The building system needs some rebalancing - forts, ports, libraries, granaries, and aqueducts are obviously useful towards their intended purpose. That's fine, no problem there. And the bottom row buildings, especially temples (for conversion) and amphitheaters (for assimilation) are generally very useful.
Markets can be used to stack assimilation bonuses, but are good for little else, the trade route bonus is far too small to ever really matter enough to give you an additional trade route (and if it doesn't cross the new route threshold, the percentage increase is completely useless). Training camps are pointless - manpower is mostly irrelevant in 2.0.
Tax offices are the biggest offender though. A 10% tax increase sounds reasonable, until you realize that you make next to nothing from the taxes of any one city. Tax income is so small that it is only meaningful in aggregate across an entire empire (even then it's inferior to commerce income). This is a big problem; not only are the tax buildings themselves kind of pointless money sinks, but they are also the only way to directly use money to boost your income. There are many possible fixes to this: (1) make the percentage increase from tax offices much larger (maybe 40%), (2) give tax offices an increase to commerce and tax income (commerce income simulates taxing imports/exports, so this makes sense), (3) increase the taxes paid per freeman (not my favorite fix, but possible), and (4) make all non-slaves pay taxes!!! It's pretty ridiculous that citizens and nobles pay literally no taxes - it doesn't even make sense. Yes, nobles got out of paying a lot of taxes, so their tax percentage would be much smaller than the percentage on freeman (whatever that translates to in game). But most of any state's income should theoretically come from cities taxing the agriculture of nearby farms. It's easier to keep track of a few large estates than many small farms - so it's not like nobles got off scot free.
Markets can be used to stack assimilation bonuses, but are good for little else, the trade route bonus is far too small to ever really matter enough to give you an additional trade route (and if it doesn't cross the new route threshold, the percentage increase is completely useless). Training camps are pointless - manpower is mostly irrelevant in 2.0.
Tax offices are the biggest offender though. A 10% tax increase sounds reasonable, until you realize that you make next to nothing from the taxes of any one city. Tax income is so small that it is only meaningful in aggregate across an entire empire (even then it's inferior to commerce income). This is a big problem; not only are the tax buildings themselves kind of pointless money sinks, but they are also the only way to directly use money to boost your income. There are many possible fixes to this: (1) make the percentage increase from tax offices much larger (maybe 40%), (2) give tax offices an increase to commerce and tax income (commerce income simulates taxing imports/exports, so this makes sense), (3) increase the taxes paid per freeman (not my favorite fix, but possible), and (4) make all non-slaves pay taxes!!! It's pretty ridiculous that citizens and nobles pay literally no taxes - it doesn't even make sense. Yes, nobles got out of paying a lot of taxes, so their tax percentage would be much smaller than the percentage on freeman (whatever that translates to in game). But most of any state's income should theoretically come from cities taxing the agriculture of nearby farms. It's easier to keep track of a few large estates than many small farms - so it's not like nobles got off scot free.
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