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Hey and welcome to the 10th developer diary for March of the Eagles! Today it is time to take a look at your money. It´s time to investigate what will drain your wallet and what will make it fatter and why.

Incomes: Tax from city provinces
In March of the Eagles, you only get tax income from city provinces, that is, those provinces that have cities in them – fort provinces or rural provinces add no tax.
Listed below you find several expenses that will drain your country of money if you are not careful enough in balancing them against your income. Tax income is based on the civilization level of a given city province; the higher the level, the more money you can squeeze out of the citizens. You can improve your city provinces' tax levels by building new “developments”(Cleared Development, Normal Development or Civilized Development) in these provinces. The Economy map mode will tell you how much money you are getting from each province.

Tax income is also tied to city size. The larger the city, the larger the tax. Simple as that. The total amount of taxes you gain from each city is affected by a number of modifiers that will increase or decrease it. This can be seen in the province view for each city. As usual for a Paradox developed game, you can get the full breakdown in the province menu by hovering the mouse pointer above the text “Tax” to see what might affect your tax income from that city. Developments, for example, are one modifier that you will build to increase the amount of tax income in a province. Other modifiers you have to consider include city improvements, the effects of looting or a scorched earth policy on the province or an event modifier in place. So long as the province is not occupied by enemy forces, this income will be added to your treasury every month.

Expenses: Military Maintenance
Your expenses are the sum of your military maintenance, interest paid on a loan and money spent on construction. The more you spend, the more you risk to lose, and if you lose too much you might have to take a loan to be able to afford the costs you deemed essential for the life of your nation. Failure to keep up with your loan payments will lead to bankruptcy for your country.

The expenses you will need to consider are:
  • Cost of building new armies, fleets and province improvements: Getting to the top is not cheap, and a large portion of your monthly income will go to building your army and navy up for war, as well as investing in your provinces so that they can earn you more money in the future.
  • Army and fleet maintenance: Once you've built your war machine, you will need to keep it salaried and in fighting shape. Over time, this will be your greatest cost, since it is constant, regular and unavoidable. No matter what you pay to raise an army, keeping it in the field for a decade will cost much more.
  • Paying interest on loans taken: If you aren't careful with your money and find yourself running a deficit, you will be forced to take a loan. Bankers don't work for nothing, so you have to pay interest on this loan while you get your country back on its feet until you can pay the loan off. It is very important to pay attention to this interest expense, if you take a loan, because it can be easy to forget that you are paying it. This is an expense that shows up on the ledger book, but it's not carrying a flag or laying brick.
  • Giving war subsidies to allies or the enemies of enemies: If you're making a good amount of money, why not share it with your friends in the form of war subsidies? War subsidies are regular transfers of cash from your treasury to those of another country that you want to back in a war, even if you don't necessarily want to contribute troops. It's a small drain on your treasury, and only applies while the target state is at war.
  • Satellites pay a portion of their tax to their overlord: If you have the unlucky fate to be the satellite or vassal of another state, then a portion of your income will be earmarked for that larger state. It's not fair, but that's life under the thumb of an overlord power.

Continental blockade
The Dominant Naval Power gets a trade bonus income based on the tax value of all unblockaded ports controlled by nations with whom it is at peace. So, for example, if Britain is the Dominant Naval Power, all peaceful European ports contribute to a bonus income.

This is a powerful asset, of course, but also vulnerable to political manipulation if you come to rely too heavily on it. If France is able to pull more and more nations into her war against Great Britain, then that trade bonus deteriorates, cutting into British wealth and maybe forcing it to take a loan to maintain whatever position it has spent itself into.

Hope that gives a good overview on how to spend money to make more. Cause money makes the war a go round. That´s all for now, next week we reveal how the navies work..

MotE_2.png

Ps. And don´t forget to watch March of The Eagles video walkthrough by King at Gamespot!
[video=youtube;ib1I4DOEMxw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ib1I4DOEMxw[/video]
 
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Nice, classic. I like the continental blockade system, I assume that "normal" blockade must affect the income of a coastal city as well.

Do recruiting army in a province reduce his population proportionally, so the soldiers don't pay taxes?
 
I like the simplified system of economic development. Hopefully, it would be easy to mod the start and end date to make it count.

Btw, completely OT, but this system of coalitions, land vs naval, would be a perfect (well, great would be a better word) one for Peloponnesian War or Punic Wars.
 
Will there be loans from countries as well as from banks which are seen as a way to win the war and not as a way of getting money long term? Throughout the period Britain bankrolled anyone who would fight the Napoleon so that by 1813 they were paying for the armies of Russia, Austria-Hungry, Prussia, Sweden, Portugal and Spain, not to mention the Portuguese and Spanish Partisans and, of course, their own armed forces.

They were able to do all this despite the effects of almost 20 years of constant blockade so it seems likely that they should have some "off screen" source of income to reflect the colonial empire which made that possible.
 
Will there be loans from countries as well as from banks which are seen as a way to win the war and not as a way of getting money long term? Throughout the period Britain bankrolled anyone who would fight the Napoleon so that by 1813 they were paying for the armies of Russia, Austria-Hungry, Prussia, Sweden, Portugal and Spain, not to mention the Portuguese and Spanish Partisans and, of course, their own armed forces.

They were able to do all this despite the effects of almost 20 years of constant blockade so it seems likely that they should have some "off screen" source of income to reflect the colonial empire which made that possible.

We don't loans just subsidies. With the time scale of the game the loans aren't going to get paid back anyway.
 
If you gain no tax from rural provinces, do they still provide something useful (like manpower)?
 
Zafra? Where in Portugal is there Zafra?

That's probably the worst Division of Portuguese provinces in a Paradox Game I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot since Eu1 and HoI1 where Lisbon was Lissabon...
Zafra and Olivenza look like they need to switch names.