouldn't miss a whole month of taxes!) and then 25% about 3/4 ths through the month. It generally worked fairly well. I am not as adept at detail micromanaging as some others. This was really one of my first such experiments.

Bradius

[This message has been edited by Bradius (edited 05-06-2000).]

In any event this little excersize has convinced me that you can pull in many more debens than I thought by raising wages to +8 or +9 over kingdom. In a good, sound city this translates into lots more income.

Bradius

It requires paying some attention to, because the timers reset when a new entertainer arrives from a school, but the "performance days remaining" figure at a venue functions as a game timer, where there are 32 performance days in a month, or 2 per work day.

-- JWorth

23 -3
24 -3
25 -2
26 -2
27 -1
28 -1
29 -1
30 0
31 1
32 2
33 2
34 2
35 3
36 3
37 3
38 4

100 4