Ah tax.. one of the most hated aspects of both life and Monopoly City Streets.
Using tax to limit the number of streets a player can control is just ridiculous. Rather, tax should be a way to challenge players to build smart and control exponential growth.
Streets should require a base tax based on their potential income, probably length and number of intersections. This base should be high enough that a street will cost the player a considerable amount of money if not developed. It should not be terribly difficult to make a profit, but discourage hoarding of streets. A good rule of thumb might be that a street filled with the cheapest of buildings should just break even.
The second source of tax should be income, regardless if from rent or trading. Perhaps this should be a fixed rate, or maybe there should be "tax brackets" that correspond to net worth or daily/weekly/? income. These brackets could result in players manipulating their income to avoid tax, which might be an interesting aspect of the game.
There could be fees for certain operations in the game as well, for instance a posting fee for auctions, a demolition fee, etc.
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Setting a base tax on the basis of street characteristics would be unworkable and would end up making the coding very complex. A better and simpler rule would be to have progressive taxation, something that is done in practice in a lot of countries. A certain level of income is tax-free and subsequent income brackets are taxed at higher rates, with a peak taxation rate somewhere between 30-40%. For example, you can set a threshold of 500,000, with the first tax bracket from 500,001 to 1,500,000 at 10%, 1,500,001 to 3,000,000 at 20% and a peak tax rate of 30% for income above 10,000,000.
ReplyDeleteA fee for demolition is a good idea as the way it works on MCS makes destruction easier than construction at times.
I think that a maximum tax level could also work.
ReplyDeleteHowever as it stands there simply are not enough sinks for in game funds....infact the only 2 i can see at all are the negative chance cards and the income tax...but we can essentially ignore the income tax as all its doing is limiting inflow of funds rather than taking them out of the game space.
I would suggest a property tax, a tax per street and per building (perhapes maintenance costs, that has a monopoly flair to it) But a cost/sink that is bassed on the size of a players portfolio would be good. This is to be paid daily after income has been recieved.
I would still keep an income tax as well, starting at some smallish fixed amount, then progressing onto 10% (again for the monopoly flair) but i would keep the tax rate rising as income levels go up..perhapes as high as 60% for the real big earners.
If you really wanted to get nasty you could also charge a capital gains tax bassed on any profit recieved when selling a property for more than its actual face value...
a street's base tax could simply be a proportion of its value ie where you currently get 10% of a street's value as income that should be the tax cost instead - it makes sense that way anyway as IRL empty property is a financial drain not income.
ReplyDeleteThat would go a little way to discourage hoarding of large amounts of empty streets. Of course they could always just put one or two buildings up to offset the cost so may want to add a multiplier in to increase the burden on tycoons eg, 1.2x for every 10 streets starts you off painlessly but by 50 streets the tax has doubled, by 100 streets it's ~5x the base tax
simple to implement, not too onerous (as long as you develop your streets) but prevents all but the most determined trillionaire from trying to buy up every street in a city.
A tax on buildings I don't like as it's either a flat rate - in which case it discriminates against new players and is inconsequential to rich ones - or you make it a progressive tax rate in line with building costs in which case you're really just reducing the income per building, it doesn't add any new dimension.
i like the idea of capital gains tax tho - help reduce the profitability of dodgy trades...