Scenery's SUBURBIA

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

Those karma events every 3 minutes seem a little too frequent, unless they'll be small events most of the time.

the goal here is to actually get people to pay attention to god and most of the neutraly god events won't be anything significant. anyway we did taxes today and they got a little loving complex so im going to do a writeup on this stuff for reference

   taxes exist to buy cops and priests guns and everyone social security aka death insurance. currently we got four kinds of taxes, three of which are pretty simple. sales tax is a percent of an item's total price added to purchases, export tax is a percent of revenue earned by selling stuff to the japanese who exist to transmit materials into money, and tick tax is a percent of how much you earn passively. death tax is where stuff starts to get tricky as a few unintuitive mechanics emerge.

   when you die two things happen before you respawn. first, you drop a portion of your income you have stored in the bank, which right now is an arbitrary 10% for simplification, as well as any cash on hand. the government then either taxes or subsidizes a percent of the income lost from the bank depending on current policy choices. furthermore the government can also set a flat tax forgiveness/full subsidy threshold where if you are below this poverty line deaths are automatically either fully subsidized or not taxed.

   as an example suppose joe got gunned down in the streets with $50 on him and $100 in the bank. because of the arbitrary 10% he drops 10$ from his bank as well as the $50 he was carrying on the ground. the government has an insurance payout of 10% and thus pays $1 to joe as compensation for his bank losses. joe's total losses are $59. if the government instead chose to tax death at the same 10% rate, joe would pay them $1 and his total losses would be $61.

   addenum: having both taxes and insurance active at once is dumb as it just becomes tax%-insurance%. tax and insurance rates will be changeable with law points.

[Ad Bot]

[Bloo Kirby the 2nd]

update: pope

make it so you can give the pope undertale

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

make it so you can give the pope undertale

[Element]

-snip-

this is good stuff right here cant wait for suburbsia

[Gytyyhgfffff]

update: psychologist

the psychologist is a job where the player is given the ability to interview prisoners for mental deficiencies after they are arrested. they both sit down in the two chairs in the office shown in the image and have a heart to heart conversation. if the psychologist is already interviewing a prisoner at the time the prisoner is added into a queue so the psychologist can interview him later. yes this is a silly job but it has the potential for good humor and fun so we're adding it.
we've thought of a new good idea for jail which is just not have a jail at all. once people are arrested, they turn into 'prisoners' but they can still walk around the map like anyone else and they are unable to do any illegal activity. they wouldn't be able to buy/craft/pick up guns until they're released from 'jail'. this is the best idea for jail ever because it isn't jail at all. 'prisoners' will be able to build and do anything else normal except they just can't kill or harvest drugs or buy drugs or do any other illegal activities. the game will not let the profit off of illegal activities so if they harvest drugs or grind corpses or whatever they won't get any resources from it. 'prisoners' will receive a prison uniform though and will not be able to take it off until their jail time is up. this is the next generation of city rpg jails because it isn't absolute boring bullstuff like all the other kinds of jail.

[startacker]

What are you talking about I love sitting in a jail cell for 10 minutes.

[Element]

i have found my dream job

also forget jail i love you for this

[Legodude77]

Why stop there? How about an optional "labor camp" where prisoners can choose to work menial jobs? They could get a little bit of time off for working and whatever profits they make from the job goes back to the city. This should be optional because like you said there shouldn't be a jail.

[TheLeaderOfTheRebellion]

restrictions are boring in general but thats better than mousefire(1); at a rock for 3 hrs sim

[Gytyyhgfffff]

update: taxes, social security, city budget allocation, jail, law points, and newscasters

so there's 3 kinds of taxes that the mayor can change:
  - income tax: citizens have to pay this tax when they receive their paycheck. how much money they have earned from selling items/food is also factored into this tax.
  - sales tax: citizens have to pay this tax when they purchase stuff. its just like sales tax in the real world.
  - death tax: citizens pay this tax when they die. when citizens die, they drop 10% of the money on the ground that is in their bank, and that 10% is taxed. (you cannot see death tax in the image because social security is currently selected which is incompatible with death tax)
the little information buttons on the tax gui swatches display the same information i just posted here. we'll be adding more of those information buttons to more of the gui stuff so you don't have to use /help to figure out what is going on. the above images of the mayor gui are not final because they still need more information buttons.

death tax is special because you can turn off death tax completely in favor for social security, which is the exact opposite of the death tax. instead of citizens being taxed when they die, the government pays a percentage of the money lost from a killed player's bank account. the poor cutoff in the gui is the point at which the government pays all the money the player lost upon death. for instance, if the cutoff was 1000 dollars and a player lost 500 dollars on death, no matter what the social security percentage is at they will have all their money covered. if they lose 1500 dollars then the amount they're paid is based off of the percentage. there'll be a default poor cutoff set at either 100 or 150 so that when new players join they aren't immediately forgeted over from being killed by a murderer a whole bunch of times. the money max is the max amount of money that the government will pay for social security. for instance, if the max is set to 1000 and the player loses 1500, the government will pay at most 1000 dollars even if the social security percentage is set to 100%.

you can't have death tax and social security turned on at the same time because that wouldn't make any sense.
the mayor is in charge of giving out money to various institutions in suburbia, being the police department and the church. the gui shown to the right is not representative of what suburbia will be in the end, because we plan that the mayor will be able to give the institutions money based on a percentage of city income per tick. this is so that the government doesn't go bankrupt when a forgetful mayor doesn't reduce a set amount of money for the institutions' budget. in the budget gui you will see two more additions: budget history for the city and a take government money option. the budget history shows how much money the government has made off of taxes and how much money they have spent. this will let mayors adjust their budgets more easily. the take government money option is a corruption feature, as the mayor can take how much money they would like from the government (note: the 40 million dollars shown on the gui will probably not be possible in the real game, so the mayor won't be able to become a millionaire incredibly easily like that).
miscellaneous updates:

i'm not sure if i've posted about this already so i'll just post it here. laws are purchased with law points now as well as taxes. a change in one tax will cost one law point. laws also cost one law point. one law point is generated once per minute which means the mayor is always able to do things but he's just restricted to not making a huge amount of changes quickly.

i'm not sure if i have mentioned this before either but there's radio news for god events when they occur. there's multiple newscasters all with different reactions and the mayor can choose which newscaster to hire as seen in the gui images above.

the jail has been coded. here's what the jail is for suburbia and why it is better than a normal city rpg jail:

we've thought of a new good idea for jail which is just not have a jail at all. once people are arrested, they turn into 'prisoners' but they can still walk around the map like anyone else and they are unable to do any illegal activity. they wouldn't be able to buy/craft/pick up guns until they're released from 'jail'. this is the best idea for jail ever because it isn't jail at all. 'prisoners' will be able to build and do anything else normal except they just can't kill or harvest drugs or buy drugs or do any other illegal activities. the game will not let the profit off of illegal activities so if they harvest drugs or grind corpses or whatever they won't get any resources from it. 'prisoners' will receive a prison uniform though and will not be able to take it off until their jail time is up. this is the next generation of city rpg jails because it isn't absolute boring bullstuff like all the other kinds of jail.

for people interested for how much progress we're making i've started and finished all of this except the law points and newscasters in the past day. the only reason why suburbia hasn't been receiving a lot of updates is because of my laziness and homework. except a lot more progress in the next three weeks because of winter break and me being a lot more motivated to work on this than usual.

the to-do list that i've made says that i have 21 out of 29 things done which is 72%. if i finish up the laws the mayor can enact over the next three weeks then there won't be a lot of suburbia left to work on.

[The Resonte!]

holy balls its finally happenng

[NotBomberguy]

yes very good much hype yes

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

first, farming is changed into something baseraiders-esque as now you draw from some global farmland thing to plant crops because they became to important to be freely generated by everyone. the beginning money maker that was farming has been replaced with a junk crop which is independent of any restraint and explicitly made to be sold to the japanese. more details on the new farming mechanics later.

second, we ran into a problem with items as they could be used as a bank because you can't drop them and they were easily stored risk free. to fix this 20% of item worth is now dropped on death. item worth is the sum of all items stored and an individual item's worth is the price you sell it to the japanese for which is very close to the price of the materials. the cheapest items are dropped first. if an item can't be divided up into cash while maintaining the 20%, such as if a guy has only one gun in a shop or something, the item disappears and cash equal to the percent that would drop is dropped while the owner is compensated for the remainder. item drop percent is 10% higher than cash drop to make items a less viable wealth holder than money and so people will gank each other in the mines.

also we looked at the original city rpg job system which is mostly stuff like spawn with a gun and a different income and decided to apply it to this in the form of passive buffs anyone can take called perks. perks are minor buffs with a range of effects from increasing passive income to spawing with a stuffty gun or having two votes instead of one in elections and a stuffload more. everyone gets one perk that can be changed every five minutes.

some of the ones we have from memory
-always know where the mayor is
-increased alligator limit
-slower hunger
-one free cuff escape every few minutes
-faster hunger but another buff slot
-some more i forgot

[Element]

this is looking better and better i cant wait to play it, will there be some play test phase before you begin hosting it publicly or just gonna say forget it

[The Resonte!]

-increased alligator limit

the only stat that matters