Help:Taxes
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Local Taxes
All taxes are collected locally, i.e. within the individual region, but the tax day is realm-wide. On tax day, the taxes collected in the local tax offices are split up and distributed. At the local level, taxes are split up to:
- maintain the buildings in the region
- pay the local militia, if any
- pay for food bought by the warehouses from traders and caravans
- distributed to his knights
- sent to duchy, as levied by the Duke
- everything leftover is kept by the Lord
Lords can not change region taxes entirely at will. The administration needs time to adjust, so region taxes can only be raised or lowered by a few percentage points per day.
In addition to the official taxes, region lords can also levy an additional, unofficial tax. These are hidden from the remainder of the realm, and the peasants dislike them even more than the regular taxes. But since the taxes collected this way go directly into the lord's pockets without anyone being the wiser, some lords still make use of them.
Realm Taxes
In addition to local taxes, there are also realm-wide property and wealth taxes. Different from the local taxes, these do not generate income, they only re-distribute it.
The Property Tax is a tax on monetary possessions of all nobles within the realm. The tax rate itself is the percentage of gold and bonds that is going to be taxed, while the limit allows the banker to tax only wealthy people - everyone who owns gold or bonds below this limit is not taxed. Gold and bonds are checked separately, so if the limit is 100, a noble might not pay taxes on his 85 gold, but he will pay taxes on his 150 bonds.
Realm Distribution
BattleMaster's tax distribution system allows the banker of a realm a great deal of freedom. The basic principle is that weights are set among multiple categories, and these determine how much of the realm's taxes every member of the realm receives. At tax day, all shares are summed up and everyone receives a part of the taxes according to his number of shares.
Everyone gets 1 point automatically, so everybody should get at least a tiny share of the tax income.
The "Unaligned" share is your way to get money to those nobles who have not sworn oaths to any lords. Depending on how your internal realm politics work, this might be a few or many. One thing to remember, however, is that all new characters will start as unaligned, so a few points in here would be a good thing for newcomers.
Everyone else should receive taxes from the local tax collection, either as a local lord or as the knight of a local lord. For most nobles, the realm taxes are simply an additional bonus. As such, you will usually want to set fairly large shares for the government positions, especially if the government members are not local lords themselves.
Some Tax Setting Hints
While the system allows for some complexity, there is no reason to use all of the options. On the contrary, most realms will be well advised to leave several weights at zero.
The complexity is there to allow each realm to choose those options it needs. A well-thought out but simple distribution scheme will usually be better than a complicated, ineffective one.
Most importantly, most of the nobles of the realm should get their main income from local taxes and oaths. If realm tax shares are a major factor for non-government members, something is wrong with the local tax settings.
