ATOW: Companion - Maintaining a Landhold

[Rayneth]

Hello everyone, I am currently making a PC for ATOW who is a periphery noble with a Tier 8 property.

So first think I noticed was that its kind of non-intuitive how changing the tax rates for your residents seems to affect your holdings, especially once I made a spreadsheet to help automate a lot of the calculations, there seems to be some kind of black hole that eats up money meant to be assigned to personal income, or inversely gives you free extra money out of the ether if you change the tax rate past a certain point. I've resigned to just calling this Tax Reforms expense.

Anyway my question, is there some kind of inherent logic behind how tax rate changing is done? Or would it be better to ignore the last equation and just calculate personal income based on a flat assigned percentage, doing away with the black hole completely?

I've attached the spreadsheet I made for properties down below if anyone wants to fiddle with it and tell me if I did anything wrong.

[Daryk]

I think the problem is the *100 you have in the formula.  If you look on page 250 of the Companion, under "Residential Taxes", you'll see there's a factor of 0.01 in there that would reduce your *100 to *1...

[Rayneth]

Indeed you are right, although this is counteracted by the *0.01 a bit ahead in the formula, although I am going to remove both since they cancel each other out. Thanks for bringing up.

[Daryk]

I was looking in cell R4, and there's no *.01 there...

[Rayneth]

Oh that. That is to convert the percentages to a number like 10% to 10. If the *100 became *1 instead, the increase in the Total Landhold Budget would be 1/100 of its true value.

Anyway my observations from fiddling around with it is that if you don't want your Residents' average taxes (per percentage) to tank when you fiddle with how much you are taxing is to match the increase or decrease in taxation % to your Landholder's income %. So an increase from 5% to 10% would necessitate giving yourself a healthy 10% cut of the pie.

One question though, I noticed the "Excessive Residential Taxation (over 5%) –2/each 2%" lacks the asterisk that always tells you to round up, so raising taxes to 6% shouldn't incur any penalties right? And something like 16% would only be -10 (16%-5%=11%, So 2% achieved 5x for a total modifier of -10) Else -1/each 1% would have been used instead.

[idea weenie]

For Cell F6, instead of the massive cluster of comparisons, you could simplify it by using VLOOKUP.  The format for the VLOOKUP command is:
VLOOKUP(cell with value, upper left of cell array with the lookup value and the result:lower right of cell array, number of columns to count over)
The data array will have the value to be looked up in the left-hand column, and the result in one of the columns to its right.

So for your spreadsheet the expression would be:
=VLOOKUP(C1,A3:B12,2)

This tells the VLOOKUP command to grab the value that is in cell C1, look for that value in the first column of cell group A3:B12, and upon finding the value report what is in the second column next to that value.

Now if you want to error trap it a bit, you could do:
=if(OR(C1<MIN(B3:B12),C1>MAX(B3:B12)),"Invalid value",VLOOKUP(ROUNDDOWN(C1/1,0),A3:B12,2))

This first makes sure that the value you put in is not less than 1 (or whatever the minimum is in the table) or greater than 10 (the current max in the table), and if you put a non-integer value it rounds it down to the nearest integer before looking up in the table.

[Rayneth]

Thanks, I'll try giving the =VLOOKUP. As a studying accountant, I like how practicing my hobby gives me practice with my chosen field.

I'll leave the original attached here in case anyone who plays ATOW wants to mess with landholdings. Squeezing in 8m a year from a TP 8 trait is delicious!

[Zinmar]

Is the excel sheet up to date? I could really use this but have no idea how to use excel. My job never needed to use it, so I never learned.

[victor_shaw]

The spreadsheet takes a lot of getting use to but once you get it down it helps a lot.
Daryk would be the one to run you thru it's use.

[idea weenie]

Is the excel sheet up to date? I could really use this but have no idea how to use excel. My job never needed to use it, so I never learned.

From my looking it over:

• C1 = this is a number 1-10 that represents how big the landhold is
• A2 through C12 = a rough idea of how big the landhold is
• F1 = based on the number you put in cell C1, this tells you what your character's personal income will be
• N10 = This is the tax rate you put on the residents of your landhold.  Anything over 5% gives a penalty to the next year
• L11 through L36 = this is the normal distribution of taxes for a Battletech landhold
• N10 = if you want to change the residents' tax rate, do it here.  Not sure about the specific reasons why, but increasing this over 5% gives a penalty to income in the next year.  You actually get more money year over year if you leave it at 5% (I tried setting it at 6% for Prior Year, 5% for current year, and 4% for Next year, and had a total of ~2.1 million C-Bills.  Leaving them at 5% every year had a total of 2.4 million C-Bills for landhold income.)
• Q11 though Q29 = change these percentages to see what the resulting budget for that part of your landhold will be for the Current Year
• T11 though T29 = change these percentages to see what the resulting budget for that part of your landhold will be for the Next Year
• Not sure about the rest of the equations

Personally, if you are using it for a game, talk to the GM and ask what the minimum values should be for Landhold Infrastructure, Landhold Supplies, Landhold Staff, Defensive force maintenance, and auto-budget for those.  Then subtract the 20% of the base income for how much you need to send to your boss (opportunity for roleplaying to reduce this value).  From there, you have your net budget.  Allocate extra money as you choose to improve the Landhold Infrastructure, import Landhold Supplies, add on more Defensive forces, and the trickle that is left goes into your character's pockets.

This way you can us an existing budgeting setup to help you plot out income vs expenses


Your GM could even offer ideas:
Landhold Infrastructure - throw the peasants a party, at your expense.  Good is that the peasants are happy and more productive, bad is that they might expect it in the future.
Landhold Supplies - build a new underground storage, allowing you to get supplies cheaper as you can order them in larger quantities at once and still keep them safe
Landhold Defense - some experienced infantry and vehicle mercs want to settle down, and you need trainers for your landhold.  Hire them.