Politician Archive

also, the treasury report shows the following

City Hall 60000

Streetlamp 1500

Streetlamp 1500

on and on it goes, listing a seperate maint price for each seperate city funded structure

I thought the maint on the shuttleport was going to be 125k per week... at least I'm pretty sure I read that on here in a few diff threads.

Anyway, I'm projecting my city to cost over 1 mil/week when we get up there... hope it's popular with the tourists

More importantly: Anyone have a good spreadsheet for computing whata breakeven tax rate would be?

If I had to use taxes to totally support the city, I assure you, I would have some upset citizens. So far, from donations to keep taxes off, I have more creds in the treasure then I am spending on ammunities. I am sure in the future, this may change though.

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aldure wrote:
If I had to use taxes to totally support the city, I assure you, I would have some upset citizens. So far, from donations to keep taxes off, I have more creds in the treasure then I am spending on ammunities. I am sure in the future, this may change though.

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Oh, same here. But as you say, in the future I'd like to see some balance. Question is, how do we compute that balance? It would mostly be based on estimates, but with some float from donations I'm sure we can balance this budget.

If paying more maintenance for the city hall building at different levels is an issue, you should submit a CSR ticket or start a forum to try and have the "Hall" in "City Hall Maintenance" taken out. Less confusion.

And my citizens almost cover the maintenance cost with 1200 income tax and 20% property tax. A bunch of them tell me that I could raise it, so they don't mind I'm sure.

Koweim

The base city maintenance fee is 25k * level + 10k. So level one is 35k, and so on. Not all of the other structure prices are known (my most accurate-seeming source included 1k/week for streetlamps, but they actually seem to cost 1.5k/week each.) The most basic way to figure out tax load is to look at the cost per week per capita: 35k between 19 citizens is about 1842 per citizen. 60k between 20 citizens is about 3000 per citizen. In general, cost per citizen for the base city does go *down* as the city increases in size, since it's spread between a larger number of people, but it jumps right at the boundaries. A serious city, of course, has additional costs for other civic structures. Figuring out how to allocate taxes isn't going to be trivial, and will take some trial and error if you really intend to run the city primarily on automatic taxes. For one thing, the citizenship tax is uniform: up to 2k/citizen/week. But this will most likely pay for only the basic city costs, if that. Sales tax places a higher burden on merchants in your city, and has to be negotiated with them to avoid driving them out. Not to mention two facts: first, sales tax varies based on actual sales, and second, a higher sales tax may drive away business, cutting down on overall tax revenue. Shuttle tax is likewise hard to predict. Finally, property tax is a percentage of maintenance fees. This may actually be one of the better methods of taxation, but it depends on the makeup of your city, and how you want to distribute the tax burden.

If you plan on using sales tax or a shuttle fee to provide revenue, I recommend starting low and working your way up. Have a war chest (either keep a safe excess in the city treasury, or make sure the mayor or some other responsible party has enough money to pay upkeep and will be around before the city cycle starts to check on things). You can't track how much money is coming from each tax source, so try varying each one of the settings within your parameters (i.e. what your citizens will accept) and see how it goes. While donations can "mess up" the calculation, you can also count on certain civic-minded citizens to donate regularly.

Your goal is simply to try to keep track of how much money the city brings in (through taxes, fees, or donations) each week vs. how much it pays out in maintenance. If you're bringing in too much money, it's good for saving against a rainy day. If you're not bringing in enough, you'll have to raise taxes or solicit more donations. If the citizens are screaming bloody murder, you'll probably want to reduce taxes and look at other possible revenue sources if you need them.

Tricky, neh?

The final point I'll make is about certain city specializations. The costs of specializations are so high and their utility so focused that you'll probably want to treat these as special cases. If you're going to war, you'll have to convince citizens to donate money to pay for the stronghold ability. If your crafters are clamoring for better experimentation, you'll want to see if they're willing to pay for it themselves, or if the populous is willing to share the burden. If you think that reduced cloning and insurance fees will make your city more attractive to hunters and possible immigrants, you'll have to figure out how much it will cost the city and what the citizens can expect to get back, and convince them that it's worth it. (By my calculation, with 35 people, the minimum for a level 3 city, which is the minimum level to specialize, it costs a bit over 2k per capita for the cloning center specialization. If most of your population fights, they'll make that back from cloning in town if they die and have to re-insure six or seven times a week. It may be worth it, it may not. A larger population, of course, would have it cheaper.)

Cities are very complex. I wonder, sometimes, how many people have realized just what that means.