Politician Archive

There are two approaches to this that I see. One is much easier to implement from a developer standpoint but the other more useful from a player standpoint.

The first is to add information to the email that is sent to mayors that show how much was collected since the last report in each form of taxes in addition to how much was spent and for what. For example a line item of how much revenue was generated by each tax item in the last week. All of this information has to be available to determine the revenue recieved and spent as it is. Another useful line item would be total donations (if not an itemized list of how much and by whom).

The second would be an 'an-demand' report that would show line item income and expense based upon the current city taxes and makeup. This is a bit more difficult because the buildings within the cityhave to be 'polled' to see what the taxes would be at the current rate and the amounts collected for sales tax and travel taxes could not be done.

City Financial Reports. This was by far the single largest issue on the thread (behind the combined politician skill/gameplay issues). Mayors want more information on their cities' financial activities. Let's put together a nice proposal for the devs, telling the specifically what we want to see. Lots of good suggestions already posted on the issues thread, so we have a good start. Please cut and paste suggestions from other threads rather than just linking to them.

Everyone is invited to propose, suggest, and create here. However, we have a criticism by invitation only policy. You do not earn your right to critique, judge, correct or comment on anyone else's suggestions until after you have submitted your own suggestion, brainstorm or solution. We need to start off with all the fresh solutions we can generate, and finally we will whittle, and challenge,and compile, and combine and edit everythng down to our one official presentation issue on this subject.

Here is what I want us to present to the devs:

1. Statement of the issue: why you need financial reports, why what you currently have doesn't work for you.

2. Specific information you want from the reports, a list of what data you expect to see.

When we're done, we will compile a single answer from all of the various responsesfor inclusion in our full top-five issue submission to the devs later this week.

There are two approaches to this that I see. One is much easier to implement from a developer standpoint but the other more useful from a player standpoint.

The first is to add information to the email that is sent to mayors that show how much was collected since the last report in each form of taxes in addition to how much was spent and for what. For example a line item of how much revenue was generated by each tax item in the last week. All of this information has to be available to determine the revenue recieved and spent as it is. Another useful line item would be total donations (if not an itemized list of how much and by whom).

The second would be an 'an-demand' report that would show line item income and expense based upon the current city taxes and makeup. This is a bit more difficult because the buildings within the cityhave to be 'polled' to see what the taxes would be at the current rate and the amounts collected for sales tax and travel taxes could not be done.

1. Statement of the issue: why you need financial reports, why what you currently have doesn't work for you.

We have 4 different tax settings we can change, but don't see how much comes from which income (plus donations even more clouds the info behind treasury number we see. We need to see every income seperate from the other to be able to judge what settings to tweak to get our personal city income that a) getsenough income to finance the city and b) doesn't demand to much from our citizens.

2. Specific information you want from the reports, a list of what data you expect to see.

Well I would be totaly satisfied if I could see the 5 different incomes in 5 different numbers ...

Income tax (Ok .. you could calculate this yourself)

Property tax (this is harder to calculate having over 250 different buildings in town)

Sales tax (can't say anything about this)

Shuttle Fee (same as Sales)

Donations ... and though I'm already in Email Hell I'd really like an Email how donated how much .. maybe starting at an amount of over 5000 credits or so.

--Instead of email I would prefer the information be available on the city hall terminal.

a) details of weekly income (donations, property tax, shuttle etc.) with a line item detail option to see for example the names and amounts of donations in addition to just the general line item for donations.

b) details of weekly costs (1 city hall @ 35,000 2 streetlights at x, etc.)

c) names of shuttleport users and number of uses (per week) they made.

d) ability to find out name of owner of property.

1. Statement of the issue: why you need financial reports, why what you currently have doesn't work for you.

Well, one of the biggest factors for any Politician is his/her ability to manage a budget. There is no discernable data to project the cities margins. I know how much is in the coffers. I know how much the city maintenance is. What I don't know is exaclty how much money is coming from Flat Tax, Property Tax, Sales Tax, Travel Tax or Donations. There isnothing to showreoccuring city income as opposed to misc. income. This hasn't been too much of an issue in the begining stages of a new city. However my city has reached level 4 and continues to grow. There are many requests for services which draw from the cities coffers. Without knowing where the money is coming from, my only option has been to ask for donations when needed, and keeping an obscene amount of money in the city hall. If I had the ability to see steady income and payouts, I'd have an easier time determining if a donation to the city should be deposited, or re-invested in another city project. I would suggest implementing some type of income email to show the break down of taxes and definitely an email for when citizens make donations.

2. Specific information you want from the reports, a list of what data you expect to see.

I. Income Report - Flat Tax, Property Tax, Sales Tax, Travel Taxand Donations.

II. Expense Report including Mayoral Withdrawls

III. A report on the number of people utilizing the the shuttleport, inbound/outbound.

i like everything here and would like to reiterate that an expense breakdown is vital so we can see exactly how much each and every part of the city costs us, id also like to be able to see how much foot trafic we get, for example whenever you enter or leave the radius of a city you get a message telling you the fact so the system must keep a record id like to know how many non residents entered my city in the last 24 hour period as well as how many people used the shuttleport and finally id like an email everytime someone donates to city hall

1. The problem - There is insufficient data from the city hall terminals to create a viable city budget without weeks of trial and error. While trial and error may be seen as a gameplay aspect by some, it can wreak havoc when a city population has insufficient funds because the budget was created on a best guess basis.

2. Suggested solution #1 - A small, harvester-like GUI to use as a budget projection tool. A very simple and straight forward interface with sliders (one for each taxation type), a graph or indicator to display current weekly budget demands vs. currently set taxation level (changes in real time with movement of tax sliders, lights green when maintanence fees are met or exeeded, red when there is a deficit), and check boxes to add in city features that may be added or removed which affect the maintanence fees (such as clone center, street lights, specializations, gardens, etc. with the boxes defaulting checked withthe currently present city features). This would give mayors a friendly interface for calculating appropriate taxes.The limitationit would have to be a tool for possible projected budgets only, as things like revenue collected from sales taxes would be have to be based on last week's collected taxes. Still this type of tool may be best for a video game and might be reasonable to implement.

2. Suggested solution #2 - Weekly email with hard data from city hall. This would create a lot of work for the Mayor out of game (which I personally view as a minus, as if I wanted to play with Excel and/or a calculator I would just go to work), but it would provide the most accurate take on taxes possible. Every city feature and its fees would be presented with totals collected from each individual tax (broken down by each individual tax contribution by players, ie. BobTKiller generated 4500cr in sales tax for the city and 1200cr in property tax), and donations would be presented with the name of the person who made the donation. Each email would need to be dated for archival purposes, so that mayors can collect a history and make projections based on that history. The benefit is that this method is as accurate as possible, but involves "no fun" aspects and takes a player out of the game.

I'd take either solution, but I am leaning toward #1. I'd rather have a fast good estimate than a tiresome highly accurate one. Of course, solution #3 could be both of the other solutions combined, but my optimism low with regards to getting a lot of attention from the devs on this matter. If we can not have both, I'd at least like the first option.

- Acroyear

What I would LOVE to have... if possible... (combine with other post idea)

1. 5 stats of income. Income Tax, Property Tax, Sale Tax, Shuttle, and donations.

2. Have at least 4 weeks to work with... i.e. Spreadsheet style....

any citizen can look to the spreadsheet to see how much we made last week... how much we made week before.. and such... this will be totally useful in raising/lower taxes.

Also we can tell if we are getting full income tax from all citizens... how much are we getting from property etc etc...

City Hall Terminal! We get enough email as it is. Too easy to delete. And the developers would probably end up sending us an email everytime an event happened.

• Player A just donated 100,000c


• Vendor C just sold a CDEF Pistol and paid a sales tax of 10c


• Player B just paid his taxes of 1000c


• Player D House just paid maintenence of 100c

UUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHHHH! No, thanks.

Much better to set up a spreadsheet type display in the city hall terminal. I like the idea of four weeks, but I'll take the last full week (before the update)and the current week (waiting for the update).

From that we should be able to see the five categories of income already mentioned: donations, income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes and shuttle fees. It should be broken down over the week(s). So in the previous week there were 70,000 in donations, 80,000 in income taxes collected 90,000 in sales tax collected, 100,000 in property tax collected and 25,000 in shuttle fees collected, and a total 365,000. And then a listing of what has been paid so far this week.

Then a breakdown of the same of the expenses:structure maintenence, city specializations, city decorations, (I forget all of the fees), etc. And the cost of each (we have this now, but it should be summed better). Total, 365,000.

Someone suggested being able to slide the taxes back and forth so we can see the effect. That would be nice, but not essential. Once you have this information it's pretty easy to figure out how much more or less you would collect by raising/lowering taxes.

"do we ask for both, along with the ability to turn off email reporting if it is unwanted?"

Either way is fine by me. I prefer email but wouldn't balk if it was a City Management Console option.

Mayor Feliz Gizmacher, Founder of Dune Retreat

1. Statement of the issue: why you need financial reports, why what you currently have doesn't work for you.

Without specific knowledge of cash flow, a Mayor has a dificult time projecting costs.

2. Specific information you want from the reports, a list of what data you expect to see.

Line items for the specific Revenue items:

Income tax
Sales tax (either last week's number, real time, or amortized projection for week)
Property tax
Shuttelport fee (either last week's number, real time, or amortized projection for week)
Donations (list donor and amount)

Line items for the specific Expense items:

City Hall
Shuttle Port
Clone Center
Large Gardens
Lamposts
etc...