How do you tax provinces with over 1000 capacity?

[treb]

South and North Bengal have over nearly 4000 tax capacity, Punjab and Delhi have 3100, china has around a dozen states topping 1000, I don't even need to do the math to work out that using administrative buildings will lose you far more money than even that tax capacity will ever bring in.

What is the point?

 

[yurcick]

What's the point to what? Giving you a notification? I think you should know that you can increase your tax revenue by expanding your bureaucracy. Whether you should act on that depends on circumstances, and in your examples you probably shouldn't.
That's OK for large undeveloped countries to have tax waste. However, with higher taxation allowed with more advanced laws and with countrywide bureaucracy deficit because of the institutions (they eat up a lot of mana in large countries) it would be effective to employ much more bureaucrats, to the point where it doesn't make sense to have state-level tax waste.

 

[CaesarVincens]

Keep in mind too, that having less than full taxation capacity doesn't waste the money, it stays in the pops pockets. Having tax waste (from bureaucracy deficit) does waste money.

And like yurcick says, taxation capacity is not a goal in itself, just a metric, and for India and China more a side point of building up bureaucracy generally.

 

[Fawr]

In my China run I ended up building up my bureaucracy in every one of those enormous provinces so that I ended up with no tax waste in any of them.

Of course that didn't happen all the in first 10 years. First I got railway tech, then I built up industry in one province with relatively high tax efficiency. Then I changed to a tax system that let me collect income tax, and then I built up government buildings in that province to get to 100% tax income there.

Once I'd also got everyone in that province employed outside of subsistence farming, I moved onto another province, industrializing it and simultaneously increasing the tax take. Rince and repeat getting province after province into full employment/full tax income (and benefiting from massive throughput bonuses on the way).

Sometimes I also jumped ahead of my industrialization plans with government buildings. That was useful when I needed the bureaucracy for institutions like schools, police or colonies (as well as the tax income).

 

[Surimi]

Initially, there isn't much point trying to increase tax capacity because, as you say, it won't pay for itself. However, what I think you will find is that those highly populated states mean very high bureaucracy requirements for institutions, which means you'll need to build a lot of bureaucracy buildings for that and will end up improving tax efficiency anyway.

That said, it is definately worth prioritizing the techs and laws which boost taxation capacity. Those can have a pretty massive impact on your income.

 

[Silens]

Those regions are full of poor farmers, no point in taxing anyone there. Only when you start building up the industry and getting tax/bureaucracy innovations, when your industry can keep up with the resource requirements, when the SoL rises, only then it'll become manageable.

I play Qing a lot, so I have a bit of experience with having numerous 20-30M pop provinces. It takes a while to get things up and running, so don't think you'll have it done by the 1850's. The 1870's are more realistic target for that.

And yes, it means you'll have 50-60 administration buildings in those provinces, sometimes more. No way around it, if you want 100% taxation at some point. The amount of paper you'll need, and money to pay for all those government employees, requires a certain degree of wealth and resources on your part. You have immense requirements, so you have to make sure that everyone is in the workforce and has a good taxable income first, else the taxes won't pay for the taxation system.

 

[Morrowind3]

This is where consumption based taxation shines. It may be weak but it always operates at full capacity, so you only need to bother with government admistrations for institutions. Never play a Qing game without it.

 

[romothecus]

South and North Bengal have over nearly 4000 tax capacity, Punjab and Delhi have 3100, china has around a dozen states topping 1000, I don't even need to do the math to work out that using administrative buildings will lose you far more money than even that tax capacity will ever bring in.

What is the point?

Admin buildings get throughput bonuses just like most buildings, so it's actually far more efficient to tax people in one spot than to have those same people spread among many other provinces. (Particularly with a Skyscraper.) You will also get a ton of extra Infrastructure efficiency from using edicts like Road Maintenance there, as opposed to something else. But you don't build the admin buildings right away, of course. You shouldn't try to get sufficient tax capacity in those provinces until you have telephones and central planning.

As to "what is the point"? Dirt-cheap wages mean you stack your industries even higher in a single spot, and you get more throughput bonuses from economy of scale.

Naturally the problem for India starts and Qing is that you are technologically behind, while GB/Prussia/etc are starting with railroads, atmospheric engine, etc, and often better social structures (like no Serfdom, some kind of voting, etc), so getting those people into useful jobs is a much tougher lift.

 

[DukeLeto42]

Ok, let's go over it again:

Fixing taxation capacity is an outcome of bureaucratic needs.

Over the course of the game, you will need steadily more Bureaucracy to advance your Institutions and handle your conquests. This is why you build more Admin. buildings. As such, you will fix your taxation capacity deficits in the process of the real goal of supplying your Bureaucracy, not the other way around.

 

[Secret Master]

It's worth pointing out that lower tech levels, taxation systems that need taxation capacity aren't super effective. It's not just Qing and EIC, and it's not just techs that give better PMs to government buildings.

Paper is a required good for government buildings. When you have little paper output and it's low tech, your paper prices are going to be out of control even if you have filing cabinets for government buildings. Telephones are more efficient when you have switchboards for government buildings, but obviously that means you need the tech for the government build, the tech for the electronics industry, and the rubber to run the electronics.

Then you need the right tax system for the kinds of POPs you do have. No point in taxing wages if subsistence farmers are 90% of your population.

What I'm saying is that taxation efficiency isn't just about the literal number, and you are right to be skeptical about getting all the taxes. But it's a long term project, not something you solve on day 1.