• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Dev Diary: Tile Upkeep Explained

Hi everyone. As we have seen a bunch of questions about how the Tile Upkeep added in patch 1.1.5f1, also known as Economy 2.0, works, we created this mini development diary. We hope this will answer some of your questions and give a better understanding of why we added the Tile Upkeep, and like always we welcome your constructive feedback and questions that might pop up after reading this.

So, let’s start with the basics. The Tile Upkeep is a new administrative land cost applied to land you own. It’s a fee that the city pays to the government for expanding its city limits inspired by the real-world property tax paid for unused land. The first 9 tiles already unlocked when you start a city do not have a cost. You are only charged a Tile Upkeep once you expand beyond those. The upkeep cost is a percentage value of the map tile purchasing cost and the percentage value increases on a curve from 5% to 25% as more map tiles are bought. This means early map tiles have a lower upkeep cost but as more map tiles are purchased, the upkeep per tile also increases affecting all purchased map tiles’ upkeep cost.

3-1 Curve.png

X axis is the number of map tiles purchased, Y axis is the % of map tile purchase cost used to calculate the map tile upkeep costs.

When we were designing the Economy 2.0 update, we felt that more management features should be taken into consideration when you build your cities. Based on the feedback from you all following the release and from the closed beta group during the development of Economy 2.0, we came to the conclusion that the game was not challenging enough, especially in the later part of the game. And with the lack of a proper challenge being successful didn’t have the impact we wanted it to have. Growing the city’s limits is a natural way to progress through the game, so implementing an upkeep cost to map tiles was a good way to pace the gameplay, especially in the latter half where the city size grows rapidly and the map tile expenses reflect that. Our goal with the Tile Upkeep cost is to bring you more meaningful choices as you expand the city so you don’t just have to consider where to expand to, but also whether your city can sustain such an expansion. All in all we feel it strengthens the game pacing and improves the gameplay experience.

Of course, this new cost affects your ability to reach the edge of the playable area and create new Outside Connections, so let’s talk briefly about the cheapest way to create them early on. If you haven’t already noticed, map tile costs are affected by what is available in them - buildable land, resources, etc - making tiles with a lot of water the cheapest. This makes buying ocean tiles the absolute cheapest way to go if your city needs that new Outside Connection as soon as possible. You can then create a bridge or pipeline to the edge of the playable area. Or you can use the terrain tools to create a more realistic landbridge and build a road on top of it, but keep in mind that more land inside the tile affects its upkeep cost.

3-2 Purchasing tiles.png

The UI has been updated to show not only the cost of new tiles but also the Tile Upkeep they come with.

If you’re continuing an existing save, you may have unlocked a lot of map tiles that now come with a high Tile Upkeep. You may be able to expand your city to build additional tax income to offset this cost, but if you have built villages or rural towns on the map using either Unlock All or a mod to unlock map tiles, that may just be too much to cover. In that case, we recommend enabling Unlock Map Tiles under Map Options the next time you load your save. While this does disable achievements, it also disables the Tile Upkeep so you can continue your city. This option is also great if you enjoy building small towns or villages and don’t want to skip the Milestone progression.

We have already seen some great feedback on the Tile Upkeep, both from those who like it and those who don’t. We will continue to follow discussions about the current state of the game, not only in regards to the Tile Upkeep, so we can further refine the gameplay and balance to provide the best possible experience for you while maintaining our goals for the game. We also have a survey where you can share your thoughts, currently available through the launcher.

Please keep in mind that iterating game features and balance takes time, so even when we agree with your feedback, we may not be able to address it for a while. Nevertheless, we greatly appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts about the game and the changes we make. We look forward to reading it and continuing development in the fall. Thank you for being a part of this journey.
 
  • 47Like
  • 9
  • 4Love
  • 4
  • 1
Reactions:
That is, indeed, a better idea than development points.

Dev points are yet another unrealistic concept in this game. If I had a few trillion dollars and wanted to found and build a city, even if it had zero people, I could hire outside contractors to build a subway or a nuclear power plant. The technology exists and is largely dependent only on land and money- not population, status, or time.
If everything is available immediately where's the challenge?
 
I can understand the tile upkeep cost as the property tax for unused land, however that then leads to a few more thoughts.

I don't see that artificial scaling of this tax as the city gets bigger (more tiles unlocked) makes any sense - I get that its supposed to make late game more challenging but I think there are other more interesting ways to do that.

Make upkeep costs being a function of the average land value in that space, rather than just tile purchase cost - So more valuable tiles incur a greater tax burden. This could also be a curve. I think this is more natural as it encourages cities to balance green areas vs density and is more of a later game challenge. It also respects the property tax for unused land notion more directly in that if you have unused land in a highly valuable area it costs you more.

Add an outside of district cost for services (fire, police, garbage, etc) which increases with the number of tiles purchased to cover owned land area not covered by a district. This would allow for rural settlements without full services but provide it with a cost factor which is a function of how spread out your city is.

Add an efficiency penalty applied to all emergency service buildings for owned land not covered by a serviced district - (presumably the fire service, even if they were not officially covering an area wouldn't let people die in a fire in the next area over, but in being available to do so they cannot do their regular job as well) - this also counter balances the previous point so that simply adding a district without services is not a loophole.

Add an unhappiness factor for the well educated and above population which depends on the amount of surplus money the city has. The richer the city is without spending it on the people, the more unhappy the people get. This would also lead the way towards several potential new city ordinances that increase well being (funding for the arts, welfare programs, etc. ) but cost more with higher populations - draining more of the late game surpluses.
For businesses, I think it would be fun to introduce something more indirect, businesses should have an "owner/CEO" and if the owner/CEO is unhappy about how much surplus the city has, the business also becomes unhappy with the higher taxes and may move away as a result.

With these options the upkeep cost wouldn't need to scale with number of tiles unlocked, but it would still add more mid-late game financial management challenges for players.
 
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
I must say, I don't like the idea of tile upkeep. It seems to me to be a very arbitrary addition to artificially make the game harder. While I'm not opposed to balancing the game to make it more challenging, I also think it should be realistic. Paying a lot of money for tiles without getting anything in return for it doesn't make any sense. Even if you want to go with the story that this is "government land tax", then tile upkeep should be based on the land value of the tile (Ie, resources and buildable land), not on the amount of tiles already made available. Thank goodness for the 529 tiles mod that allows to switch it off completely.
 
  • 5Like
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions:
I must say, I don't like the idea of tile upkeep. It seems to me to be a very arbitrary addition to artificially make the game harder. While I'm not opposed to balancing the game to make it more challenging, I also think it should be realistic. Paying a lot of money for tiles without getting anything in return for it doesn't make any sense. Even if you want to go with the story that this is "government land tax", then tile upkeep should be based on the land value of the tile (Ie, resources and buildable land), not on the amount of tiles already made available. Thank goodness for the 529 tiles mod that allows to switch it off completely.
The irony is that once you hit a certain population and density of development keeping up with tile upkeep doesn't feel very difficult. I'm playing a vanilla build with about 160k population. Most of my services are set at 120% (although I keep education at 90% to increase the numbers of uneducated and poorly educated for lower educated job postings) and my tax rates are all set around 7-8% (except for the highest educated workers).

My city is still making money hand over fist. But this same build was making money immediately after Economy 2.0 even at 40k'ish pop and most rural communities.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions: