FAQ - Government

1. How do I collect taxes?

First, you need to build an Administrative City, then build a tax office in your housing block. Then stock the tax office with wood or paper (depending on the time period). When the tax office receives materials, it sends out a tax official which collects taxes from every house he passes. If a house isn't passed by a tax official recently, it won't pay tax.
Be sure to tax your elite houses, they pay a LOT of tax!
Note: tax offices won't be available in all missions. If you don't see the tax office icon on the government tab, you won't be able to collect taxes.

2. A tax office is available, but I can't build it?

You need to build an Administrative City and staff it before you can build any tax offices.

3. The mission briefing told me I should build a mint/money printer, but I can't find those buildings?

As with the tax office: you can't build a mint/money printer when you don't have an Administrative City in the city. If you build an administrative city, the icon for the money printer/mint (if that building is allowed in the mission) becomes available on the Government tab.
Note: you can only have one mint/money printer in your city.

4. I have some copper on the map, and no Bronze Smelters. Is the Mint worthless?

No. The mint sends its own miners to the copper deposits. So, it does not need a bronze smelter to operate.

5. How do I get animals for my menagerie?

There are several possibilities:

• Request the animals from other cities. Notice that you can only do that if they like you a lot. But then be careful, as the requests will lower their attitude towards you. Allies are most likely to send an animal, you have to butter up your rivals a lot to be able to request animals from them
• A better way to get other cities to give you some critters would be to send them the ones you have. That will induce them to do you the same favour, and send you some animals, also, IF and only IF you send them animals from another climate region. For example: the city has a temperate climate, then send an animal from the humid or arid climate to be reasonably sure to get one back. This sometimes even works with apathetic rivals.
• The easiest way to get animals is if they roam your own map. Just get a hero that can capture animals (Nu Wa, Sun Tzu, Xi Wang Mu or Sun Wu Kong) to come to your city, and click the "Capture animals" button on the command screen for the hero. Note, however, that the hero will hunt the animal closest to her at the time the command is issued. So, if there are several types of animals roaming the map, you might want to get the hero close to the desired creature first.)

6. I got a hero to capture an animal, but while he/she is bringing it to the palace, it gets killed by tower sentries/hunters!

This is a bug deliberately let in: hunters will do everything to provide meat, and tower sentries will do everything to protect the city from predators, so they will just shoot the beast.
To get the animal safe into the palace, you need to temporary unman the towers (go to the military tab, click on 'unman towers') and shut down the meat production (go to the industry full report and click on the text saying 'operating normally' next to meat). Once the animal is safe into the palace you can turn them on again.