Politician Archive
Thread: How do your town work? Taxes, maintence, city plan
I been mayor for Aexon Beach on Chimerea for 5 weeks now and I really like it, my citizens helps out and do not have any plans to remove me from office.
I have only had citizen tax this far and that been 600 credits a week, and from today I get 120 credits for each shuttle ticket. The rest have been paid be the citizens that dropped some cash now and then. Not sure if this gonna work in the higher ranks when the maintence cost is above 200k But I will try and see what happens.
The town is located far to the north on Naboo at the sea, its a nice area and everyone thinks a good spot for a beach town, even if I lose some of the city zone to the water.
In the begining I really had no plan how the city would grow, so people placed their houses a bit like they wanted, then 3 weeks later I started to take control how they was placed, so the town turning out to have 2 parts.
Old Town, Where the town first started with the cityhall and the first settlers houses.
New Town, All new citizens get their houses here placed in line with the house around them with a central plaza.
I plan to realign some of the buildings in the old town but not much more, people liked the idea of a maze like part and one in good order.
How have you planed your town? How to you pay the maintence cost and so on. Share your ideas and progress 
I am mayor of Crystal Valley on Dantooine (Chilastra server) and I've planned the town since the beginning. I made sure all the houses were in sections so roads could be seen and it had some organization. I don't want all the houses to be in lines or anything because honestly I like having houses kinda disorganized a little because it makes it more of a real city feel. I still receive a lot of compliments on the city though so I am happy with the progress.
Crystal Valley has about 90 citizens so the 2k income tax pays for about half of the maintenance of the city. Our shuttle pulls in about 150k more a week so taxes in itself pay for most of the maintenance. Donations are given by some members at 100-500k increments usually so we are doing fairly well right now with the treasury.
our city Spired rock charges 2k week and 1% sale tax..
even at high price items that didn't stop our customers.. that 1% is not THAT much... also we have a bank.. if all else fail super high items can be traded directly with cash (when both parties are present) so it is no loss either
currently the city's taxes are paying about 2/3 of the cost and players donation pays the other 1/3 not too bad really..
as our citizens grows... it will pay itself.. but it is not too bad
On that first day in Mos Ekser, Tatooine (Flurry),everything was a little chaotic so there wasn't a great deal of planning in where people put thier houses. My CityDesign Consultant(kudos to her for doing a great job) has been slowly realigning houses that they form streets.
We currently charge a 2% sales tax and 100 credits for each shuttle ride. Outside of that, most of our income is derived from hunting Krayts and selling the tissues, enterprising hunters who keep a close eye on what resources are in demand, items donated for sale with the profits going to the city treasury and the ever welcome campaign contributions. Its worked very well for us so far.
Do anyone have special awards for citizen that do things above the call of duty?
I make statues with the name of the citizen that done a effort for the town as a bit of award, something that got a warm welcome, people can give a special touch to the town.
Mayor of Vesania, Corellia(Chilastra) here. At first our placement of homes was...haphazard at best. We still have some rearranging to do to more organize the city layout, but those changes are small really.
We have had no taxes from the onset, relying simply on the generosity of certain citizens. We now, thanks to that generosity, have a very large treasury that will last us several months at Rank 4(City).
And yes, we also have a few statues to commemorate or memorialize some of our outstanding citizens. Most notably those who donated a large sum of money to the treasury 
Our whole city has gone through several shifts now. We have realigned housing to ensure citizen placement and city growth. I've found the best way to handle this is to act like a real-estate agent. We place the houses and sell them.
How can you do that? Have a friend who doesn't use their lots (and preferably whose account you have access to) place thehouses. Then have them /transferstructure to the new resident. We have a nicely laid out city that will never miss a growth cycle until the cap hits. We sell the houses for fair market value.
Maintenance is generally managed by the merchants of the city, currently no taxes. If a few were going to, let us say, shirk their civic duty we would probably institute a sales tax.
One of our master architects made statues in tribute to the first mayor and Highland Expeditions first guild leader. I expanded on that idea and started creating Extraordinary ServicePlaques (Bone Armor Segments with the name changed) with the name of the character and a very, very brief description (not enough space for anythingelse)of their contribution to the city and then hang those in City Hall. When I add new ones I write a little exert in my State of City report that I do every week. People seem to appreciate it and I like being recognized for their efforts.
When we first placed our city hall, the plan was to maintain a strict grid lay out. Then our city planner went MIA. Now, we simply ask people not to place in our town square area, where we have reserved the space for our civic structures and the like. At rank 3, we have a few neighborhoods, several rows of houses surrounding our town square, and while somewhat random, it looks fairly nice. We have one district that we cannot build on being too close to a POI abandoned city area, but we've worked around it.
So far, we have had no taxes, but not every citizen has been contributing to the treasury, so as soon as our city council debates and decides on an amount, we'll impliment it.
As for governing, we have a city council with nine members on it so far, whose primary duties are simply to be there to help out new citizens, answer questions, and be the leaders of our community.
Every week, I send out a basic status report on who's in the city, how many of this and that, what we can build, pretty much the information listed on the city maintenance terminal, as well as my abilities as mayor. After that, I send out varying reports on the happenings of our city, what new bugs or issues are coming up, and anything that I feel the citizens of our city need to know about. When inspiration strikes, I also send out short stories regarding my day as a mayor. The first one came about because of the annoying thing of SWG /always/ disconnecting me when I'm typing up my emails and I loose all the information I was just working on. *Twitch.*
Recently, I've also added badges/awards/recognition for our citizens as well. I like the idea of the bone plates hanging in city hall. I've been trying to figure out what to do myself with that.
We also have a 'sister city,' or perhaps more appropiately, a rival city. All of our citizens are Rebels, and their city is run by an Imperial guild. I've gotten to know the other mayor, and we came up with an idea of hosting various PvP events between our two cities and guilds. So far, all we have done is a social hunt to get to know one another, but we had an utter blast (and boy did the Imperial/Rebel jokes fly, several times my sides hurt from laughing). I'm looking forward to our first 'war game' senerio (they outnumbered us on the social hunt, and there was several hours where I, the Rebel mayor, was the only one in a group of 8 Imperials, we're going to set up a kidnap/rescue senerio). Other ideas will be capture the city, hold the city, scavenger hunts, resource hunts, treasure hunts, our own 'missions' set up with clues and the like, story contests, and decoration contests on our list of ideas so far.
The bugs we've worked around, the nerfing of /citywarn we've dealt with, I really hate the max limit of decorations right now, since many of us were looking forward to beautifying our city, keeping spaces clear for gardens we won't be able to place for awhile now. (But at least every week our city looks different.) What I wouldn't personally give for some way to cut/paste into SWG email, that would be the most wonderful tool I can think of as a mayor. That, and personal mailing alias. We have a city council, which differs from the Guild, which differs slightly from our citizen registery, our hunting party, our merchants, our... you get the idea. I'm half way pondering getting out a file and starting one for this game, just to keep track of everything. But **edit**, I hate having to write up my status reports every week and hope I don't get disconnected on. It's to the point where I'm tempted to break out my HTML skills again and start up a website for us, but I'm hoping that one of the citizens will volunteer for it first.
As for how things are working in actuality, I hear back froma very small percentage of our citizens every week on pending issues that require the city to vote on. So it basically becomes that after one week, those that speak up on an issue get their wishes, and if noone speaks up, then I simply do what I think is best (or what I want to do), email the citizens of the changes, and repeat the next week. It is very frustrating to have so little feed back from the citizens, but since I'm still mayor, I guess they don't have any problems with me so far (other than perhaps the sheer amount of email I send out to them on a weekly basis).
Lady Illyria Makarae, Mayor
Staff Corporal of the Rebellion
Firelake Stronghold, Talus (Kauri)
DreamWatcher wrote:
Do anyone have special awards for citizen that do things above the call of duty?
I make statues with the name of the citizen that done a effort for the town as a bit of award, something that got a warm welcome, people can give a special touch to the town.
That is an awesome idea.
Mos Mesric, Tatooine on the Kettemoor server is the city that I am Mayor of. I was not the original Mayor nor was I there for it's birth. The city has a nice layout to it. It's situated between the Squill Caves and Tusken Bunker. We currently charge 100 credits on shuttle tickets, 10% property tax, 250credits a week income tax and a 3% sales tax. We have 61 citizens at the moment and I am proud to say that we broke even this past week (only my second week in office). My goal right now is to attract commerce to the city and to make sure that all the civic structures are being utilized.
I really like the idea of using statues to give props to those who really care and are there to help when it's needed. Very nice touch.