Cities can now gain debt! Hurrah!

Seriously though, we've introduced a couple of new functions for the Treasurer Minister and Development that relate to obtaining gold loans to build facilities in the new Production system, detailed below. This is needed because the release of Mining and ??? down the road will introduce new production facilities, and we're aware some cities wouldn't have enough gold to cover that (or barely have enough to cover Farming's).

Please note that this ONLY covers the gold portion of the facility construction/upgrade costs. You will still need to obtain the commodities yourselves.


The Treasurer Minister (not aides!) can approve a loan as follows:
------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

>>> 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.

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.

If you made a mistake or change your mind, CITY LOAN RETRACT will retract the approval.


The Ministry of Development can build a facility using a loan as follows:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
e.g. 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.


How does the loan work?
-----------------------
The production facility will have a debt value attached to it (equal to the loan value + the 20% interest), which Development and Treasurer ministries can see if they check the CITY PRODUCTION INFO on that facility.

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 as follows:
CITY LOAN REPAYMENT RATE <amount> GOLD
Each Howling, the city will lose that specified amount PER FACILITY ON LOAN from its coffers towards loan repayment.

The Treasury can use CITY LOANS to review what the repayment rate is set to, and what loans exist.


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.


Neat, but we already used our gold to pay for our facilities. This sucks.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
But wait, there's more (debt)! Let me tell you all about equity loans.

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!


IN SUMMARY
----------
New Treasurer commands:
CITY LOANS
CITY LOAN APPROVE <amount> GOLD FROM ESTERPORT
CITY LOAN RETRACT
CITY LOAN REPAYMENT RATE <amount> GOLD
CITY LOAN REQUEST EQUITY OF <amount> GOLD ON <facility>

New Development command:
CITY PRODUCTION CONSTRUCT/UPGRADE <facility> ON LOAN

Penned by my hand on Quensday, the 12th of Variach, in the year 482 MA.
Discuss this post on our forums:
http://forums.aetolia.com/discussion/3243/announce-post-2988-city-loans-debt