Politician Archive

I calculated city maintenance for the 36 players in my city

City hall (Township), 4 Mission Terms, 5 Streetlamps, and a cloning center are costing 118.5k a week

Property tax at 50% for 36 small houses will only generate 48,384. Our City has a mix of various houses including guild hall and cantinaand our total income per week at 50% tax rate is around 65k.

I have also an income tax of 1500 on the citizens and it will generage an additional 54k a week.

Basically Max property tax rate, and near max income tax rate is needed to make the minimum weekly payments for a city. This just dont seem right.

--Citizens see 50% tax and they automatically get nervous, oh I cant pay that much, oh the taxes are too high...etc etc. I detailed it out for them down to the individual cost per citizen per week and it seemed to sooth some.

Anyone have any suggestions or feelings about the extraordinary city maintenance fees? At the momement its only a few wealthy individuals helping sponsor the entire city, and I dont want to overimpose on the players in the city.

they are a bit high but still manageable:

1. ideally you want to have 84 residents in your city, 1 less then level5 upgrade

2. have your city located in an area where many will use the shuttle port, and put a 300-500 surcharge (this is the best way to tax non citizens without hurting crafters)

3. run city events with entry fees, and give out prizes, but keep a portion of the entry fees to go in treasury

i agree the city maitanance is steep ,, but it is good that it is .. city is suppose to be hard to have.. especially large ones.. it takes strong planning and organization to make it work and survive.. this is why it doesnt bug me when peeps do the cross server trading.. (i dont and wont) because their city will grow to fast for them to handle..and my guess in another few weeks wewill start to see a few of these ghost cities fail...

the key is to pace your city's growth to what its citizens can handle... no one said you had to be rank 5 by the 5th week..... it is good that you are aware of this fact and are trying to come up with ways to deal with it .. i know a few cities on my server where the mayor just dumped a few 100k in the treasury .. and thinks that will cover him for a few months..

and something that i found out today .. anyone can donate to your cities treasury .. citizen or not.. a few people have donated to ours already because they liked it so much ..

In the long run, most of the city income should come from sales tax. Taxing building is unfair to those having the larger houses, enticing them to keep small ones, and therefore your city does not look as grand as it could.

I would encourage merchants to come establish a shop in your city, providing them areas to setup merchant tents, etc. Even if they're not resident, Merchant players can have quite enough vendors to have shops in many cities. With vehicles and later the space expansion, travel will become easier and merchants won't be so reluctant to travel over the gamaxy for their sales.

SlugEater is exactly right. 51 citizens, 72 structures (with some factories and harvesters that got swallowed after the last expansion), bank, City hall, cloning center, 5 mission terminals. This is all easily covered by the 5% sales tax and 5% property tax. No income tax in Ba'aar.

They key is the sales tax. In a city that's developing, sell furniture...lots of it

Amyrlin: 250 citizen tax 10% property tax 5% sales tax. Population 45class 3 incumbrence 120k

Right at this moment, taxes pay for approximately 75% of our city costs... I have no plans of ever raising the rax rates... and not charging property tax? that's ludicrus... if you are wealthy enough to buy and maintain a large house, a measly 10% additional maintenance will have no bearing on your decision to keep that house... Let's keep things in perspective here... nobody is being punished

Property tax to me seems fairest . . . those with the largest or the most structures are the ones who can afford them. No one is starving with a medium house and a ton of harvestors. Thankfully our citizens are happy to make donations on top of their taxes, so those who have the credits to blow volunteer them tfor the benifit of the entire city.

~~Shabhaii, Mayor of Tombra, Naboo
www.cityoftombra.com
The REAL BT
"The FS system only rewards the Veruca Salt's of the MMO world . . . not the Charlie's"

How about NO tax and simply sell a holo and pay for months and months never worrying about city cost... =)

A city which has to rely on the income generated from the people within a city will have exactly these issues.

To have a city which pays for itself you need to continually get external cash to visit the city.

This is where proper city placement, and a proper mix of facilites come in useful.

If you are near an area that people want to visit and you can get to Rank IV then you will start to generate income via your shuttleport. However if there are 2 or 3 other cities nearby then you will have to be careful with your ticket prices.

Having well known and respected merchants in your city who charge reasonable prices also encourages peopel to come and visit and you can make money with a small sales tax. However you also need to watch out on this.. Set the tax too high and even the most respected merchant whos good are now 10% higher than someone else will loose customers..its all a balance.

I begin to wonder if the Politician class isnt actually wrongly named.. it should have been the Economist.

hope all is wel Rianna =)

I too get all my funds from donations. Just put nominal taxes on with 1k flat fee 5% 5% just for the fact that it actually makes use of the system and im interested to see how it works.

Every thursday i put a call to the guild for donations and tend to pull in between 1 mill to 3 mill. With an estimated 1.5 million a week maintenance cost in a few weeks I dont see how I could manage without these donations from the guild unless the income generated from shutle ports will make a massive difference.

That said Im literally maxed out on everything I can do from the word go and the level 5 metropilis will have as much down as possible.

This is something stupid. i put on cloning specialisation for the sheer fact its the only specialisation we got =) 80k to make it only 800 creds instead of 1000 to clone. LOL. Still its fun =)

Well, that's 400 clonings a week to get your money back. If people don't clone that much, it's not worth it. As when you clone you usually stay there for the day (you don't clone when just passing through the planet), that means 57 people cloning every day. Seems a bit much, I don't see any place other than a major PvP hub getting this kind of cloning rates.

Im up to 250k already !

No problem though as I got 10 million in treasury but its still very steep for a week.

Mos Bahamut is running around 235K per week.. Currently taxes are set at 2K personal, 10% Property, and 5% sales tax... we really don't get much in the way of business but we are working on that.. thanks to the holo's atleast 5 of us are picking up crafting professions... We have a Master Architect and an up and coming weaponsmith.. other than that... not much business... But we are setting up to be a militarized cityand not just an economic one... The bases them selves are generating 60K income in taxes.. so as long as we keep them up we should be fine. It seems Rebels from all over are coming out to use our base and thats great because thats more maint. for the bases.. Once we get a sizeable stockpile in the treasury and after our city council decides how to balance the budget 8) the taxes will be lowered but we are getting most of our treasury from citizen donations... actually we've had about 200K in donations the last2 days...

also we are seperating the 'Military base' fromt eh rest of the city, and out Merchant areaand civic buildings will be on the opposite side.. so Covert Imperials are welcome to come, shop, enjoy a show and a few drinks. As long you don't stray to close to the bases you'll be fine.. hehe... ok should be fine.. with this many people in the militia across so many guilds I can't say for certain that every member does not have an itchy trigger finger. But if anyone has any problems feel free to contact me and the dispute will be noted... Screen shots are required for any action to be taken though...