Player City Info

[Martok]

A mayor with Civic Policy I can set the city to "require zoning rights." When a city requires zoning rights no one may place a structure in the city without permission. The mayor and the militia can grant a person permission to place structures for 24 hours with /grantZoningRights. Using /grantZoningRights again on someone that already has rights to your city will revoke the rights.

[Martok]

As we don't have a Politician Forum, I'm posting this here in the Test Center forums. This is where I play and this is where Politicians are currently happening.

Yesterday I set a Corellian City Hall upon the face of Corellia. I have survived the experience and am now ready to talk about the joys and the sorrows of a first day Mayor.

Placing the hall is an exciting experience. Searching for and clearing the right spot needs to be done. Placment is a one time deal so the pressure is on to get it right the first time. You don't get a second chance unless you're carrying a second hall in your pocket.

You name your Outpost during the placement process. The outpost must have a name that is unique to the planet upon when it is created. So while there can be a New Austin on Corellia as well as on Tatooine, there cannot be two New Austins on the same planet. I chose to name my outpost New Hope. It's a name with many many meanings and no two people are likely to think of it in the same way, but it seemed to me to be a very fitting name for the first player built city in the universe.

Here's where you run into your first problem. For the next week your city will be an outpost, with only a 150m radius. If you're not on absolutely flat unbroken ground, then you're soon going to run out of room and any city planning you did will be out the window. This is what happened to me. The players moved in, we had a start on a semblance of order, I turned my back and houses were placed where I didn't want them to be. Then I went to bed. When I got up 10 more houses were there and the areas I had planned for features were covered.

This may not be a problem for city halls going down where player housing already is, but for new outposts it's a problem.

One possible solution. Provide a grace period for housing placement. For the next 12 hours after city hall placement, recalculate the radius based upon the number of declared residents appearing. So in after 2 hours there are 10 residents, then the city would become a village with the 200m radius. Thus allowing a bit of planning in placement to take place as the city is first created. At the end of twelve hours, lock the city down for its first week.

Currently New Hope can be described as Urban Blight.

Immediately after placement, the Mayor is going to have one question on her mind: How much maintenence money should I put in. Well to judge by the display at the City Management Terminal the answer is "I dunno."

The Terminal currently displays neither the maintenence rate nor the time of the next election. Hopefully this can be looked at and added to the displayed information.

For those wondering, maintenence is currently expected to be on a weekly schedule instead of hourly. So once a week the full maintenence for your city will be debited against your treasury. Currently that amount is 50k plus add-ons. Planetary map registration is an 5k per week add-on. A city specialization is a 20k per week add-on. Add-ons add up.

One of the next things the mayor notices is all the new email. There's a new email to the mayor on city creation. There's a new email anytime anyone sets something up in the city, there's a new email whenever someone declares residency. In other words, there's a lot of email. It's times like these you wish you had a more full featured email client that could sort things into a city mailbox.

One wonderful feature that I was asked about many times last night is that spawns do not occur within the current radius of your city. No more lairs on your front doorstep.

Those are just some of my thoughts after my first Mayoral experience. I'll be bring you more as time marches forward.

To recap the problems I've seen so far:

1. City radius does not take into account influx of residents immediately after creation.

2. No way to control building placement

3. No display of maintenence requirements

4. No election/maintenence clock display

5. Your mailbox becomes Spam Central Station (See number 5 below)

And to recap the delights:

1. It's a city! Yipee!

2. No more front door spawns!

3. You sell a lot of houses!

4. Tourist Traffic increases!

5. You get a lot of mail. (See number 5 above)

6. It's a city! Yipee!

[Chris]

so basically we need to figure up how big of a space we need for our city hall and block off the rest of the area within the starting radius with structures until the mayor can get that skill for zoning rights

[MArkham]

Well since we already have the houses placed This wont be as bad. At 150 meters, depending on how large the city hall is. We can place it in the large street between the large houses and incorperate most of the town allready. What we really need for sure is the town name.