Tropicology: Banks

[Senor Ruina]

Tropicology: the scientific study of Tropico.

I got interested in banks because "money makes the man" seems like a good way to get high scores.  So I wanted to know what banks can actually do.

Here's some results.   Mucho macho edition, patched to 1.5.3.

First, embezzlement by a single very highly skilled banker seemed to top out at $81/month, from the $500k treasury level that is found in sandbox mode.  This suggests that yearly rates max out at 0.2%/year per banker.  (If this is in true, in theory one might see up to $83 embezzled by a single banker in a month. I did not test that long.)  I have not tested multiple embezzlers carefully, though I have used them in play and it seems to scale up.

However, there is a big problem with embezzlement: it is an attendance-based job.  So in reality you will never get near .2% per year, since a banker is unlikely to work more than 4-6 months/year.  If you plan to embezzle, make sure there is a house for each embezzler near their bank.  Micromanage him into it.

Strategy wise, it does seem that in a longer scenario "money makes the man" is a good idea.  If you can get 15 bankers working 1/3 of the year, you will be moving 1%/year to Switzerland.  With a treasury of size N, you get 10x as many points for swiss money as you do for "Economic Powerhouse" cash/buildings of that value.  Therefore you need to move 10% of your treasury to Switzerland for the same score.  Of course, the total value of the buildings + treasury will be many times N for a typical game, especially early on.  So in practice more than 10 years will be needed for this strategy to pay off, and it will only pay off when you are no longer growing the economy.  But it does seem that on an island large enough to fill up with stuff, within about 15 years after filling it MMTM will be superior to EP.  This is probably the way to go with longer games and/or smaller islands.  (Special building permit will also go a long way towards making MMTM superior to EP.)

More results:

When you switch banks between uses, there is always a lag of several years while the bankers get up to speed on the new use.  So don't expect to quickly switch on "urban development" for a building spree, and then back to embezzlement, at least not without a penalty.  (I still think it may be a good idea.)

On urban development: first off, it is not attendance based.  The rate does max out at 60%, but this does not seem to be by bank, but rather the number and skill of individual bankers doing it.  I found that 9 highly skilled bankers can get the full 60% after a few years.   It does not seem to matter how many banks are doing it, just how many bankers, their skill levels, and for how long.

I did not do much research on offshore banking, but it does not appear to be attendance based.  Also, it appears to be pretty profitable, at least when all the tourists are high class.  More research is needed.

[Dutch]

I'd been wondering about this. Looking back, I think the living-working distance for my embezzling bankers has been too big, usually.

[Junta_Joe]

Wow, this the first serious research I've seen in months.

Good job, Senor Ruina.  

[Eddy]

Yes, excellent work.  Now I understand why I've never made much from bankers.

[Egg]

  Why not at a desperate moment.... Use special building edict and erect many cathedrals... That usually gives me all the amount i need, besides it is 10% of the cost... If you have developer trait to cover the 20% increment costs.... it is better than the 1% from bankers... use bankers to lower costs of buildings... better still make cash from tourists off-shore banking if you have high- class tourism that is...

[Senor Ruina]

Special Banking Permit is a fairly effective way to move money to Switzerland.  It can be extremely effective, depending on how you use it.

I have read reports that if you undo a building, the money does not come back from Switzerland.  I don't know if the "wasted" 8% comes back or not.  If it does, then you can move essentially all of your treasury to Switzerland at no cost (other than time spent endlessly clicking to build and unbuild things).  If not, then you can still move roughly 50% of your treasury.  

I regard fake building and unbuilding as a cheat/exploit.  Why?  Because using it completely removes the reason for an important game feature (using bankers to move your money), and the scoring system clearly rewards the difficulty of getting money to Switzerland.  If you want to use it, fine; clearly in that case you should never use bankers to move money.

It is also clear that if you use that cheat/exploit, then if you want high scores you should never play anything except MMTM.  And if you do, your high scores should be about 5x or 10x as high as other people's high scores.

I view the fake building spree, transferring "only" 8% of your treasury as a borderline cheat/exploit.  It does not break the scoring system like the fake  build/unbuild use of SBP.  Or at least, it does not break the system badly.  It does seem to make MMTM a superior strategy for most presidentes.  

Consider the difference between economic powerhouse (EP) and MMTM.  In EP, you get points for the value of buildings and cash.  In MMTM, you get 10x the value of money, but only in Switzerland.  But with SPB in place, you get 8.125% of all money spent on buildings, as Swiss cash; so scorewise you get 81.25% of a building's value.  Treasury cash you get nothing for; that's what bankers are supposed to be for.  If you do a fake building spree at the end to pump your account, then you will also get 81.25% as the EP score for treasury from your Swiss account.  So to do better with MMTM versus EP, you need only find a way to move 1.9% of your building value and treasury to Switzerland.  That's not hard to do.  By my calculation above, 5 bankers embezzling for 6 years should get on the order of 2% of your treasury moved.  That's not hard to afford.  

[Copper Maniac]

It does not turn out that you can move 1% or some other fixed percentage per year of your treasury to Switzerland.

I set up an island on Hard/Hard.  Built two banks, hired workers from abroad to make sure they would start at a consistent known skill.  Bankers arrived about mid-year, and were settled into housing.  The experiments began at the beginning of the next year.

ABC edict was on; there were no other bonuses for education.  The average skill of the bankers (originally at one notch) reached two notches typically during the fourth year.  Due to replacements, in some runs the average skill reached three notches eventually and in others it did not (within 10 years).

Set wages to 10/15/20, and 25 for bankers.  Immigration set to skilled so as to have replacements available for the bankers who keel over or whatever.  Population was close to 200.  Happiness was in the upper 50's and drifting into the lower 50's over the time period.  The economy was not set to be big, just reliable.  Let the game run on auto-pilot for 10 years.  There was an election in the third year that was always won cleanly.  An election in the tenth year was always fixed, whether or not it was necessary.  Mardi Gras was on at the beginning.  It was reenacted upon announcement of the second election.  A bunch of fountains were scheduled to keep the construction crews busy.

I used Exacto to set the treasury to 10 million at the beginning of each year and performed four 10-year runs.  Accumulations into the Swiss account were:

1st 5 years    15647  15683  15645  14605 avg 15395
2nd 5 years  17806  18057  18884  16973 avg 17930
total              33453  33740  34529  31578 avg 33325

From these ten bankers, average annual Swiss accumulation was 3332.5.  Experience is growing, and consecutive years are not independent, but, to get a feel for the variability, if the 40 annual Swiss accumulations were considered independently drawn from the same population, then the sample's observed standard deviation was 892.9 for year-to-year accumulation.

Banker skill made very little difference, as can be seen by comparing the results for the first 5 years versus those for the second.  The difference due to skill is probably more than illustrated, because overall happiness was gradually declining.

To see whether the treasury amount impacts the Swiss accumulation, the same experiment was conducted with the treasury set to 1 million at the beginning of each year.  Again, four 10-year trials were conducted.  Swiss accumulations were:

1st 5 years    14968  15674  14948  16457 avg 15512
2nd 5 years  16527  17193  15491  15193 avg 16101
total              31495  32867  30439  31650 avg 31613

From this and the following experiment we see that the treasury amount seems to have negligible impact on the amount moved into the Swiss account.  It is possible that it has a minor indirect benefit (makes capitalists happy?).

The same experiment was run with the treasury set to 200 thousand.  Exacto was applied whenever it deviated from this by more than 10 thousand.  Only one trial was run.  Swiss accumulation was:

1st 5 years    15093
2nd 5 years  15179
total              30272

It is possible that using Exacto upsets some formula that is used when determining how much is moved into the Swiss account.  I ran one trial where the treasury was initialized to 200 thousand and left untouched.  Swiss accumulation was:

1st 5 years    16394
2nd 5 years  17417
total              33811
ending treasury:  330,008

No conclusion drawn about whether Exacto is disturbing the results.

It is possible that the wage of the bankers factors into the amount moved.  One trial was run with banker wage set to 50.  This means a total of (50-25)*12*10*10 = 30 thousand additional wages over the course of the experiment.  The treasury was maintained at 10 million, so compare with those results.  Swiss accumulation was:

1st 5 years    15711
2nd 5 years  16595
total              32306

There is no reason to believe that the banker wage is an important factor.

Two trials were run, one for each of the banks.  The other bank was set to tourism (but there was no tourist population), so it was innocuous.  This was again with 10 million treasury.  Swiss accumulations were:

                          1st 5  2nd 5  total
left bank only    6821  7463  14284
right bank only  7744  8391  16135

As expected, the effect of multiple banks is cumulative.

Someone conjectured that the Swiss funds have something to do with how much building is going on.  Continuing the experiments past 10 years with no building showed similar additional accumulations.

Some factors were left unexplored.  For example, the Swiss accumulation might be proportional to the population.  Similarly, it might be proportional to the amount of money flowing around in the economy (no convenient statistic provided within the game).

If we assume the rates above are typical (for all populations and economies), then we can see how effective the slush fund setting is:

Building maintenance on a bank is 64 per banker per year.  If banker wages were 20, then that is 240 per year.  So there are 304 expenses per banker per year.  A profit can be made off the housing and entertainment for the bankers, but other overhead exceeds this, so the expenses are greater than 304 per banker per year.  In the 10 million treasury experiment, the bankers were skimming 333 each per year, which comes out of the treasury.  So the effect of the slush fund is very similar to the special building permit (half the extra costs (minus 500 edict cost) going into the Swiss account).  The building permit has to be turned off and on to not hurt respect with the intellectuals.  I usually schedule 20 to 50 thousand in building at a time, however, once the economy is rolling.  You can also do better if you can keep the bankers on the job longer somehow.  I never (clearly) saw more than 6 of 10 bankers on the job.

If you can drive banker wages well below 20 without incurring a big military overhead, then the slush fund could be much more effective than the special building permit.  However, since the treasury amount seems to have no effect on the effectiveness of the bankers, you want to be using both Swiss banking and the special building permit as much as possible if you have a thriving economy and are playing MMTM.

[Senor Ruina]

Nice work CM.

I replicated your result.  In my case, 4 banks embezzling with the treasury exacto'ed to 50000 once per year.  The total embezzled after 17 years: 110000.  So, 6500/year from 20 bankers, a result per-banker practically identical to what you saw.

Your analysis is also good.  The total amount spent for salaries and maintenance at the banks in the 17 years was about 125000.  That was with wage = 24.  Obviously the idea of MMTM is not as good as I thought.  As it stands it will be very hard to beat EP with it.  And given that EP is so much easier to do, it seems rather silly to try.  Maybe, as you say, if you can mash salaries way down using a nasty strategy.

It is worth remembering that 1/3 of salaries can be recaptured in rent (ideally).  I am curious why you assert that other expenses of people outweigh this.  My own feeling is that other expenses don't add up to that much, but I could be wrong about that.  

On my test island, I had a clinic and a cathedral, a restaurant and a cabaret, and some farms for food.  There were about 80-90 people most of the time, 20 of them bankers.  The total profits at all of the "service" buildings (excepting farms) was about $-40k, or about $29/resident-year.  Corn costs $13.3/meal in lost exports, so that's another $20/year (people seem to average 1.5 meals/year).  All in all the support costs were on the order of $4/resident-month, and that was for some fairly premium support.  (Happiness was much higher than necessary to win elections.)  I am sure it could be lower.  

[Copper Maniac]

For housing, I have
+5 to +10 per annum per resident

For entertainment, I have
+0 to +5 per annum per resident

For all other general overhead (excluding media and banks) I have (going by the general overhead page of the almanac)
-50 to -90 per annum per resident
It tends to be a bigger negative as the game progresses.

So, it's -35 to -90 per resident per annum, more if counting per worker.

I was only stating that the +5 to +15 that you can get from rent and entertainment is outweighed by the other overhead.  So the cost of operating a bank is something more than the wages and building maintenance.

[Senor Ruina]

Banker salaries get counted on the overhead expenses page as Infrastructure Wages.  So in these tests General Overhead is inflated.

My General Overhead for the 1950 year of my bank test, purged of bank costs, is 1730 for 64 people (27/pop), and that is overbuilt happiness-wise.  When the pop goes up to 80-85, which it will before too long, the same overhead will cover it.  That will be more like 20/pop.  With bank costs included, it's 8770 (137/pop).

With a larger island, the cost/pop will decline somewhat, because part of it is paying for things with island-wide effects (the palace and the immigration office).  And part of it is paying maintenance on non-fully staffed buildings, in particular the cathedral.

[Copper Maniac]

I guess I just wasn't meant to be evil.  

Since we're talking about a point in the game where bankers are skimming money, I'm assuming that we have electricity and such.  Expensive.  With wages at 8/12/20.

120 MW of gas power + substation => 3420 per year
two clinics for 300 pop => 1200 per year
church and half cathedral for 300 pop => 1700 per year
two police stations => 1890 per year
two docks => 1120 per year
four construction offices => 3230 per year
three teamster's offices => 2540 per year
two marketplaces => 330 per year
unmanned palace => 200 per year
diplomatic ministry => 630 per year
immigration office => 390 per year
one bank set to urban development => 1580 per year
college with 2 profs => 960 per year
HS with 3 school marms => 750 per year
literacy edict with 300 pop => 1200 per year
social security with 300 pop => 670 per year
food for mothers/children/students/elderly => PRICELESS

The stuff that mostly doesn't scale with population (palace, diplomatic ministry, immigration office, urban development bank (with MMTM), college, and HS) amounts to 4510 per year for 300 population.

[Senor Ruina]

Well the issue is how much it costs to skim money.  In which case, what you want to know is the marginal cost of a banker.  Banks don't use electricity, so that cost should not be charged to bankers.  Similarly for several of the other pricey things on your list.  Teamsters aren't needed for banks (except possibly a very small fraction that are moving food from farms to markets which bankers eat).  Banks don't use docks for anything.  Charging these things to bankers doesn't make sense.

With your numbers, there are about $13500 costs I would count as marginal costs of bankers, or $45/pop-year.  About $4 per month, which admittedly is a fair amount, but still less than rent.  If you are paying bankers $24, then you can collect $6-$8 from each of 'em in rent, which makes the net cost of having them $20-$22.

[Copper Maniac]

To some extent the cost of infrastructure for bankers is restricted.  As you say, what are the teamster's for?  But really, you do need the teamsters to move the food to the marketplace so the bankers can eat it.  Maybe they are not as reliant on teamsters as workers providing other Tropico functions.

The shop girl at the marketplace needs food, religion, health, and entertainment services -- as do the people providing these services.  Everyone needs police and such as well.

Maybe the shop girl visits a casino for entertainment.  The casino needs electricity.  Maybe the engineer at the power plant needs lots of large fountains to be happy.  It is not simple to divorce the bankers from segments of the infrastructure.

The bankers are more finicky than the uneducated workers, so they actually pressure you to provide the more expensive versions of services for them.  And the bankers either need to be bought from overseas or they need to be fed/etc while they are children (and their mother supported while out of the work force), plus provided for while going to banker school.

You can turn a profit on entertainment, but the worker providing the entertainment induces infrastructure.  Likewise, you can turn a profit on the banker's housing.  But maybe the banker needs a blue house (not space efficient).  In the space just for the banker's house perhaps you could have built some small fraction of the space for a profit-making business (plus all space for its supporting infrastructure).

To put it another way, is it right to say that a construction worker should not have the cost of a college credited to their supporting infrastructure?  But the construction worker needs health care.  Where do doctors come from?

And everyone needs to support all those little children, who consume all that expensive health care, religion, etc.  Don't you wish there was a way to stop all conception late in a game?

Anyway, the net result is $64 per year for building maintenance, something around $240 per year for banker pay, and some additional amount for the infrastructure induced by a banker.  Banks are certainly not cheap.

[Senor Ruina]

To me, there are two helpful ways to think about the issue of support costs, and who to charge them to.

One way is: is some particular support thing necessary for some supported thing?  Push to the limit the supposed supporting thing - remove it.  Can the supported thing still function?  If so, is it more costly?

In this case, we are talking about adding a bunch of bankers to an island, for the purpose of embezzling.  Can you add bankers if you removed all the teamsters from the island?  Yes, you can.  Even if the markets shut down, the bankers can still walk to farms to get food.  The bankers themselves are fine with no teamsters at all.

This is easy enough to prove.  Just create an island for yourself, with no teamsters allowed.  You can do this just fine.  In fact you can run a teamsterless island and make money in tourism, just fine.  Teamsters are unnecessary for bankers, and should not be charged to them.

Of course, the cost in walking time of bankers to farms may be higher than hiring teamsters to move food to marketplaces.  This will depend on the exact layout of the island.  

On some islands, you could not remove all the teamsters without the economy collapsing, which would obviate the point of embezzlers.  In a sense, then, teamsters are necessary for bankers - but that's different than what I am talking about.  Here the necessity is mediated by money.  I want to talk about things directly necessary.

A second helpful way to think about the issue of who to charge what to, is to consider pushing the addition to the limit.  What would happen if you added 1000 bankers to your island?  You'd need to build a lot more stuff for them - houses, churches, farms, etc.  And even some new markets, and teamsters to move the corn to the farms.  But you would find that the number of new teamsters added would be a much smaller proportion of the new population than they are in your current island.

Or similarly, consider adding 1000 bankers again: do you need another power plant?  No, you don't.  Electricity is not necessary for bankers.

It may be, though, that it is cheaper to maintain people using electricity.  But the point here one of cost, which is where we got here in the first place: how much does it cost to embezzle?  Assume that $20 is the breakeven point.  If it costs $20/banker-month without electricity, but less with, then clearly embezzling is a good deal.  How much, you don't know without quantifying.

[Coconut Kid]

This thread suffers by stumbling badly off-topic a couple of times. First, EGG throws in an inane comment about misuse of the 'Special' Building Permit edict to pump money into the Swiss Bank Account. The edict has noting at all to do with "Banks."

None-the-less, Senior Ruina answered:

Special Banking [Building] Permit is a fairly effective way to move money to Switzerland.  It can be extremely effective, depending on how you use it.

I have read reports that if you undo a building, the money does not come back from Switzerland.  I don't know if the "wasted" 8% comes back or not.  If it does, then you can move essentially all of your treasury to Switzerland at no cost (other than time spent endlessly clicking to build and unbuild things).  If not, then you can still move roughly 50% of your treasury.    I regard fake building and unbuilding as a cheat/exploit.  ... it completely removes the reason for an important game feature (using bankers to move your money), and the scoring system clearly rewards the difficulty of getting money to Switzerland.  ...

Ruina's comparison between using Bankers vs the Edict may be of some use, but unfortunately it neglects a major point. Every citizen knows when the Edict is in effect and that it is a way El Presidente is extorting money for his personal use. Therefore, his relationship with the Intellectual Faction takes a 10% hit when it is in effect. Conversely, the embezzlement by the Bankers is effectively concealed, albeit a smaller amount. It should be noted that the Paradise Island expansion added two buildings with options that feed the Swiss Bank Account.

It seems the political cost is not so easy to measure as the simple overhead of buildings + employees.

[Coconut Kid]

Then Copper Maniac sets out to examine a number of variables. Some side issues get blown up out of proportion.

It does not turn out that you can move 1% or some other fixed percentage per year of your treasury to Switzerland.

...   Banker skill made very little difference, as can be seen by comparing the results for the first 5 years versus those for the second.  The difference due to skill is probably more than illustrated, because overall happiness was gradually declining.

...   From this and the following experiment we see that the treasury amount seems to have negligible impact on the amount moved into the Swiss account.  It is possible that it has a minor indirect benefit (makes capitalists happy?).

...   Some factors were left unexplored.  For example, the Swiss accumulation might be proportional to the population.  Similarly, it might be proportional to the amount of money flowing around in the economy (no convenient statistic provided within the game).

If we assume the rates above are typical (for all populations and economies), then we can see how effective the slush fund setting is:

Building maintenance on a bank is 64 per banker per year.  If banker wages were 20, then that is 240 per year.  So there are 304 expenses per banker per year.  A profit [?] can be made off the housing and entertainment for the bankers, but other overhead exceeds this, so the expenses are greater than 304 per banker per year.  In the 10 million treasury experiment, the bankers were skimming 333 each per year, which comes out of the treasury.  So the effect of the slush fund is very similar to the special building permit (half the extra costs (minus 500 edict cost) going into the Swiss account).  The building permit has to be turned off and on to not hurt respect with the intellectuals.  I usually schedule 20 to 50 thousand in building at a time, however, once the economy is rolling.  You can also do better if you can keep the bankers on the job longer somehow.  I never (clearly) saw more than 6 of 10 bankers on the job.

If you can drive banker wages well below 20 without incurring a big military overhead, then the slush fund could be much more effective than the special building permit.  However, since the treasury amount seems to have no effect on the effectiveness of the bankers, you want to be using both Swiss banking and the special building permit as much as possible if you have a thriving economy and are playing MMTM.

Oh my! Much of this is helpful to understanding the basic operation and proves that there are so many variables that a "fixed" result may not be relied upon. But then he wanders off into measuring the wind effect of butterfly wings beating. I am mystified by the allusion to a connection between unit skill and unit happiness. Good garsh - think about the code needed to do that.

I suppose that using 'pause' may allow switching the edict on & off to go undetected for faction relationships, but that seems close to a cheat. However, Ruina gives a better challenge to this diffused picture of overhead -- after he realizes how far Copper is wandering.

Well the issue is how much it costs to skim money.  In which case, what you want to know is the marginal cost of a banker.  Banks don't use electricity, so that cost should not be charged to bankers.  Similarly for several of the other pricey things on your list.  Teamsters aren't needed for banks (except possibly a very small fraction that are moving food from farms to markets which bankers eat).  Banks don't use docks for anything.  Charging these things to bankers doesn't make sense.

With your numbers, there are about $13500 costs I would count as marginal costs of bankers, or $45/pop-year.  About $4 per month, which admittedly is a fair amount, but still less than rent.  If you are paying bankers $24, then you can collect $6-$8 from each of 'em in rent, which makes the net cost of having them $20-$22.

Very few players are cost accountants; worse, the game doesn't collect the needed data. The concept of Marginal Cost is important.

[Coconut Kid]

To some extent the cost of infrastructure for bankers is restricted.  As you say, what are the teamster's for?  But really, you do need the teamsters to move the food to the marketplace so the bankers can eat it.  Maybe they are not as reliant on teamsters as workers providing other Tropico functions.   ...

The bankers are more finicky than the uneducated workers, so they actually pressure you to provide the more expensive versions of services for them.  And the bankers either need to be bought from overseas or they need to be fed/etc. while they are children (and their mother supported while out of the work force), plus provided for while going to banker school.

...   To put it another way, is it right to say that a construction worker should not have the cost of a college credited to their supporting infrastructure?  But the construction worker needs health care.  Where do doctors come from?

...   Anyway, the net result is $64 per year for building maintenance, something around $240 per year for banker pay, and some additional amount for the infrastructure induced by a banker.  Banks are certainly not cheap.

Copper really wishes to 'cost out' the universe -- well at least the Tropico World. He's flat wrong about the code which makes the units work. Bankers are not more finicky -- he is overlaying his expectations on the designer's work and getting more verisimilitude than actually exists.

To me, there are two helpful ways to think about the issue of support costs, and whom to charge them to.

One way is: is some particular support thing necessary for some supported thing?  Push to the limit the supposed supporting thing - remove it.  Can the supported thing still function?  If so, is it more costly?   ...   I want to talk about things directly necessary.

A second helpful way to think about the issue of whom to charge what to, is to consider pushing the addition to the limit.  What would happen if you added 1000 [whatever]  ...

But the point here is one of cost, which is why we got here in the first place: how much does it cost to embezzle?  Assume that $20 is the breakeven point.  If it costs $20/banker-month without [whatever], but less with, then clearly embezzling is a good deal.  How much, you don't know without quantifying.

I would add that it is necessary to give the developers some credit. While they didn't hit the mark in every case, players should assume they usually did. There is a break-even point, and it is part of learning good gameplay to find it.

Cross reference to two threads about players who "assumed" the game is broken \ has a bug:
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tropico/cafe/index.php?topic=1380.0
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tropico/cafe/index.php?topic=459.0