I loved the idea of shared tax, mainly because it was supposed to bring more life to territories other than WW or Everfall. But i gotta admit that new system is VERY BAD. My Company owns MD which is one of the most upgraded territories. Yet we struggle with getting enough tax to even pay upkeep, not even gonna mention gold for upgrades or flat company income for crafters etc.
As you can see our WW is nicely upgraded with 15 upgrades. Yet net income is 2/3 of START UPKEEP. Making it not only profitable to own, but also not profitable to upgrade. Yes, yes - more upgrades equal more income. But the amount of gold and time dumped into upgrades and townboard missions is just insane.
Most of the companies on Ulthar own a territory, but dont even wanna bother upgrade it cuz its not profitable.
Also why do we even have tax system and sliders, if we cant change those?
AGS i love you very very much and i appreciate your work, but this is a serious mistake, misunderstanding or miscalculation.
After a certain point (<~1.9 million coins globally per week) the territory system just becomes unprofitable. There also isn’t much variance of the required amount based on the number of upgrades. It really only changes when you add upgrades. The range is from ~1.9 Million to ~2.2 Million. Keep in mind the lowest is actually at 39 upgrades but that comes with the risk of getting up to 8 downgrades from one war or invasion loss. With less than 11 upgrades there is no risk of regression. This also doesn’t include the cost of any territory/housing buffs.
However, this is not how territories are upgraded. Usually players will not do any work in finding out how much the server is actually making in global taxes and will upgrade too fast. If you were to do 2 upgrades every day the required amount per week would nearly double as the only purpose some of the upgrades serve is to increase the upkeep you have to pay.
TL;DR: If the server is low pop, stop throwing coins away on the territories. Don’t start upgrades after the first half of the current period.
Great post, althou why would low-pop servers be just “fucked” at this point? Why shouldnt we invest in territories, why would anyone fight for one?
Servers with so low pop that they aren’t able to afford territories should be merged. However, it seems really bad to implement a system that is not resilient to a dying pop.
Ulthar, server i’am on is at about 900 people in peak times and i gotta say that i like that.
Its not too hard to find parties for dungeons, farm spots are usually free or not highly contested. Why would we be punished at this point?
Well it also doesn’t help that you’re on a FSW. It’s funny how AGS implemented a system with static costs while having two completely separate economies. FSWs don’t have the same coin supply as “legacy” and are closed to merges or transfers even from other FSWs.
imo they need to take gold out of it. there should be no cost to declare. no cost to upgrade and no direct income for the territory owners. if the owner doesn’t upgrade in a reasonable amount of time the ai should start one.
they should add other buffs or serious tax discounts for owning a territory.
all the gold from taxes should just be a gold sink.
To be fair the game itself is being killing by it self. Also theyre fixing this town management issue. They are raising the trading tax from 2.50 to 5.00 which is where most of the gold comes from
That’s not a fix with the old system we had all territories at 2.5% tax and got along just fine the new system is just stupid shouldn’t bad income amounts off of how upgraded the territory is
Why can’t we change taxes for specific cities, eventhou we still got sliders to change taxes?
If you wanna stick to the current system of sharing taxes across all cities. Why would some cities get more than the others? The entire goal of that system, along with shared storage is to give freedom to players on which city they wanna focus on.
New system doesnt quite work for low pop servers. As everyone can see lately, even old legacy servers are getting like 1k players at peak, which is not enough for the NEW system to work out. With no constant server merges (which i wouldnt like anyway), servers are dying because of the tax system. Territories are not getting upgraded cuz its not profitable, companies leave the servers cuz they cant fullfill their needs, wars are not a thing cuz why would they take a territory if they are gonna be losing money anyway?)
Because it wouldn’t make sense with the newer tax system?
Because those cities are more popular? A Everfall or Windsward is many times more popular than a First Light in almost every metric. I still think one of Prasinos original suggestions would be far better: splitting just the trading income over every town, to allow incentives to run town buffs, etc. I’m not sure it makes sense to split all of the taxes.
I think almost everyone but AGS agrees on that. We predicted it even before Fresh Start servers came out. I still hope they create some sort of fix outside of merges for this.
The problem is that upkeep doesn’t scale with playerbase and income does. If server is popping and super popular… everybody makes stonks and everybody is happy. If server is doing badly… In old system you had at least 2 towns that made positive money on small server. Now money gets distributed so basically all towns become not profitable if you pay the upkeep. This system sucks for small servers…
I would recommend AGS to switch the upkeep cost to somehow rely on playerbase. Like for every tax income, it adds to the upkeep cost. Like % amount of tax income goes to upkeep cost. So then you can make a choice to go full stonks or pay % of your income to upkeep and prevent town from downgrading and have happy citizens. Make it scale similar to the income system. ANY sort of scale helps low pop servers, even simple one. You could start with something simple to code and make and improve later. Put bandage before actually fixing it. Better than what it is now.
I’m curious, you want to keep a city and you don’t want to pay anything for it and throw it all up the other players’ asses?! so you might be kidding…
Ofc i wanna dedicate to my city. Theres no issue paying upkeep. But why would even someone want to keep a city if its just gold sink with no positives?
Me and my company are working our asses off doing Townboards, paying weekly to keep the city growing. Why would we get punished for such thing or playing on a server with 900 peak players?
Personally I like the pop on Ulthar, you can still get dungeons parties going and be free to gather stuff. As we can see on New World Server Status - Player Count and Population almost HALF of the servers are going on similiar or lower pop. Makes no sense to upgrade any cities even if its fully upgraded - you still wont profit out of it because of huge Upkeep cost.
Cause they’re incompetent?