Politician Archive
Thread: QAville Maintainance excedes 1 Million
ElginBH wrote:
There appears to be no net benefit to running a player city as opposed to building a lot of houses outside of a NPC city. Shuttleports, banks, mission terminals and such can be 500 m away to an NPC city or 250m away to the pc one that we are paying over a million a week for. Does that seem reasonable ? The only new advantage presented is making them center of research, strongholds or the like. 15% to experimentation is pretty cool, but if its the only new advantage, is it worth a million a week ?
I don't understand why this is such a big debate. Ifthese things are not worth the money they cost to you, then don'tbuild them. It most certainly does NOT cost a million per week to maintain a good specialization - that includes a great many other things. Making peoplechoose between what amenities they want and can afford is a good think, we don't want full service citiescovering every inch of the map.
ElginBH wrote:
To those that have decided cities are for the 1337 and powergamers I can only express sadness. This is a player built game, with a player economy. This isn't Evercamp. Or at least is isn't supposed to be. This isn't the epic quest, its us, the players building content into the game enjoyable for all. I don't expect cities to be littered all over the maps either, but I really think that this is a grotesque overcompensation for a failure to remove credit duping bugs. Its clear the developers don't have a stranglehold on what might make a working economy. Ultimately, cities might only be afforded by those with the foresight to dupe credits. No one wants that.
Elgin of Scylla
This isn't about the 1337 or the powergamers at all, its about economics. You said it, but you don't seem to understand it - and quite frankly, I think the devs have a pretty good hold on how things need to be setup. People seem to want to build cities for their own purposes, but what they *need* to be thinking about is how they can build their cities to be useful to other people. The key to running successful cities is not going to be the personal wealth of the mayor, its going to be how useful and helpful the city is for other people - will people want to come live there, will crafters want to setup shops, will people want to come buy things, will fighters run missions from there, will the shuttleport provide a valuable service, will the cantinas be full of entertainers, will the med centers be full of doctors, will the city be a factional stronghold, etc - there are going to be many ways fora city to be successful.
I think people are still thinking that cities will be an expanded PA hall with some new services for their guild. Its not, the way people are thinking about cities needs to change.
Joshie wrote:
The citizen requirements are floors, not ceilings. An outpost can have 40 people living in it if they want to cram everyone in together. And, just like in real life, having each citizen provide the same amount of money via tax is a stupid solution. Those who have more money can afford to pay more money.
When a rank 5 city exists that has only the City Hall, 80 houses, and nothing else, then we can debate your other point.
I don't think you are right on that. I think once the city hits 10 citizens the next week it jumps up to the 2nd level. I don't think that is something that can be opted into or out of.
Plinka wrote:
Had some time today to chat with GreenMarine a bit and managed to get a few of the answers we've been looking for. I still have to go throught the transcript and look for tidbits but here are a couple of things:
City Sizes:
Outpost 5 citizens, 150m radius
Village 10 citizens 200m radius
Township 20 citizens 300m radius
City 30 citizens 400m radius
Metropolis 50 citizens 450m radius
These numbers are still subject to testing (Like all of the information I've been providing) and may change before this goes live.
Also, in the politician tree people have noted the empty box at Martial IV. While it's not yet noted, that box is the one that will grant the ability to place faction mission terminals using /installmissionterminal commands.
I'll be back with more information a bit later.
That is how the scaling works. As your city gets larger, the costs increase. The base cost is 100k per week.
Joshie wrote:
A level 1 outpost's maintenance will not be a million credits per week. It will be 100k per week plus a few extra thousand for the terminals or trainers or whatever that outpost would want.
That is how the scaling works. As your city gets larger, the costs increase. The base cost is 100k per week.
That is not scaling. A level 5 city could just have the city hall and pay 100k - the same as a level 1. The costs do not increase at all based on size or population. The sole determinative factor of cost is amenities, which are all optional other than the city hall.
So at a no frills level, an outpost of 5 citizes pay 20k a week for their city. A level 5 of 50 (or is it more?) would only pay 2k a week.... If 20k is good for the 5, it should be good for the 50. So the city hall maintenance for a level 5 city should be 1 million a week, just for the hall....
So if you don't think maintance is too high, you should be willing to accept that, 20k per week per citizen just for the hall.
When a rank 5 city exists that has only the City Hall, 80 houses, and nothing else, then we can debate your other point.
why would i pay 16K to be in your city????
there are no benefits to cities really
Neilla, not to be mean, but can I pick on your revenue plan a little bit? I'm seeing some assumptions in there that seem unrealistic, and I thought you'd want a chance to address them in advance?
In a city of 50 citizens, on average, maybe a third of them are going to be elite crafters, so call it 15 crafters. Not all of those will be weaponsmiths, or even armorsmiths doctors and tailors. That will include one or more of the following: droid engineers, bio engineers, chefs, and architects. 2MCr/week divided by 15 crafters equals an average of 133,333 credits per crafter per week. Now, I'll tell you right now, as a tailor I'm one of the lucky ones with an actually profitable profession ... and for me 130kCr in sales is a pretty good week. However, to hit that number I have to do a lot of in person sales in high-density traffic sites like Theed cantina. So of that 130kCr sales in a week, probably less than 30kCr goes through my vendor. And like I said, I'm the lucky one. Tell a chef that the city needs her to average130kCr/wk in vendor sales, and watch her reaction ... preferably from a safe distance, if you're overt. You won't get a much more favorable reaction out of the droid engineer or the architect, I'm thinking.
The other one that bothered me was your budgeting 200cr per shuttle ticket in tax. I'm pretty sure that the city doesn't get the whole shuttle fee, right? I know that on average player cities are going to be closer to the starport towns than they are to each other, but there seems to be a 200cr floor under the shuttle ticket cost. So what your fiscal plan does is charge anybody who wants to fly into our out of your town around 400cr per shuttle flight - which is almost certainly so high that many people would balk at it. I will be surprised if very many cities can sustain a shuttle tax above 50cr per ticket before traffic drops off. Maybe I'm wrong about that, though.
If private building maintenance is averaging 150kCr/wk, a 20% tax is 30kCr/wk, not the 15kCr/wk you budgeted. However, I don't think that anybody is going to put up with a 20% property maintenance tax; my gut instinct is that once you go above 10% at the absolute most, people will move somewhere cheaper, so your 15kCr/wk figure was a safer one. That being said, that estimate probably under estimates private building maintenance cost, because you didn't include any factories or harvesters that might be inside city limits. (Nor did you include any vendor tents, but I have no idea what their maintenance rate is, or even if there is one.) Factory maintenance costs will be predictable and budgetable. Harvesters won't, because some weeks the good resource spots will be within your city building radius, and some weeks they won't.
BradBradley wrote:Neilla, not to be mean, but can I pick on your revenue plan a little bit? I'm seeing some assumptions in there that seem unrealistic, and I thought you'd want a chance to address them in advance?
In a city of 50 citizens, on average, maybe a third of them are going to be elite crafters, so call it 15 crafters. Not all of those will be weaponsmiths, or even armorsmiths doctors and tailors. That will include one or more of the following: droid engineers, bio engineers, chefs, and architects. 2MCr/week divided by 15 crafters equals an average of 133,333 credits per crafter per week. Now, I'll tell you right now, as a tailor I'm one of the lucky ones with an actually profitable profession ... and for me 130kCr in sales is a pretty good week. However, to hit that number I have to do a lot of in person sales in high-density traffic sites like Theed cantina. So of that 130kCr sales in a week, probably less than 30kCr goes through my vendor. And like I said, I'm the lucky one. Tell a chef that the city needs her to average130kCr/wk in vendor sales, and watch her reaction ... preferably from a safe distance, if you're overt. You won't get a much more favorable reaction out of the droid engineer or the architect, I'm thinking.
The other one that bothered me was your budgeting 200cr per shuttle ticket in tax. I'm pretty sure that the city doesn't get the whole shuttle fee, right? I know that on average player cities are going to be closer to the starport towns than they are to each other, but there seems to be a 200cr floor under the shuttle ticket cost. So what your fiscal plan does is charge anybody who wants to fly into our out of your town around 400cr per shuttle flight - which is almost certainly so high that many people would balk at it. I will be surprised if very many cities can sustain a shuttle tax above 50cr per ticket before traffic drops off. Maybe I'm wrong about that, though.
If private building maintenance is averaging 150kCr/wk, a 20% tax is 30kCr/wk, not the 15kCr/wk you budgeted. However, I don't think that anybody is going to put up with a 20% property maintenance tax; my gut instinct is that once you go above 10% at the absolute most, people will move somewhere cheaper, so your 15kCr/wk figure was a safer one. That being said, that estimate probably under estimates private building maintenance cost, because you didn't include any factories or harvesters that might be inside city limits. (Nor did you include any vendor tents, but I have no idea what their maintenance rate is, or even if there is one.) Factory maintenance costs will be predictable and budgetable. Harvesters won't, because some weeks the good resource spots will be within your city building radius, and some weeks they won't.
First, I'm primarily estimating sales tax income by the vendor sales in our current settlement; we have an architect, a weaponsmith, an armorsmith, a chef, a tailor, and a stimpack chemist, and between us we clear considerably more than 2m/week in vendor sales. While there are some crafts that are less profitable, there are others where one makes decent money.
The shuttle tax is a wild guess. We don't know what the base price is and its very difficult to estimate how many trips per day there will be. But its not a major factor.
Property tax - very hard to estimate, too. If I said 20%, that was a typo; 10% is as much as I can imagine. We might get a little more from that.
There is another source of tax income, the 'income tax' which is actually a wealth tax (this is news since I proposed our revenue plan). That might be the thing that lets us close the gap. If we imagine that 50 citizens will have a total of 20m credits (conservative, I think), then even a 1%/week wealth tax will bring in another 200k, making it fairly straightforward to balance the budget, and allowing the burden to fall more evenly on the wealthy members of the community rather than just on the crafters.
Neilla wrote:
There is another source of tax income, the 'income tax' which is actually a wealth tax (this is news since I proposed our revenue plan). That might be the thing that lets us close the gap. If we imagine that 50 citizens will have a total of 20m credits (conservative, I think), then even a 1%/week wealth tax will bring in another 200k, making it fairly straightforward to balance the budget, and allowing the burden to fall more evenly on the wealthy members of the community rather than just on the crafters.
The income tax is a flat fee you can adjust only from 0-1000 credits per citizen per week ... it's not a percentage. You won't make much income through this, unfortunatly (see Plinkas posts)
DaQuilla wrote:Neilla wrote:
There is another source of tax income, the 'income tax' which is actually a wealth tax (this is news since I proposed our revenue plan). That might be the thing that lets us close the gap. If we imagine that 50 citizens will have a total of 20m credits (conservative, I think), then even a 1%/week wealth tax will bring in another 200k, making it fairly straightforward to balance the budget, and allowing the burden to fall more evenly on the wealthy members of the community rather than just on the crafters.
The income tax is a flat fee you can adjust only from 0-1000 credits per citizen per week ... it's not a percentage. You won't make much income through this, unfortunatly (see Plinkas posts)
Right - I think I got confused between what people wanted to be true vs. what was actually true. You're right, at 1000/head/week the income tax is insignificant, leaving the burden on crafters.