TaxIt/Economy

We have time and money, and ways of investing money to make more money over time. This implies an economy. We need sources and sinks. Possibly varying in importance over the game. Options?

Ok, I've roughed out a scenario (sheet "scenario 1") on the google drive spreadsheet I shared to you.

It assumes a self-contained player, who is collecting as much in tolls as he's having to pay out to other players, and who isn't contributing to the king's central city.

I assumed the river tax in years 1 to 7 would be : 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4
and, to balance that, I assumed he sent a decreasing fraction of his goods by river in each year: 50, 40, 30, 20, 10, 0, 0

I also assumed he paid nothing (net) in cash bribes to other players, and only 4 out of his starting 20 to get his initial city placements.

The result it that, after paying for his cities and production spots, he has an exponential amount spare to spend on roads, from year 3 onwards: 0, 0, 10, 20, 40, 80, 160

Possible Sinks:

Charge for toll booths (possibly an income charge, rather than a cash charge)

Make collecting tolls not 100% efficient (so, of the toll raised, the tollbooth owning player gets half, and the king gets half)

Incentive for building something else (monuments? city improvements? pyramids? railways?)

Hazards that need to be protected against (fire, flood, thieves)

Get the player to bid on things (turn order? opportunity to build their 3rd, 4th and 5th city?)

Alternative, offer cash to VP conversion at some rate at the end, that won't discourage useful road building, but will discourage paving the entire space.

I think I'd say the exponential increase in income is *itself* undesirable. For one thing, it's very much rich-get-richer; providing some kind of at least potential catchup mechanism is desirable in most games. (That is, assuming the VPs are also increasing at better-than-linear rate?)

Possible ways to prevent exponential increase: There are negative options, such as a tax on income [maybe above a certain amount] - maybe even a cap. I think better than just negative is to also add positive options such as things you can commit some amount of money to per turn to get some other benefit, and that are powerful enough that you'd want to reduce your income die from the 80s level down to 30-40 in order to get that benefit. Maybe railways (or other things that you suggest such as city improvements) cost some money per turn but have some corresponding powerful effect. --AC

: The inducement can't be financial (such as cutting transport costs), because that's just investing money to get yet more money which, if the rate of return is worth doing at all, just makes things worse
: So the inducement would have to be victory points, or something that converts into an increased chance of victory points, such as aid in gaining control of other cities, or protect versus the same for your own.
: Having bandit attacks (or even militia from other cities) and caravan guards who can protect shipments from being robbed (but who need paying), would be one route. Perhaps tie it in with a periodic natural disaster that inhibits travel along nearby routes (thus promoting creating networks with multiple ways to route around obstacles)? I fear that would drag too much game time away from the network stuff we wanted to focus upon, but I mention it in order to list all options.

If we revisited the idea of routes having a maximum transport capacity, then a good money sink would be upgrading level1-roads to being level2-roads that can carry more than 3 of one good in a single summer caravan load.