This is all a stop-gap measure for the first few turns after conquest - if you ever want to get any taxes out of the province, as you usually do, you'll need to deal with taxpayers' happiness eventually. When taxes are not zero they blog climate change denial or something, I don't care. So I decided that every province has a sizable population of armed libertarians who will gladly shoot every protester for me as long as I set taxes to zero. I don't particularly having to babysit conquered provinces, chasing rebels around, and counting how many units I can move and how many I need to leave. Now why did I do so? The answer is my favourite 'less micromanagement'. Not quite literally, as it seems impossible to have anything triggered by zero taxes, so I gave all non-zero taxes extra -10 happiness, and every government type gets extra +10 happiness - net result being what I wanted, except it looks a bit silly in game.
Libertarians everywhereFirst to see how modding works I wrote a very small mod - turning off taxes adds +10 happiness. I knew Empire Total War won't be as easy, but nothing prepared me for the pain I suffered. My M2TW mod is generated by a bunch of simple regexps, with which I can experiment as much as I like, turning features on and off and changing their magnitude in seconds. Medieval 2 Total War somewhat less as all data files were in obfuscated packages - but once you unpacked them it was as good as Rome.
