What tax rate is the best?

The best tax rate when you’re not online and playing the game is 50%. Putting tax rate at 50% the population will be stable at 50% of maximum, and they will each pay 50% tax. The stable population number is your loyalty times your max population, and loyalty will be stable at 100% minus your tax rate. This is why it’s so dangerous to put tax rate at 100% and leave your computer for a long time, cause then both your loyalty and population will go down to 0, you will have riots and loose lots of resources.

When you’re planning to stay online for a few hours, first set the tax rate to 0% so that your population goes up. You can use population increase or disaster relief to speed this up. When loyalty and population is at 100% you set your tax rate to 100%. This will earn you a massive income, all you have to do to keep your population from going down is to use disaster relief every 15-20 minutes. If you run out of food, just buy it at the market, food is cheap compared to all the fold you make using the method. This trick will keep loyalty at 100 even with 100% tax rate. Before you log off make sure you change tax rate back to 50%.


exception
I would just like to add that this is mostly true for your main city only, and mostly in the early game. For my secondary cities that are either just lumber producers or Troop Cities, I prefer to keep the tax rate low so that the usable Population is as high as possible. After the beginner stages, I make more money from lumber and raiding than taxes.