What do you think about the exploiting tax strategy? The so-called mp strat.

[Kryndude]

I can't tell if it's a legit strategy or not. Here's what I've been able to understand from talking about this in other communities.

1. More effective if a province already has high base tax, meaning that exploiting isn't always the same value.
2. Temporary tax efficiency modifiers (clergy estate, random events, etc) make it more valuable.
3. Production out-values tax later in the game, manpower always the most valuable, lowering dev cost for those two might be worth it.
4. Money now is better than money later, allowing you to snowball with early conquests.
5. It does come at the price of 0.1 base force limit, which adds up in the early game.
6. Annual income related features become less profitable (sale of titles, random events, etc).
7. Efficient use of governing capacity
8. You can ignore churches and get more out of workshops and barracks, so efficient use of building slots and cost.
9. Every time you exploit, the next exploit becomes far less valuable in comparison to what you would've earned if you didn't at all.


I'm not smart enough to process all the variables so I just observed a real-game example.



Year 1449
Berlin (tax 4, production 3, manpower 1)
Burghers diet mission to dev push Berlin, should I exploit tax before I do it or not?

tax income = (base tax + local tax) / 12 * tax efficiency * autonomy

Berlin annual tax income before exploit = 4.4 ducats (shown as 4 in tooltip)
Berlin annual tax income after exploit = 3.3 ducats (shown as 3 in tooltip)

Earned 20 ducats from exploiting tax
Saved 2 dip points


I'm playing with the florryworry rule (no savescum, no loans, no allies) so in my case this seems worth it. I can fight wars with the money and snowball. But would it still be worth it if I can just take loans instead? I know that production and manpower are much more valuable later in the game, but early game income is important too, and I really can't tell if this is something I want to do universally or just when I'm in need of quick cash. Thoughts?

 

[Don_Quigleone]

Given that it costs 100 ducats to give yourself the same annual increase in income (from churches or workshops etc.) I'd say its a bad deal.

That said, if you were having governance issues, or you wanted to reduce the cost of deving a province that produces gold or something like that, I could see a use on the odd occasion. But 20 gold seems pretty weak given how much income you're giving up. Most buildings take longer than 18 years to pay off.

 

[Arizal]

I suppose if burning your country to the ground allowed you to kill an adversary earlier, it could be worth it, but it would be an extremely fringe case where you are one OPM vs one OPM with no allies.

Otherwise, in a very big emergency. But I don’t play competitive mp, so this is just a guess.

 

[Jarvin]

Spoiler

I can't tell if it's a legit strategy or not. Here's what I've been able to understand from talking about this in other communities.

1. More effective if a province already has a high base tax and tax income, meaning that -1 base tax isn't always the same value.
2. Tax efficiency modifiers (clergy estate, random events, etc) makes it more valuable.
3. Production out-values tax once factories come online, manpower always the most valuable, lowering dev cost for those two might be worth it.
4. Money now is better than money later, allowing you to snowball with early conquests.
5. It does come at the price of 0.1 base force limit, which adds up in the early game.
6. Annual income related features become less profitable (sale of titles, random events, etc).
7. Efficient use of governing capacity
8. You can ignore churches and get more out of workshops and barracks, so efficient use of building slots and cost.
9. Every time you exploit, the next exploit becomes half as valuable in comparison to what you would've earned if you didn't exploit.


I wasn't smart enough to process all the variables so I just observed a real-game example.

View attachment 666482View attachment 666483View attachment 666484View attachment 666485View attachment 666486

Year 1449
Berlin (tax 4, production 3, manpower 1)
Burghers diet mission to dev push Berlin, should I exploit tax before I do it or not?

tax income = (base tax + local tax) / 12 * tax efficiency * autonomy

Berlin annual tax income before exploit = 4.4 ducats
Berlin annual tax income after exploit = 3.3 ducats

Earned 20 ducats from the exploit, around 18 years worth of Berlin's original tax income.
Saved 2 dip points


I'm playing with the florryworry rule (no savescum, no loans, no allies) so in my case this seems absolutely worth it. I can fight wars with the money and snowball. But would it still be worth it if I can just take loans instead? I know that production and manpower are much more valuable later in the game, but early game snowball is important too, and I really can't tell if this is something I want to do universally or just when I'm in need of quick cash. Thoughts?


edit:
Okay, someone else did the math. At default tax efficiency and 0% autonomy, regardless of the base tax you get 10 years worth of income the first time you exploit. Next time you do it you get 2.5 years worth of income. This is assuming everything is of default value so things might change in the actual game, but to me it seems not entirely feasible.

Hold on, let me think about this for a minute. I don't know what I'm talking about.

Here's a fun fact
If I were to guess, about 95%, if not more, of the people in MP communities you might have talked with have no clue what they are talking about either, even if they enjoy pretending otherwise. Even in competitive MP groups most people are clueless about how this game works and are just blindly following the "meta". I appreciate your attempts to try to figure this out on your own and actually put some effort into it, but talking with randoms on the internet is not the right way. Try to do it on your own; consult actual data and game mechanics if need be, not people who do nothing but pretend to be knowledgeable.

 

[wielkiciensteam]

Never played multi but in singleplayer it's often good choice to use exploit development button but I mostly use it on manpower during hard wars. I prefer taking loans over exploiting tax because it lowers your income for next years and makes your life harder when it comes to loans etc.

 

[Kryndude]

Here's a fun fact
If I were to guess, about 95%, if not more, of the people in MP communities you might have talked with have no clue what they are talking about either, even if they enjoy pretending otherwise. Even in competitive MP groups most people are clueless about how this game works and are just blindly following the "meta". I appreciate your attempts to try to figure this out on your own and actually put some effort into it, but talking with randoms on the internet is not the right way. Try to do it on your own; consult actual data and game mechanics if need be, not people who do nothing but pretend to be knowledgeable.

Thanks for the advice. This game is so damn complicated that I can't really tell for sure (yes, I'm no longer appreciating it's simplicity, the dunning kruger effect is hitting me hard lul). At least so far to me it seems like a bad strategy. You're sacrificing valuable income for one point discount on production and manpower development. If you need money you can always take loans, and if you want to dev push you can do it just fine without giving up free tax money.

 

[Cavalry]

I didn't pay attention to it much, because this is an empire building game, not a destroying game. But I was force to do it in a near death situation, and it was looking good, I need the manpower too so I exploit them.

So I guess everything that help you win a war is OK. And manpower is much more useful than it looks. So next time when one develop a province, put more point in mil point, and build soldier house in grain and fish provinces with your accepted cultures.

 

[makaramus]

it depends
obviously not so good deal for a tall country that likes to devolpland
but if you are conquering country... its really good.
You are supposed to do it for terrorities as it will hurt you %10 of its value
when I play someting like Qing, Yuan or golden horde maybe russia or ottomans I tend to use it simply because 1 devolpment is NOTHING compared to short boost it will give me to fuel my conquest

 

[Less2]

Places where it could be useful:

If you stack -development cost and use it on a strong province (e.g. 9/1/10) and exploit either manpower or tax. In this case from a sample midgame save I have you can get ~90 ducats or 7,000 manpower and pay around 4-10 mana to re-develop the province. These are both quite good exchange ratios, assuming you both have the -dev cost bonuses and the time to micromanage all of this.

If you have a gold mine that you want to keep running long term. Exploit the tax or manpower until it has 2x the bird dev you'll want to run it at. This saves you cost on continually re-developing it every time it runs short.

If you really want to min-max your tallness, exploiting e.g. a 5/5/5 down to 1/5/5 before developing to 1/9/10 makes your buildings more effective. Unfortunately you can't exploit bird dev except on a coastline.

 

[Kryndude]

If you stack -development cost and use it on a strong province (e.g. 9/1/10) and exploit either manpower or tax. In this case from a sample midgame save I have you can get ~90 ducats or 7,000 manpower and pay around 4-10 mana to re-develop the province. These are both quite good exchange ratios, assuming you both have the -dev cost bonuses and the time to micromanage all of this.

I can't imagine how much -dev cost you need to stack in order for a 20 dev province to cost 4~10 mana. Is it realistically achievable?

If you have a gold mine that you want to keep running long term. Exploit the tax or manpower until it has 2x the bird dev you'll want to run it at. This saves you cost on continually re-developing it every time it runs short.

Re-developing? Do you mean increasing production? Does that negate the depletion penalty?

If you really want to min-max your tallness, exploiting e.g. a 5/5/5 down to 1/5/5 before developing to 1/9/10 makes your buildings more effective. Unfortunately you can't exploit bird dev except on a coastline.

My question is this; instead of going from 5/5/5 to 1/5/5 and then up to 1/9/10, with the same amount of monarch points, why can't I just do something like 5/7/10? Wouldn't that give me better income and more force limit?

 

[makaramus]

I can't imagine how much -dev cost you need to stack in order for a 20 dev province to cost 4~10 mana. Is it realistically achievable?

actually... very easy if it is farm lands

 

[Kryndude]

Okay, I did the math, instead of making a 5/5/5 province into a 1/9/10 over an 80 years time period, you could instead just make it a 5/7/10 and still have spent 54 less monarch points. I know late game production is good but not sure if it's more than twice as good. Could be, with all the modifiers stacked up, but it also means that until you reach that point you were making less money.

 

[Less2]

I can't imagine how much -dev cost you need to stack in order for a 20 dev province to cost 4~10 mana. Is it realistically achievable?

yes

Re-developing? Do you mean increasing production? Does that negate the depletion penalty?

The only depletion penalty is that the dev is cut in half. If you re-dev it's as if it was never depleted.

My question is this; instead of going from 5/5/5 to 1/5/5 and then up to 1/9/10, with the same amount of monarch points, why can't I just do something like 5/7/10? Wouldn't that give me better income and more force limit?

Okay, I did the math, instead of making a 5/5/5 province into a 1/9/10 over an 80 years time period, you could instead just make it a 5/7/10 and still have spent 54 less monarch points. I know late game production is good but not sure if it's more than twice as good. Could be, with all the modifiers stacked up, but it also means that until you reach that point you were making less money.

Exact math depends on your -dev cost modifiers. Essentially you'll be paying 16 dip mana to move 4 dev in tax to production. If there is a high value good in the province that you also collect most of the trade for and that has a workshop (but no temple), yes it can be worth it.

 

[Kryndude]

Essentially you'll be paying 16 dip mana to move 4 dev in tax to production.

See, this is the part that I'm not getting right now. Why move? Why not just leave what's there and add to that?

Exact math depends on your -dev cost modifiers.

I don't think it does. Base cost is fixed and all the modifiers are additive. It doesn't matter what other modifiers you have the amount you save per modifier is the same.
I confused individual modifiers with final cost.

 

[Kryndude]

There are two things to consider: money and monarch points.


Let's start with money.

B = base tax T = tax efficiency A = autonomy Y = years

BTAY = 5BTA' + (B-1)TAY

therefore Y = 5BA' / A

If we presume that we exploit provinces with 2 to 5 base tax, the above equation shows that we have 10 to 25 years before we break even and start losing money, less if autonomy is considered. So in that time period we need to use 0~25 ducats to increase our annual income by 1T ducats. An average church gives us a bit more than that and it costs around 90 ducats.

So unless we're exploiting a ridiculously high dev province, we need to spend the money on something very important to make it worth monetarily.


Now let's take a look at monarch points.

Base cost for developing is fixed at 50, and dev cost reduction modifiers are additive, which means the amount of mana we save per modifier is always the same.

Now, when developing a province there's no penalty to dev cost until 9, 3% starting 10, 6% starting 20, and so on. So normally by exploiting you reduce the dev cost by 1.5 or 3 points per exploit. This doesn't save mana in total but by deving manpower first you are able to basically trade dip points for mil points, but you do spend extra dip points to reach the same level of development than if you would just dev without exploiting, since, of-course, you have to catch up.

The above image illustrates what I'm trying to compare. Instead of spending extra mana to dev back up, can't we just spend it on the original dev and end up with more in total? Is production that much more valuable than tax, enough to make a 1/9/10 province more profitable than whatever we end up with with the same amount of monarch points?

So let's think about it more.

Dev cost in the middle is the same for both cases, so we're essentially translating what it costs to dev back up into further development past 20. At 20 dev we receive 36% penalty, at 21 dev we get 42%, and so on.

number of times exploited	minimum dev cost penalty to recover	total amount in percentage	possible extra dev / saved MP percentage
1	0%	100%	0 / 97%
2	0%	200%	1 / 64%
3	0%	300%	2 / 12%
4	3%	403%	2 / 125%
5	6%	506%	3 / 80%

So if we don't exploit and instead dev push further, we realistically get 0~2 extra dev points and some leftover monarch points. This isn't exactly an accurate way to think about this since there's a 20 years cooldown and we would likely dev a few times before we reach base tax 1, but the difference is small.

That's comparing 1/9/10 to 2/8/10, 3/8/10, 4/8/10, and finally 6/7/10, all with bits of leftover monarch points.

A 3 ducat trade good gives you 0.05 production income per dev point. If you control 50% of the trade node you get 0.075 income per point. That's a bit less than tax's 0.083. But, production efficiency bonus becomes greater than tax efficiency as the game progresses, although this depends on which country you play and which idea groups you pick. And since manufactory + workshop combo is preferred, that adds additional 50% and later 100% bonus for production efficiency. And the more you control your node the more you get from trade portion of the production, not to mention trade efficiency.

For the sake of easier comparison, let's assume that late game production is twice the worth of tax. That means it's not worth it to exploit more than once just for the dev cost reduction, especially if you value manpower even more than production and decide to invest the extra 0~3 points into manpower instead.


Overall, exploiting doesn't seem too feasible. Any feedback would be appreciated.

 

[Less2]

I don't think it does. Base cost is fixed and all the modifiers are additive. It doesn't matter what other modifiers you have the amount you save per modifier is the same.

If it costs you 16 mana to re-dev the provinces then the amount of dev you lose depends on the dev cost at whatever you intended to develop it before. For example if you spend 16 mana and then went to 1/9/10, that 16 may buy you 1 extra dev. Is 1 extra dev worth switching 4 admin dev to dip dev? Maybe. But say instead you went to 1/14/15. In that case your 16 mana saved probably buys you 1/2 to 1/3rd of a dev, depending on how strong your -dev cost mods are. And if you went to 40 dev then the 16 mana would be worth even less contributing to additional development.

Depending on exactly how tall you intend/need to play, you may be developing to 20, 30, or 40 dev. Over 20 is kind of non-ideal but there's definitely instances in which you'll go way higher just due to running out of provinces.

 

[Reman]

Some thoughts:

• EU4 doesn't have a traditional snowballing curve that many 4x games like Civ6 or Stellaris have. In Civ6, you have no barriers to rushing technology, so things like "Chopping" (using workers to chop forests, lowering long-term production in exchange for a short-term boost) are very valid. In EU4, essential snowballing techs (like admin efficiency or Imperialism) are hardlocked to certain dates. There's a big difference in Civ6 to having 10 cities by turn 100 vs having only 5. For EU4, there's relatively little advantage to having 4000 development by 1600 vs having 2000 development. "Snowballing" is really tame in EU4, so I don't really buy that as a persuasive argument for exploiting.
• Optimized SP runs will never get enough dev cost reduction to where it's worthwhile to blow admin points for a bit of extra cash. Not even close. I know this is cited as an MP strat, but exploiting almost certainly has SP usefulness too, which I'd be interested in discovering.
• Courthouse spam makes money management a marathon, not a sprint. I think a lot of players are still adjusting to the new meta. Short-term things like loans have really started to fall out of favor among the more experienced players, myself included. I still think they have their place, but I don't think it's as justifiable as it once was to spam them wildly unless you're planning for a managed bankruptcy.
• I don't really buy the governing capacity argument either, as production is relatively efficient being outside of states, while tax and manpower aren't. You can get full trade income from normal territories, and TCs reduce the autonomy impact on production income by half.
• All that said, exploiting still probably has its place. I don't think exploiting a 4 basetax Berlin is the best way to do it. You'd always want to start with the higher dev provinces, and the AI can go absolutely wild on deving in this patch, so you can end up with tons of provinces that are like 13/8/12. Exploiting a province with that tax value at the start of the game will give you ~63 ducats which will take around 63 years to break even, which is pretty good. This could lead to heuristics like "it's better to exploit on all provinces with >10 tax before taking loans" or somesuch (not explicitly advocating this particular cutoff here, just food for thought).
• If raw dev is your enemy because you're going for a one faith or one culture, then exploiting is always worthwhile obviously.

All of the above thoughts are without extensive testing on my end; they're just my intuition so far.

 

[alexti]

Amount you gain from exploit is b*r*a*5, where b is base tax, r is tax rate and a is autonomy rate. If autonomy and tax rate don't change over time, then the loss from exploit is r*a per year. So you're effectively paying r*a annual interest on perpetual loan of b*r*a*5 (and which has no effect on inflation). With effective interest rate of 0.2/b you can get an idea on what provinces it's a good deal. With base tax of 5 it will be 4%, like a regular loan. Of course, autonomy can change (particularly if you're exploiting just before de-stating an area), so it can be a better (or worse) deal.

Here is another example. Let's say autonomy is 0 and tax rate is 100%. So exploiting province with base tax of 20 gives 100$. Which one can you to build a temple which will bring 19*0.4=7.6$ yearly, while you're losing only 1$ in comparison to the original base tax. So that's 6.6$ yearly net gain.

Of course, if you're playing without loans you may need to exploit regardless, because it's surely better than getting annexed.

 

[Kryndude]

Amount you gain from exploit is b*r*a*5, where b is base tax, r is tax rate and a is autonomy rate. If autonomy and tax rate don't change over time, then the loss from exploit is r*a per year. So you're effectively paying r*a annual interest on perpetual loan of b*r*a*5 (and which has no effect on inflation). With effective interest rate of 0.2/b you can get an idea on what provinces it's a good deal. With base tax of 5 it will be 4%, like a regular loan. Of course, autonomy can change (particularly if you're exploiting just before de-stating an area), so it can be a better (or worse) deal.

Here is another example. Let's say autonomy is 0 and tax rate is 100%. So exploiting province with base tax of 20 gives 100$. Which one can you to build a temple which will bring 19*0.4=7.6$ yearly, while you're losing only 1$ in comparison to the original base tax. So that's 6.6$ yearly net gain.

Of course, if you're playing without loans you may need to exploit regardless, because it's surely better than getting annexed.

Wow, okay. That really puts it into perspective. So I guess base tax 5 or even 4 is okay to exploit depending on the situation? But that's just the money-side of it, we need to figure out if it's also worth it MP-wise.

edit: nevermind, it's garbage compared to loans. It's basically losing money forever after 5 years... am I right?

 

[newtlord]

edit: nevermind, it's garbage compared to loans. It's basically losing money forever after 5 years... am I right?

You don't have to do a lump-sum repayment at the end like you do a loan, though.