[johan osterman]

Raising taxes to 200 for one turn only results in 20 unrest. If you pillage with a large army you can generate unrest 10-20 times that as well as killing of most of the population. 200 tax is the amount of fiscal abuse you can subject province to without resorting to an outright pillage. You are assumed to have some adminstrative authorities in place in a province even when you do not have any commanders there, they are assumed to be able to threaten the populance enough to recieve the increased incomes. As I said unrest is an abstraction and I do not think that 20 in unrest represents to severe a penalty for increasing the tax to 200%. And as for the tactic being cheesy I think that realism should, if anything, dictate much more unrest in newly conquered provinces. If you wish you can consider the extra money spoils of war and the players abstaining from raising taxes to 200% as an uncommonly benevolent and disciplined conquering army.

In the early stages of dom 2 development there were some discussions of changing the way unrest works, so that there was a provincial unrest and one national happiness factor for the whole empire as well as a couple of other ideas, in the end it was decided that the current unrest model was sufficent and simpler to use and implement, there was also a slew of consistancy issues that arose from moving away from the current system to a more detailed one. The end result of these discussions were the pop killing effects of taxes in excess of 100%, and I think the system as is stands works well enough both from a gameplay and and realism perspective.