User Guide

When your city is new and its industries are in their
infancies, taxes are essential to keeping the city solvent.
Even when trade revenue picks up, charging citizens
taxes can provide a sizable supplement to the city’s
income.
Setting a Tax Rate
By default, the tax rate is set at 9 percent. To change
this rate, either info-click on the city’s Palace or visit
the Overseer of the Treasury. Setting the city’s tax rate
at the Palace is described on the previous page.
The Overseer of the Treasury provides you with a
wealth of information that will help you decide at what
level to set the tax rate. In addition to listing the tax
rate itself, he tells you what percentage of the popula-
tion is currently registered for the tax (that is, how
many are visited by tax collectors), and how much rev-
enue is generated. He also knows how much more
money the city would earn if every citizen was regis-
tered for the tax.
With this information, you can
decide what to do about the
city’s tax rate. If the city isn’t
earning enough from taxes, the
answer may be to build more
Tax Collectors’ offices. Use the
Administration: Tax Income
Overlay (see page 208) to see
which neighborhoods aren’t
paying their fair share.
Raising taxes can be a good idea
if the city is in debt and needs a
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Municipal Functions
tors. You need to build Tax Collectors’ offices (see
page 104) to take in what the city is owed.
In addition to road access and
labor, at least one part
of the Palace must be
on grassland to supply
it with ground water.
High ranking officials from
Egypt and abroad stay in the
Palace when visiting the city.
The Palace also provides an “at-a-glance” look at your
ratings. When you hold the cursor over the building,
a balloon listing your ratings, the tax rate and the
unemployment rate appears.
You can also set your city’s tax rate by info-clicking on
the Palace. On the pop-up panel, the tax rate is listed.
Click the buttons to the right of the tax rate adjust it
up or down.
If the city is fortunate enough to have Gold Mines
nearby (see page 70), the Palace accepts the gold ore
and converts it into cash.
Palaces come in three different sizes: Village, Town and
City. In each city, only one of these sizes will be avail-
able to build, depending on the rank you have
attained.
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Once the Palace is built, the city can begin collecting
taxes.
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Municipal Functions