Simcity Tax Rate

[Karleen Chura]

Please note - the figure of 20% tax is calculated from levels and ratios for happiness and population, it's not as simple as happiness multiplied by population! A 20% tax rate is not simply 20% of your total population number in Simoleon form. If it were this simple an equation, early level Mayors would receive barely anything and find it a real struggle to make money for a long time, whereas higher level Mayors could buy everything in sight and would dominate the Markets. We didn't think this was very fair, particularly for a free-to-play game, and the balance of the game would have suffered too much.

Actually, what I noticed is that it seems to be 20% of your base population based on number of residences without the adders for parks, transport etc. So even though I have a population of 350,000 without all of the population boosters my population should be around 72,000. Big difference, but that makes my sense for why my daily tax is less than $15,000.

One thing which is quite obvious is that the tax is good at lower levels but exponentially decreases with every population. I was able to raise the tax to 10k when I had 100k population, but now I am at 150k population and the tax is only 12k. (Both at 99% happiness)

I got the same BS answer from EA. if you really want to know how your paid the 20 percent is absolutely meaningless. using regression trend lines on Excel I have formulated the equations, note this is with 100% happiness. Y=.018x+10199 I started this with my population at 110704. This tells you how much money one will receive with x=pop. Y=-.06ln(x)+.8063 this is the percentage you get per population this is a downward logarithmic trendline. the first equation has an R value of 1 and I have 9 different points, an R value of one is perfect. the second trend line has an R value of .976 which is close to perfect.

I notice that most of my cities with a reasonable police coverage have a rate (on the graph) between 15 and 25. My news-ticker (advisors) does not seem to correlate to crime rate since I've gotten complaints about "oppression" with a crime rate of 20 and riots in cities with virtually no crime (with the understanding that the riot is a function of general unhappiness and not necessarily of crime.) In another city (one which never has had a police force) I have a crime rate of 70 but the sims aren't complaining too much. Most of them live in high density R$ "project" style housing and the education system is relatively new. In another (large) city I had a crime rate of over 100, but I do think the sims were complaining then.

On a side note, have you ever noticed that a city with no education or police force can have virtually no crime? I think as long as those sims have "full employment" (mostly in-city Dirty Industry and nearby Cs$), they will not turn to crime. Whereas the city described above with a crime rate of 70 has a population of 50,000 but only 10,000 jobs thus might explain.

I usually forget to put in police stations and get a crime rate of about 12. Maybe try putting in more playgrounds and parks and generally cleaning up the area, rather than a whole bunch of police? Or cut police funding so they aren't arresting random people in addition to the criminals?

Also, if you somehow want to hold your plans in building a jail, you can increase the funding of your police department. Increased funding usually helps, but keeping it at 100% funding is alright. Problem can arise when you decrease the budget.

To get a riot, I think your mayor rating must be negative... -50? Also for jails you can build them very soon.. a budget for them set to 4$ is usually enough for normal crime coverage early on.. you can check by prisoners/cells

Crime can also be reduced by increasing road access. I know this sounds odd, but there is a relationship between how far a tile is from the nearest road and the likelihood of crime in that tile. This is why airports, universities, etc always have crime.

That's odd, I always thought airports had high crime rates because they were open spaces that weren't too heavily occupied or guarded. Crime usually doesn't come up for me, and I hover around the 20 range.

The police don't patrol the countryside.. they only patrol via roads.. furthermore their "reach" into a lot is generally about 3 tiles.. so form every road point the police protect about 3 tiles and if you surround especially larger lots with roads, the police get better coverage of the lot.. and if they don't cover it they can make no arrests

In response to SimCity's crime generation, it is vastly underrated. I mean, c'mon only 10 assaults a month in a tile of 300,000. Good one, not even Fargo, ND's crime rate is that low. So if crime is hurting your sims, just remember that it should be a lot worse, considering the game's basis of America.

Also, the graph view of crime vs the data view of crime on the map doesn't seem to add up sometimes, especially if you have a very high population density. In one of my cities with about 1,000,000 residential and 3,000,000 commercial (mostly skyscrapers), crime is very rampant on the "data view" but hovers around 30-40 on the graph.. the police advisor keeps complaining about crime but the Mysims always applaud about how safe their neighborhoods are.. go figure

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Up until about 450k population, City A was able to maintain a stable demand for R with 9.2/9.0/9.3 tax rates. However, demand for all R suddenly tanked into the negative! After opening new cities in the region and checking CAPs with plugins, I found that regional demand for R was still sky-high and that CAPs for R in City A were 30% at the most. It was only after adusting taxes about -0.3% for all R that the demand for R in City A returned to levels that reflected CAP-adjusted regional demand for R.

Now that's an interesting question. I don't know a specific answer, but as my margin grows in the city, after applying such ordinances as I usually want, I start dropping tax rates to try and keep the profit at a reasonable rate, somewhere around $2,000 a month. My largest city with only 375K Sims has a current, across the board rate of 7% except ID which is shut out. I generally drop rates by 0.2% when the spirit moves me, and have never experienced any demand shut outs that I did not deliberately cause.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Sim population is not static. It grows, ages and dies, so you have to keep things attractive for new blood. When a neighborhood matures, I close any schools that have less than 10 enrollment, or sometimes increase the number of lower wealth zoning, to attract more R$ needing education. This may require serious urban renewal using the dezoning tool (v) followed by some new zoning.

I know in SC3K, neutral tax rates got lower as the city increased in size; SC4 might still have a lesser version of that mechanic lingering in the code (back in SC3K, it was so severe that a large city could hardly tax its residents at all without complaints).

Interesting, but why do I have the impression that SC4 was totally new code? However, I think that's a good idea as income increases to have a lower neutral rate. The city I mentioned above is now down to 5% but the income is well above 10K per month.

To see the neutral tax rate ingame you can use the Census Repository Query used in my (or in one of the original Census Repository buildings). The query uses the above "hard-coded" table (it is coded in the LUA script). I don't know if the data are correct or where they came from. For example, what happens in the case of a mostly business city, with a large commercial but a relatively small residential population, are the neutral rates the same for both the commercial and the residential sector? I have discovered that the neutral tax rate is available as a game-supplied value in one of the game's scripts. I will soon update the Census script so that it uses this value instead of the above table. But not being my own work, I'm not going to release this, so feel free to ask me to send you a copy if you want.

I will soon update the Census script so that it uses this value instead of the above table. But not being my own work, I'm not going to release this, so feel free to ask me to send you a copy if you want.

Depends on the calculation the simulator is performing at the time. Population for health, education, age, neutral tax rate, population display and residential demand are based only on residential population. Since sims don't live in commercial or industrial buildings, the commercial and industrial population are only a reflection of how many sims are working in that sector and as such the "population" is only used for demand calculation, as far as I know.

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