10.4.4 Ministry of the Treasury
The Ministry of the Treasury is responsible for maintaining the operating budgets of all the ministries but itself and the Steward. They ensure that the city has enough gold sovereigns to keep it running smoothly. The commands associated with the Ministry of the Treasury are: FUNDS TREASURY - Shows you how much is in the Treasury. - Only the city Steward or his aides may transfer more gold from the city coffers to the Treasury. This is to keep the city's gold more secure by requiring multiple points of contact. ALLOCATE <amount> TO <ministry> - Transfers funds from the Treasury to a Ministry. Must be done from the Council Room. ALLOCATE <amount> FROM <ministry> - Transfers funds from a Ministry back to the Treasury. Must be done from the Council Room. CITY COMMS or CITY COMM SUMMARY - Shows a summary table of the current commodity status of your city. CITY COMM RETRACT <amount> <comm> FROM QUARTERMASTER - Retract the stated quantity of commodities from the city quartermaster so that the Ministry of Trade may make use of it. Only the Treasurer may do this. FUNDS [ministry] - See the funds each ministry possesses. This must be done from the Council Room. READREVLOG/REVLOG - Works the same as READLOG in HELP CITYCOMMANDS, except that it is a log of incoming and outgoing city revenue. WRITELOG REVENUE <text> - Write to the city's revenue logs. Loans ----- The Treasury can also organize a loan from the Esterport banks to supplement a city in need of funds. Interest is, of course, expected in return. CITY LOANS - See some basic information about the current rate your city would be paying at and if there are any outstanding loans. CITY LOAN APPROVE <amount> GOLD FROM ESTERPORT - Requests a loan up to the specified value from Esterport. This command approves a loan for Development to use within the next 24 hours, but by itself does nothing. Your city doesn't go into debt just from using the command. - With a loan in place, the Ministry of Development can then opt to build, or upgrade, a production facility using the approved loan. See below for how to use this approved loan. >>> A loan is repaid back with 20% interest. <<< e.g. You borrow 1 million from Esterport, the amount you have to repay is 1.2 million. CITY LOAN RETRACT - If you made a mistake or change your mind, CITY LOAN RETRACT will retract the approval. CITY LOAN REPAYMENT RATE <amount> GOLD - Loan debts are repaid at a rate of 10,000 gold per Howling directly from the city's coffers - i.e. no need to micromanage Ministry budgets to ensure you have enough. This 10,000 gold repayment stacks for each facility you currently have on loan. If you have one facility that was built from loan, you pay 10,000 gold. Two buildings, you pay 20,000 gold and so on. - The Treasurer can adjust how much will be repaid each month, choosing to pay more than the baseline 10,000 gold per facility. Each Howling, the city will lose that specified amount PER FACILITY ON LOAN from its coffers towards loan repayment. What happens if your city runs out of gold for repayments? The facility will immediately close down. Facilities that are closed will not accrue further debt that needs to be repaid, you just stop losing gold each Howling from that facility until it opens again. CITY LOAN REQUEST EQUITY OF <amount> GOLD ON <facility> - The Treasurer Minister (not aides!) can take out an equity loan on an already-built facility, putting that facility into debt and adding the specified gold immediately to the city's coffers. This works almost identical to the normal loan - the request value + 20% interest gets added to the facility's loan debt. Please note that this isn't possible if the specified amount + the existing loan debt on that facility would exceed the facility's total gold value. Useful if you want to immediately raise funds in the city for something, too! Development command: CITY PRODUCTION <CONSTRUCT|UPGRADE> <facility> ON LOAN - This starts the construction process on the specified facility, using a loan that the treasurer has approved. If the approved loan amount is less than the facility cost, the remainder will be taken from Development's budget as per usual. If the approved loan amount is higher than the facility cost, only the facility cost (+20% interest) will be added to its debt. - For example, the Treasurer approves a loan of 3 million gold, facility construction would cost 5 million gold. 2 million gold will need to be covered from Development's budget, and the rest will be loaned from Esterport.
