I've always wondered how they work and what people thought of them. How do treasuries work for them? Normal guilds get taxed by the region they're in, do secret societies get taxed as well? All I know is that you have to be led to them and everything's pretty secretive including other members. :)
No tax, from what I can remember. But it doesn't really work as a personal bank unless you have only one safehouse to maintain and you have the starting capital to enlarge it to the point where it would be useful. At that point maintenance costs begin to factor into how much you really want that safehouse. Of course, things might have changed in the 1.5 years since I've been in one.
High maintenance costs? Why would you need to enlarge it for a personal bank?
Because the starting treasury size is not that big. Someone who has access to it or knows more can give a more concrete number.
Oh? Treasury size is dependent on size of SS? Didn't know that... I just thought that guilds didn't have an upper limit on treasury size, so SS didn't either. :)
SS treasuries are limited to 300 gold per size of the safehouse. This limits their ability to be used as personal tax shelters and safe deposit boxes.
They do not get taxed (it wouldn't be very secret if the tax collectors new how to find them).
They do pay monthly maintenance for the safehouses.
...depends on how much you are trying to hide and for what purpose, doesn't it. get a lordship in a new region and you can put another one up. 4 gold a month maintenance for lvl 1.
Yes, it does depend on how much you're trying to hide.
But then no one cares if you're hiding 600, 900, or even 1,500 gold. Try seeing how much it would cost you to hide 20,000+ gold, on an ongoing basis. Don't forget to include the initial cost of building/expanding all those safehouses.
Unless you're constantly rolling in thousands of gold, and get it regularly for a long time, it would probably cost you even more to upgrade to the level where you can store thousands of gold. Maybe it's a hint for players not to be greedy?
Quote from: Artemesia on March 11, 2011, 12:36:12 AM
Unless you're constantly rolling in thousands of gold, and get it regularly for a long time, it would probably cost you even more to upgrade to the level where you can store thousands of gold. Maybe it's a hint for players not to be greedy?
Or a hint that the proper way to be greedy is to be/control/convince the Banker to remove property/wealth taxes.
I had a Secret Society at one point. Ostensibly, a place for people from the Church of Estahsism which collapsed within a couple of days of our last Priest pausing (I note it is much less brutal now. Valentic Order took weeks to die). Anyway, as only a single measly person made the journey to Pel Mark, it did just become a local stash. I did end up getting another gathering place over in Old Grehk though, and had I seen eye to eye with my comrade over the Fronen-Old Grehk war, I might one day have achieved a restoration of Estahsism in it's founding land.
At any rate, as my only other member was far away and didn't have cause to toddle on over, as I say, I used my society as a place to squirrel away my gold. I had over 1k gold stashed at one point, which to be fair, ended up being spent on all sorts of Bara'Khur infrastructure projects as Attila established himself a political base. I guess those treasury limits are a more recent thing, which is a shame. The old set-up was awfully good for scheming. I can see why the limits came in anyway.
Quote from: Indirik on March 10, 2011, 03:57:43 PM
Yes, it does depend on how much you're trying to hide.
But then no one cares if you're hiding 600, 900, or even 1,500 gold. Try seeing how much it would cost you to hide 20,000+ gold, on an ongoing basis. Don't forget to include the initial cost of building/expanding all those safehouses.
Tsk tsk, you should know that you can't hide more than 1800 gold (lvl 6). Yes I've built a society safe house that high, and yes it cost over 10k roughly speaking. The funny thing is that you can hire guards to defend the safe-house, which in theory doesn't need any guards since only members can see it. IIRC it takes 36 gold to maintain, I'll have to double check when I'm in the region.
The reason you can't hide more is to get to level 7 costs more than you can store in the safe-house. Since you can't use your personal funds in the enlargement, you are stuck at level 6. Though at level 6 you've basically taken over an entire city block for one safe-house.
You can't hide more than 1800 in any one safehouse. You'd need 11 safe houses to hide 20k. And that would be a huge expense. That didn't use to be the case. The treasury thing went in about a year ago.
.... um... how many secret soc can you found in a single region? (does the cost increase?)
Haha... I don't think the cost increases. Nicely done, Fodder, I guess no one thought of that yet... or have they? ;)
No comment. 8)
Nice :D I need to try this :)
... whole new meaning to the word banker.... personalised accounts too XD
I think most people that USED to use SS as a personal bank figured out pretty quickly that you can create multiples for the same purpose. To me it is a bit of an abuse of the mechanics, but that is just a personal opinion.
You can only do that by accepting other Lords into your society, because they are the ones who have to build the additional safehouses. If you want to make it your own secret personal bank that nobody else knows about, then you're limited to your own region.
Edit: NVM, misread the above post. That does smell a bit like mechanics abuse... Perhaps a limit on how many SS you can found would be in order then.
I would hope that most players realise the treasury was added for a reason, and trying to get around that limitation is not in the spirit of the game.