Do some variation with tax rate so that different strategies can be played around with it.

or take out the whole thing out since no one hardly changes it.

Except for the last 2 turns

or 1st 2 turns, turn by turn strats (cashers) change tax rate quite much.

I have thought this myself.

Any thoughts though?

Umm... you could make it worthwhile for cashers to have lower tax rates with more civs and bad for farmers so they would raise theirs to have less people eating food.. but beyond that I dont have many ideas :P

No matter how you tweak it though, some "ideal tax rate" would be calculated out and everyone would just use that new ideal tax rate.

True.. although having it different for different strategies would at least be better than it currently is. As it is now it may as well not be changeable.

I mean you can tweak in a way like,

Just like Utopia
You have Reservist Draft, Normal Draft, Aggressive Draft and Emergency Draft if I can remember correctly..

People who are in need of soldiers will do Aggressive/Emergency Draft in expenses of gaining less Pop/income /turn

So likewise on EE,
You can set Higher Tax Rate, and in return you have slower Pop Gain to reach max pop, or have military/pop uses more food consumption.
Or you can set to Lower Tax Rate, your food consumption gets lower and more people fill in to get max pop earlier

Or you can do like 2:5 Ent/Res and set higher tax rate since there will be more people in country.

yes, but, that's what we have currently, and there's just an ideal tax rate as a result....

We'd have to make it affect more things to make it change i think

Shouldn't the ideal tax rate change by more than maybe 1% when food prices go up by 50%?

If you want the optimum tax rate to be more variable, you need to tie it to things that are more variable....

examples: market prices, tech levels, military levels, #/types of allies, war status, total # countries on server, current land, total land on server, population, total population on server, relative to the tax rates in other countries on server, etc.

the last one would be interesting... in that population would gravitate toward countries with the lower tax rates and away from those with higher tax rates, but in a dynamic way based on what the actual tax rates across the server are...