Politician Archive

Sounds like you are off to a good start Building a town from scratch is one of the most challenging things you can do in this game, but it is also one of the most rewarding.

Its definitely reasonable to expect the citizens to support the town, but you have to be careful when doing this especially at first. Chances are, if your citizens are there primarily because of getting a free house, they are not wealthy to begin with and cannot pay too much in taxes. What I would recommend doing, is that if you have merchants and PAs that are interested in coming into the city, to give them favorable locations in exchange for donations to get the city off the ground. Plan ahead for things like the shuttleport - mark off that area now and then plan around it. Merchants will often be more than happy to pay for a good location near a shuttleport because they can easily make up donation through increased sales. Eventually, you do want to be able to charge taxes though, and I would suggest looking for direct ways in which to help your citizens make back the money they pay in taxes - whether it is through increased sales if they are merchants, or through better hunting if they are fighters, etc - be creative and find out ways to help out your citizens and they will in turn be happy to help you out.

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Arsenal
The little green Napoleon
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The Commune works on a donation basis. I have yet taxed any citizens and we have met the weekly maintenance fee (currently at 459k). If fact, we have always had a good surplus in the city treasury.

Send an email out to your citizens and inform them of the weekly maintenance fee and tell them as long as donations are good, you have no reason to tax. It could work for you. It did for me. Also, you can't implement any taxes until tier II.

Good luck.

word to the wise, its your city, be prepared to pay for all the expenses at first. Because if the citizens don't, what do they lose? honestly, nothing. they can just pack up and go join another city with their free new house. You might want to pull in a few trusted people and make them generals or something of that nature, give them a title and some kind of voting power to what will happen int eh city and they will be inclinded to be more dedicatedto it. If you can do this, then suddenly you have a few more people willing to foot the bill for the city when you find yourself coming up short. once you build a city of a good size, then think about taxes, but not until then. you don';t want to take the chance of running off your citizens too quickly.

You'll want to place your money in the treasury. each week the update takes the money from there and pays for the city structures. if you don't have enough, structures get damaged and smaller things, like fountains and lights, simple get destroyed.

sorry about the double post, got some weird error but it looks like it went through anyway..... NICE!

I spent two weeksscouring the galaxy for enough ore tobuild 12 small Tatooine style houses and scoping out a spot for my new city. I also spent many evenings AFK within starports advertising for free housing trying to get people committed to declaring residency. After one failed attempt at placing the capitalon Tatooine (all lots were taken in the Tempest server) , I finally found a scenic location on Dantooine and began contactingthe people who said they wanted a free house. Of course, none of the people on my list were on-lineduring the 24 hour window that I needed so I had to begin recruiting all over again except this time under the pressure of a deadline.

With the help of several people recruiting we finally got 12 people to declare. We had one issue with someone placing their house outsdie the city limit and declaring to the planet. After discovering the error, he re-deeded but the program wouldn't let him redeclare for another 24 hrs. I found out later about the \transferstructure command. The small Tatooine house requires two lots rather than one and we also had someone with 9 lots already full and could not declare. Apparently the Naboo style house only requires one andand can also be placed on Dantooine - something I didn't know until after the fact (why is this the case?).

I met the deadline and created "Dantoonie" (pronounced Dan-2-knee). After getting over my excitement of placing the 10th citizen, Igot a reality check whenverifyingthe maintenance burdenon city hall - 35K a week. And this is just for starters as I'm getting requests for two guild halls. I deposited $35K into the treasury but I didn't see where to apply these funds to the maintence of the building - is this all I have to do?

What is reasonable to expect from people in support of a city? Is property/income tax fair or should I form a citizen hunting party each week?Should I pursue malls within the city to collect sales tax? What is the best city specialization in terms of percent bonus and maintenace costs? I want to build a thriving city and need some clues as to how to make this happen.