Politician Archive

I was thinking about the potential growth of my city and the costs of all the different things that can be added to it. I cam to the sad realisation that unless I taxed the living daylight out of the citizens there was no way in heck that the city would ever generate enough income to support its self. Now of course you can always hope you will receive donations and you may, or you may have a large guild backing you to fund the city. But my city is community based with no major guild backing. Doing the math with a rank 2 city I would have to tax people around 60-70% property tax, and 1000c income tax to just pay for the city hall and the map registration.

You might argue the numbers are wrong, and they are not totaly accurate, but based on current trends in city growth (aka everyone is placing low maintanence small houses, only 2 PAs and 1 medium besides smalls) thats what it about figures out to. NowI understand when people put in vendors and sell stuff that will be another method of income. But unless every single person has placed a PA hall, is selling tons of stuff and the income tax is painful, it seems to me its going to be really rough to make ends meet.

Now Im totaly up for the challenge and for working with my population, but I would be interested to hear what some of you other politicians think on this matter. Long story short I think either A the prices to run the city are to high relative to what it can generate without taxing the residents to death, or B there needs to be more methods to generate income besides property, income, sales, and shuttle.

Now just doing some rough figures, lets say you have the highest rank city and the basic frills installed. Your weekly cost will be roughly 440,000c a week. This includes bank, cantina, hospital, clonecenter, shuttleport, 3 mission terms spread through the city, registration, and industrial society. Now thats not even factoring any gardens or a theater or any other types of additions that could be added on. Now lets say you have a few over the needed citizens for that rank of city, 90. And for the sake of argument we will say that each person has a medium house in order to average things out. Now if we tax them a reasonable ammount say 10% that will provide 50,000c or so a week. Now if we set our income tax to 1000, that will set our weekly income to 140,000c. So that leaves you 300,000c a week to come up with from sales tax (you better pray all the merchants in your town do tons of buisness) and shuttle tax (lets hope for the friggin LA marathon to come through several times).

Now I know these figures arnt 100%, and there is probably some error in my logic. I just want to figure out how on earth a city is supposed to support its self without being the bad politician and taxing the living hell out of the citizens.

10k income tax...Oh look thats twice what you need. Is 10k a lot? Umm....no. 10k is basically nothing, on the established (non-euro) servers at least. Its at most 4 missions which take all of half an hour to run. For a large number of people its not even one mission. So....I'd say that was the simple solution.

You're looking at wanting to take 10k from each person, might as well do it in a simple way....sure you can do it with property tax and it doesn't really make any difference how you do it. But look at asking for a 10k/week contribution and you'll be fine.

I agree with you, I have 49 citizens and we are all in the same pa. I have ex[lained how it works to them and have had ZERO complaints on taxing them 2000 a week and 50% structure tax. Quite simply we want the best we can get and are willing to pay for it. However even this much cash wont cover everything. We would like lots of guardens and stuff but unless you have a real large population of 100+ working together and willing to pay top dollar it simply isnt going to be possible.

Dont be surprised if costs come down but at the moment I think they are high so we dont flood the server database with items like street lamps and also prices will stay high until the devs have drained enough money out of the overall economy.

Only the wealthy can afford the best but the longer they do it for the quicker they will be dragged down to everyone elses level.

Once everyone is poor and cities fall apart the devs will post the " We will look into city costs" thread.

First thanks for responding, just want to make sure im not the only one seeing this. Second, you can not raise income tax to 10k a week. It has a maximum of 2,000 credits.

I know I have a good community growing around me, some members of which certainly make pleanty of money. But I really think it would be nice to see a city able to support its self to an extent. Obviously the bigger the better the city with more frills will clost more to live in. But certain things would be nice to be able to tax, for instance one thing that I think would solve these problems is a 5-10% tax on mission terminals. People who use your mission terminals will still make good money hunting in the area, but for using them you take a bit off the top. If you have groups doing 80K missions you can then bring in 800 credits per mission to the city. This doesnt seem all that unfair and obviously it should be adjustable. But alas this would be a feature that would have to be implemented so probably little chance of seeing it any point in the near future.

The prices also wernt all that bad, I was mistaken in thinking things like hospitals and catinas cost the city, when they actually cost the owner, and you generate property tax off of it.