TaxIt/TaxRates

Current rules, as used in /Playtest01 and /Playtest02:

A city can support a number of tollbooths related to its size: see /Cities.
During the phase when transport routes are being built, players can add or move a city's tollbooths onto a space containing a road link, rail link, and/or a river space, within that city's range of influence - i.e. no more spaces away from the city than the city's size. Players can also specify the amount of tax a tollbooth imposes on goods transported through its hex: permitted values are 0 (equivalent to removing the tollbooth), 1, ... up to the city's size.
Whenever new /Contracts are being established and goods are passing through a space with a tollbooth on it, the owner of the tollbooth gets income equal to the tax rate of that tollbooth, and the person supplying the goods reduces their income by that much. If you don't want to accept that toll, you'll have to find (or build) an alternate route.

---

Design discussion

We looked at a number of options here:

1. Unlimited taxation - charge what you like, and if other players don't want to pay, then they go a different route or stop shipping

2. Taxation differentiated per route

3. Taxation differentiated per goods-type

4. Taxation differentiated per transport type

5. Taxation limited by number of transport links on a route that are within a city sphere

6. Taxation differentiated per contract, or per player doing the transporting

7. Taxation limited to maximum of size of city doing the taxing

8. Taxation rate differs by city it goes to, rather than player it goes to.

I think this is one of the main things, together with contracts and bidding, that we need to look at in the first playtest. As a suggestion for a first ruleset to test, how about:

"For every unit of good passing along a particular route, every city that has sufficient control to embargo at least one link upon that route may tax that unit up to a maximum of the city size."

So if you are providing 4 power then that would be either 2 units of wood, or 1 unit of coal. The advantage of using the coal would be it only pays tax once not twice.

So there's a standard unit tax price for each city, that would be independent of terrain, good-type, transport-type, or player being taxed. And the tax rate could be altered by up to +2 or -2 per year.

OK. And perhaps the tax rate each city is levying gets indicated by a marker on the board next to that city. --AC

: Perhaps. Or if that makes the board too crowded, indicate it on the city chart by the player. If you're going to put any number by a city, I'd have thought the important things are "Who owns it?" and "How large is it?". Certainly if we go for one of the differentiated taxation options, that would be hard to mark in a single hex without increasing the hex size.--DR
: "Who owns it" and "How large is it" certainly should be visible on the board as well, but I'd really hope that those would be indicated by the colour and perhaps size of the piece. The tax rate it exerts is also a significant geographical consideration so it'd be nice to have it displayed on the board, but I guess since it can change every turn it's more fickle than most aspects of geography so maybe there's not much point having it on the board. --AC

One way we could phy-rep this is to have a limited number of toll booths, in each players colour, and if a player has access to a route, and wants to tax goods on it, the place a booth of their colour across the route at some point. (Do we have coloured wooden arches we can borrow from another game?) --DR