In an effort to make the game somewhat more friendly to new players, we've changed the default taxrate to 35%, given anybody who's played the game for a while will have learned that that is the optimal taxrate, yet it is not a particularly trivial piece of information to find out when you start the game.

so no one will be able to mess up there country by not changing the tax rate in the beginning... thats not cool.

but, on the other hand... no one will be able to mess up there country by not changing the tax rate in the beginning... and that's good for retaining new players :p

minor, but awesome, change :D

nice change, this will help new players a lot :D

Oh, could we also make it so that when we start building res/ent that it automatically changes the tax rate to be the most efficient? That'd be great, thanks. =P

Will be interesting to see how this plays out...

I've always been a proponent of learning WHY you do something, not just having it done for you.

Honestly, I would have suggested setting it at like %30 - it's not optimal, but it's also not going to screw you over if you don't change it. Handing it to folks on a silver platter seems to take some of the fun of learning the game out of it to me.

I can see how it will help new player retention, just not so sure about new player learning curve.

makes a lot of sense

NOW3P, as they learn to play the game they will learn WHY 35% is the generally optimal tax rate and how varying it at times can be preferable. There is no reason to start people at another tax rate - its not like giving them a good tax rate will make new players competitive...

It has gotten so automated,that about all we need now is a browser script to login and play our tu...er...nvm.

:)

hmm so why is 35% the optimal tax rate?

if you take the maximum population formula, the maximum PCI formula, the food consumption formula and income = tax*population*pci - population*food_consumption*(food_price) and take the derivative... you can calculate the optimum taxrate is 35% for a food price of like 32-40 or so

hmm...that is completely untuitive and nobody will really figure that out on their own...so handing this out on a silver platter is good.

That is 100% intuitive... net_income = income - expenses....

LOTS of people have figured it out. The only part that requires real effort is determining the formulas for population and pci, which are fortunately well known already.

I've never worked out why 35% is the best, from first principles or anything, but I've been told that others have. People like qz! :p

if you don't like the 35% default tax rate, feel free to go into your country when you first log in and set the tax rate to 10% and you won't even notice the change! :D :p

Also, what servers did this go out on? I didn't notice it for any of my most recent startups...

This was put in at the time qz announced it, so if you started a new country after this thread was made, you should have seen the update :)

36% is best, not 35%!

depends on food price

Good job, all admins.