[INDENT] You know the saying. There are two things you can’t avoid. Death… And taxes! This is also true in Pride of Nations. And for your taxing pleasure we designed the game around not less than 6 taxes. Plus a maritime fee, for good measure.
Rest assured though, this is all handled from the same screen, and you get a nice tooltip reminding you of the effects of the taxes. The thing is, each tax in history had a different base or was used for a specific purpose, or simply triggered side effects (often negative ones) that differed from one tax to another. So it would simply be too much to regroup and abstract the taxes into a ‘one size fits all’ tax.
As you may know now, PON don’t have one single money currency, but two. First there is State Funds (sometimes called “Money” in the game), used mostly to enact decisions at the national level, draft and maintain armies and fleets. Then there is private capital, coming from businessmen and entrepreneurs. This private capital is used to build production structures, as few if any of the production sites during the Victorian era were state-owned.
Private capital mostly comes from commerce, either international or domestic (or colonial, if you have colonies). We will talk in detail in another article about commerce and private income, though. However, the State Treasury mostly comes from taxes. And these taxes are derived either directly from population, as with the census tax or the tax on income, or from the profits your businessmen make from commerce. Census tax regroups in fact several taxes that have existed since mankind managed to form cities (almost!). Basically, this is a tax on capita (the ‘head’, as in ‘decapitate’ in Latin, remove the head
). This tax is received every quarter (this means 6 turns in PON). This periodicity is not historical, but it is much more manageable in the game to augment the frequency of tax and reduce the amount received, as big lumps often have weird effects on both players’ and AI actions. As with all other taxes, you can change the taxation level, from nothing to very high. When census tax is high, population becomes discontented, and you really don’t want to have your population too much dissatisfied with you. Unless you like quelling revolts or seeing in a democratic country the most extremist candidate succeed at the next election. Tax on income was rare in the Victorian era, and we restricted it to when the country is at war, as it was mostly the case historically (in the Victorian era, us Europeans have alas since a long time had the dubious privilege of having a tax on income every year!).But population-based taxes are not the only taxes, as you get three taxes based on your income from commerce. First is the corporate tax. This tax comes as a percentage of the income your private businessmen get from international or domestic commerce. There is a slight side effect of raising this tax too much, though. First, this reduces private profits, and thus can prevent you from creating new production structures using capital. Second, it is assumed that the businessmen will pass the cost of the tax on to the consumer through the merchandises they sell… So in the end you make your population discontented too!
A sub-category of corporate tax is the Excise tax. This one is only based on the luxury type of goods. Alcohol, Cigars, Silk, gems… Illegal substances from China and India (I can’t cite explicitly the name, or PON would be rated 18+, who knows?
.Another one worthy of notice is Tariffs. Tariffs allow you to tax merchandises that reach your domestic market from foreign sources. Also it has the good side effect of restraining the market penetration of others powers, so you can sell more merchandise to yourself, increasing the amount of capital you earn every turn. The main drawback is that other countries really dislike when you put tariff at a too high level, thus leading to a degradation of relationships or even commercial treaties broken unilaterally … [/INDENT]
