Politician Archive

One thing i'd like to see and didn't quite see in the list are some additions for "Urban Planning". My town of Moonlight Valley lies a bit north of deeja peak on naboo, at the end of the river, so we got a river, forest, hills, plains the whole works. But it is quite difficult planning what goes where, especially with the larger buildings like pa halls, city structures and gardens.

I can think of two things that would easily help urban planning:

1) A grid for the mayor that you can turn on/off with a keycombo, so that in an instant you can see how many spaces you have from one side of the square to another for example.

2) Probably impossible to implement, but being able to pre-designate area's for specific structures would be nice. So I could set apart space for a pa-hall for example, then agarden and finally some houses around it. So that when a PA comes to move in, the settling can be done in minutes rather then hours (simply allowing them to only build they structures on the EXACT designated spots) because they need to re-deed over and over again, finding out after 2 hours that it doesn't fit at all, lol.

I'm really glad to see some of these issues being addressed! My citizens can hardly wait for the city garages!

Now, for the next 5?

I think the next two biggest issues are: 1) the inability of the mayor to resign so there can be a friendly succession of leadership. 2) The sources cities have for revenue. Number one has already been covered in previous posts, so I'll focus on number 2. There are only a few taxes we can levy, and some of them do not come from logical sources, for example, income tax. If I have players who are reallycasual, (and I have those players as citizens) instituting a 2000cr/wk income tax could quickly drain their bank accounts. Why not have the income tax come directly from the mission terminals when a mission is completed? It could easily be set to be a percentage of the mission reward and go directly to the city treasury. That way, the players who are active and using the facilities would be the ones paying for them. It would also take care of the playerswho may not be citizens but have decided they like hunting in your area and are using your facilities with out everpaying a single credit toward their upkeep.

The same with trainers. Here they are, working in my city (yes, I know I hired them) and THEY don't have to pay any income tax! Why not havethe income tax percentage also be the "kickback". Nothing irks me more then having to watch as imperials use the trainers I have set in a rebel city to learn skills they will later use on me in combat, andmycity doesn't even get any benefit from their convenience!

In conjunction with reductions in upkeep as a politician levels, this could help a city become more self sustaining. Place the right mission terminals/trainers and the city prospers. Place ones no one wants to use and the city doesn't do as well.

Property taxes make sense the way they are, but I will probably never use them since about half my citizens are VERY casual players (unless I decide I WANT to make houses poof!)

Guess that's my 2cr for now. Lots of good ideas up there. Keep up the good work and maybe we'll turn this into a playable profession yet!

Those are all very good thoughts you're having, I like it. Another issue I think is rather important but I kinda missed it is the cityban thingie that doesn't work properly. Two friends of mine were banned from another city but after that they could still use the city's cantina and shuttleport and still enter city hall. The only thing they couldn't do is clone.

I think the cityban function should work better than that. Just deny people access to all public buildings in your city. I very much applaud all efforts to get the citywarn function back. I don't see how it can be abused really, since the player who is warned gets a WARNING (hence the word) and if he doesn't want to get in a fight he should leave, which is really the whole point of the citywarn.

Why my militia should be able to place houses and ban people is beyond my comprehension. Let them do the warning and defending stuff and I as mayor or any other citizen that I trust - let's call it a city councillor - could do the granting of zoning rights and banning.

Furthermore I would really appreciate an improvement of the taxation system. I think I should be able to tax different structures with different percentages. For instance I want to tax industrial structures but not residential. The only way for me to do this now is to have a weekly tax refund for my residents which causes me a lot of work.

Well, that's it for my complaining.

Thewt Tabro of Infinity
Mayor of Elysium Valley
Member of the Pink Kreetles rock band

My issues remain:

Decorations: ALL decoration limits should be raised. And street lights so should not count towards them.. as they actually MAKE a city feel like a city.. (or have buildings with in a city have out door steet lights!!!) We So should ba able to have neat fences/walls/gates/ PAVEMENT ( I SOOO hate having weedy grass in our Market Square it is crazy! like it is never kept up!). In the end.. tripple the decoration limit.. seriously.

Militia is pointless.. we should have a npc militia force and peeps who are on a ban list (placed there by an appointed city councilor currently themilitia powers) that thenpc militia go after...and to this we could either A) have in game already in place npc militia like the CorSec or RSF... or simply have a limited number of npc's tied into the city level .. like 10 npc militia per rank.. that the mayor can assign patrol beats to. Also.. there should be sentry outposts so that citizens are alerted of the presence of banned peeps..

Also.. we should have a weekly update on how many residents are inactive and for how long .. even if it is not by name.. and which city buildings are about to be destroyed.. so new building placement can be arranged and other plansmade.

These are my issues.. anyone else share these?

Ok Im new to politician so please bear with me. These top 5 issues are exactly my top five issues, with number one being the lack of income reporting! obviously i can figure out income tax and separate it from the rest of the cities income but much past that there is no differentiating from shuttle fees to sales tax.

City issues:

If you want to run a business efficiently you have to know where your income is coming from and where it isnt. Now to fix what is a deficit problem I think galaxy wide. Without donations it is likely most cities would fall. Why can I not raise income taxes beyond 2k per person? Why dont the cities functions operate like a faction base's purchases? for example everything you purchase at a faction base the credits used for that purchase goes to the maint. of the base! Why doesnt the cost of insurence or cloning, vehicle repair or NPC training go to the city?

There are no municipal benifits from having all of these except out of convenience. The cost of these structures and trainers far out ways the income they bring in which is virtually none!

Politician issues:

they have been mentioned manytimes but the lack of benifits for the profession considaring the skill points expended are just unacceptable. At this point the mayor of a city is really just the skill point martre. There must be a way for mayors to have the benifit of the skill points used even if its just something stupid like diplomatic pricing for shuttles or something.

Here's something that I'd like to see implemented to help reduce ghost cities..

Higher citizen requirements.

Level 1 city : 20 citizens

Level2 city : 40 citizens

Level3 city : 60 citizens

Level4 city : 80 citizens (only this level can register on a map)

Level 5 city : 100 citizens

Perhaps a nice idea as a skill for a master politician:

Ability: Diplomatic Immunity

1. Travel Expenses cut down 50%


2. Immunity to crackdown searches ("Do you know who i am you nitwit stormtrooper, begone!" followed by a "Sorry, sir. Move along" )


3. Cannot be scanned to overt with the covert faction scanners

Travel expenses is good for everyone, crackdown searches are great for mayors high on spice and with sliced composite and the no-scan idea adds a flavour to the GCW.

In response to issue 3:

A simple way of helping players police their cities would be to add a /tcf (temporary city flag) command. This would work out well for devs (it would use existing game functions) and for players (nothing for offending players to really get steamed about because they would not be getting killed or losing anything. It would work like this:

Militia member (or appropriate administrator) would issue the /tcf command at the offending player. That player would get a system message stating that "You have violated city ordinances (or something appropriate)! You have 60 seconds to halt these activities or you will be removed from the city!" The militia member would then have to wait 60 secs to issue the command again if they do not comply. When issuing the command the second time, the offending player would be teleported (the /eject command could be modified to accomplish this) to 100m outside the city's radius (to prevent the offending player from hanging out at the edge of the city and taking pop-shots at citizens within the city). They would also not be allowed to move across an invisible barrier at the 100m out from radius line (the same way you can't enter a building when tef'd, another function that already exists which would just have to be modified). And an appropriate time limit would be set like 30 min before that person can enter the city again.

Like I said this uses existing functions so it should not be that difficult to implement, and it would give an effective way (cityban is worthless) of policing cities, which we currently desperately need!

drachenfire: Love the idea about NPC militias...I totally agree. That is the most effective and sensible means of handling actual combat policing within cities. Think about the number of dedicated player militia members you would need to keep the city policed for most of the time...nobody wants to hang out in the city just to do that!

arsheba: I couldn't agree more about the disgusting lack of communication and delegation for cities. Why is it that in EQ there were in-game bulletin boards but in Star Wars where there are computer terminals everywhere, there's no real means of communication coordination?! We desperately need more options for cities within the game...city channels and Planetary council channels would be a great start, but also important would be a City Council/Executive Council channel which would be taken care with delegation abilities that apparently only PA leader's are worthy of! Running a city is a hand full, one person really can't do it all. The best leaders are the ones who surround themselves with quality people to help them with handling the many aspects of running a city (or whatever), but currently our hands are tied from having an effective ways of coordinating this.

Well those are my thoughts, like'em or hate'em they are issues we are all dealing with, and we can all agree that changes are needed badly to fill in all the holes of a profession/city system that was obviously just throw out there to get it into the game!