Politician Archive
Thread: This Week in Politics 3/15/04
I'll make a new thread each Monday for use throughout the week for youto let me and the rest of the Politician community hear how things are going in your city, events planned, tips you might have learnedlike ways ofusing specializations efficiently, new facilities being placed, any interesting dynamics like mergers with new partners to grow your cities or issues of disagreement between your citizens, anything having to do with your politician skills, new skills, skills sold back, newissues, frustrating bugs, or just a quick status report. It will be easy for me to keep up with a digest version ofthe goings-on of the community this way, and perhaps a way for you all to get to know each other as players dedicated to the concept of building communities in the Star Wars universe.
With things having slowed down to pretty low levels of activity on my live-server city, my focus has shifted somewhat to my Test Center city.
This week's big event was placement of a garage on the Test Center city of which I am mayor. I wanted to make sure that the garage worked, that you could place it given the specified skill, Civic Policy 2, and to check out the size of the facility's footprint. The garage is small, and should be easily placed on fairly uneven terrain due to its small size. It is smaller than a shuttleport. It does work. I tested repair to my own vehicle, and you do get the system message when you come in range of it on your vehicle.
I'm glad to see garages being added to our city facilities, allowing us to offer our citizens the full array of services and support they need to base themselves entirely out of a player city, other than a spaceport hub to other planets.
The next feature for cities that I'll be keeping an eye out and keeping my fingers crossed for issome form of financial reports added to the city management terminal. We know that these reports were considered to be in the pipeline, but without a promised implementation date, every new Test Center update will have me back at city hall, opening up the terminal and hoping for a new listing under those options. I don't know how many times the citizens have asked me, "so how much are we bringing in under the new property tax?" to which I have only estimates. I don't even have a way to confirm that individual income taxes are being collected, and as I have never received a notice of non-payment, even from players who report that they have no money in their bank accounts, I'm dubious about this tax collection.
What about you guys, how do you track your financial activity for your city? Do you keep careful records and note the current level of the treasury funds versus expenses to figure out how well you did in collecting taxes? Do you keep careful records of treasury deposits by citizens, or do you just kind of let the city finances surf along, adding cash when the treasury gets low and hoping that the taxes are coming in as expected?
I'm a new mayor officially in as of tomorrow. I'm taking over because our mayor had to tend to real life stuff. I am watching the treasury like a hawk and make sure we have enough to get by every week. The last mayor did not implement taxes and neither will I. I have a great city that will step up as needed to make sure we can pay everything. Only issue I'm dealing with currently is the outgoing mayor redeeded the shuttleport and gave it to me before he left because we have been fluctuating all around the 55 citizen mark. Rather than pay extra and seeing as we are only 2k from a starport we redeeded it. I told the city when we get 60 people and I have the skill it will be replaced. I am looking forward to enjoying mayor and it should be great.
Tawney-Zola
new mayor of britannica, Lok Eclipse
Mos Tyrenia has an exotic garden addiction now. I placed the 5th one the other day. Our weekly maintenance is now 735k. But we have 7 million in the bank. As long as we have tons of cash I just don't worry. I think sales tax is giving us a much bigger boost than I thought. It is only at 2%, but I think there is a good chance that 20million to 50 million in goods may be bought and sold in a week. So we are talking 400k to 1 million credits in sales tax per week.
Added a second bank this week. Looking forward to the garage, but wish they would fix the bug so people actually need to use them.
Mos Astravia is mostly unchanged this week. Still large for a Rank 4 (upper 70s). Some citizens idle out, some new ones join. We seem to be headed in a generally upward direction. My biggest concern is that we'll lose citizens to the 6 week timer, but I have no clue how many. Rationality tells me no more than 10 and even that may be high, but one can't help but be a little paranoid about it.
My big project is forming a planetary council of cities. We had our first meeting last night. Attendance was not what I had hoped for, but there seemed to be some decent energy for action among the four cities that did send representatives, and two others had scheduling conflicts with RL. Among other things, we've begun planning a series of events to help get the word out and promote interest in the planetary council. We're concentrating on the mostly physical events at this point, such asswoop races anddueling tournaments. We've got some good ideas for more cerebral events, but we need to get better established first.
Philosophically, the city continues to struggle with its adapting identity. Originally intended as a haven for players of any faction and guild, the tendency of Imperial guilds (and of Imperial players to seek them out) to form their own cities has left us with a severe imbalance towards the rebellion among the populace. If the upcoming patch makes bases easier to defend, it might not be possible for the city to maintain neutrality much longer ...
In other news, our planet has seen the two most active PvP-devoted cities (one rebel and one imperial) lose their mayors this week. Both are leaving SWG. Two other Rank 4/5 cities mayors are not responding to email and have not in the past three weeks. I'll be looking into this further in the upcoming week.
- Sydira Katheda, Mayor - Mos Astravia, Tatooine, Naritus
Our cities financials are mostly paid for through donations and city fund raisers. About a month ago we sold a medium house lot right next to the shuttleport in an auction that went for 25 million credits. Then last week someone quit the game and left us 5 million credits. We also have occassional donations from businesses in the city. I try to encourage people to tell me when they make donations so I can better keep tabs on how the money is coming in, and unless they instruct me otherwise, I praise them in a newsletter that goes around to the citizens
I have messed around a bit with property and sales taxes though. We have around 280 structures in the city right now, and at a 10% sales tax, it was only bringing in trivial amounts of money compared to our city maintenence (like 100k per week). That definitely wasn't worth it as I had a few people complain about it, and the appearance of having high property taxes discourages new potential citizens who don't understand that 10% to their property maintenence really is a miniscule amount. The sales tax we have turned on at times when we needed - and that is very effective. We are a crafter based city, and I have found that I can have the sales tax at 1% turned on for either 2 week days or 1 weekend day and generate enough income to pay for the weekly maintence. So before we got inundated with donations, I would use this quite a bit - usually turn it on Sunday night and turn it back off Tuesday night to maintain a respectable level of credits in the treasury. Its actualy quite an interesting way to measure the amount of sales your city is doing
We were usually doing 30-40 million credits of sales per week day, and around twice that on Friday or Saturday. It would be awesome to be able to see those numbers without actually having to turn the tax on though (*hint hint*)
New Cardia, Dantooine on Eclipse
Another average week in New Cardia, with a slightly more padded population for our township now (up to 40). As for finances, we have an income tax of 2k and property tax of 10% and make about 33-50% of our overhead a week, which runs close to 300k. Sales tax is 5%, but isn't much of a factor since we're very combat centric, and though we have many highly skilled crafters, they don't maintain vendors. Our deficit is funded exclusively by donations from our more philanthropic citizens and guild members (since the city is 80% Central Imperial Order populated) and we have about 3 and a half mil in the bank, so we could subsist for several months if need be. I take a peek at it before update every week just to guage where we're at financially.
In other news... started a new subdivision that's been coined "Little Tatooine" and moved all of our minority tatoonian-style dwellings to it. In the process of adding a few tatoonian gardens to the area to add to the theme, I finally ran into our decoration cap with some surprise; for some reason I thought gardens counted as civic structures so that they and streetlights were classified differently. No such luck. Now I get to try to rethink the beautiful civic pavillions we've added lately and wonder how the new streets are going to fare without adequate lighting.
To make things worse, I face the grim realization that my SP cap was in sight... so it looks like I'll have to drop what little combat specialization I have if I'm going to master politician and continue to be the guild MD. It would seem that for such a thankless job, that isn't even considered real for purposes of holocrons, and currently has so little re-play value for the individual skills, that perhaps SOE should look into some major SP cost slashing... Maybe changing the Novice field to cost only a couple of SP instead of the normal 15, and/or slashing costs in half throughout the rest of the profession. Or, to be fair, if it's not even considered a real prof for purposes of holo-grinding... maybe make the entire field null-SP like languages. People who take the time to learn it and use it, great; but they aren't penalized. Just a thought... obviously at least a little selfishly motivated given my circumstances... but don't you agree? 
Bajeezus wrote:
What about you guys, how do you track your financial activity for your city? Do you keep careful records and note the current level of the treasury funds versus expenses to figure out how well you did in collecting taxes? Do you keep careful records of treasury deposits by citizens, or do you just kind of let the city finances surf along, adding cash when the treasury gets low and hoping that the taxes are coming in as expected?
I do keep a relativly close record of the city treasury, keeping an eye no it every couple days and putting it into an Excel sheet of our financial situation - showing city maintenace, amount of money in treasury, amount of money on my bank account due to donations to me minus all expenses listed in detail (strucutres, event costs etc) ... At best times we had a profit of about 200k (taxation 500cr 10% property 3% sales 100cr shuttle) ... at worst times wie had that as minus.
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This week in Kheraba City
After having a couple of weeks with very little going on in the city and with the beginning of population drops (mostly due to more people leaving the game) the city is now alive with fire as we are voting for the new city council. The campaigne is mostly between 2 PAs in the city that have candidates running for the same seat "Senator of Finance and Commerce" ... one PA is a Trading Guild itself (so it is feared they wouldn't be neutral) the other PA is a Hutt Gang (which is even more un-trustworthy).
The campaigne is being faught out in a very nice RP kind of way, and the last 2-3 Days I've had about the most fun being mayor! I'm so excited as with whom I'll be working with the next term (or the next month if I'm voted out at the next mayor-election).
On another matter ... I accidently redeeded our shuttle port trying to redeed the garden in front of it to remove the "Rebel" indication on the Planetary Map (I was covert Rebel when I became mayor ond placed all the gardens, just recently went neutral because of "interactions" with high ranking Imperials
) - So the shuttle was unopperational for about a day ... After it went back to life again I noticed that we are now paying less Maintenance and that the difference is 75k (instead of 25k that shuttles are supposed to cost reading FAQ and several other comments) ... CSR said 75k is the correct amount for the shuttle, and it should be "fixed" after server down, but after 3 server downs and even a city update the maintenance is still on 490k instad of 565k (just a note ... not complaining here 
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Please see the Politician thread titled:
"The Day They Saved a Player City - All Others "Tough Luck"
for my week in Politics. It warranted a bit more discussion for me to post it here. Wasa tough week 