Loans
When your tax revenue does not cover your ambitions, the Bank of Microlandia issues debt. Every loan has a principal that falls inside the minimum and maximum the bank will originate in a single application. You also pick between a short, medium, or long repayment term. The monthly payment is the standard amortized mortgage formula, so a longer term drops the monthly bill but multiplies the total interest you pay over the life of the loan.
Credit tiers
Your credit rating is the lever the bank uses to discipline serial borrowers. The first concurrent loan you carry gets the lowest annual rate, tier A. Each additional concurrent loan drops you one tier (A to B to C to D to E) and raises the rate. After five concurrent loans the bank stops answering the phone.
The spread between the best and worst tier is wider than real-world municipal-bond spreads on purpose. Real AAA-to-CCC spreads average around ten percentage points. Microlandia’s range is about fifteen, so a player who stacks loans feels the squeeze inside one play session rather than across decades. Pay one loan down and your rating recovers immediately for the next application.
How to use debt
In practice the optimal use of debt here is one large, long-term loan for a major capital program: a new hospital, a transit expansion, a row of shelters. Financed at the top tier, with the monthly service comfortably below your operating surplus, that kind of debt is almost free. Stacking three or four mid-size loans for unrelated projects is how rates climb into the punishment zone and how the budget starts losing ground to debt service.
Parameters
Credit tier apr
Annual interest rate charged by the Bank of Microlandia per credit tier. Tier assigned by the bank is determined by the count of currently active city loans (0 → A, 4 → E). Standard fixed-rate amortisation: monthly payment = P × [r(1+r)^n] / [(1+r)^n - 1] where r = APR/12 and n = term in months.
| Key | Value (ratio) |
|---|---|
| Agriculture, forestry & fishing | 0.03 |
| B | 0.06 |
| Manufacturing | 0.09 |
| D | 0.13 |
| E | 0.18 |
Max active loans
5
Hard cap on the number of simultaneous active city loans. After this many, the bank refuses further applications until the player pays at least one down. Tuned so a cap-out occurs only after deliberate stacking; with average $50M loans and typical city revenue, monthly debt service at the cap is enough to threaten budget solvency.
⚠️ Source pending
Principal min
$1,000,000
Minimum loan principal the bank will originate. Smaller draws aren’t worth the paperwork (in-fiction) and would clutter the loans table (in mechanics).
⚠️ Source pending
Principal max
$500,000,000
Maximum loan principal in a single application. Calibrated against the $200M Campara starting loan: a player should be able to take out an amount comparable to the scenario seed, but not multiples of it in one shot.
⚠️ Source pending
Term options months
Repayment terms offered to the player. Mirrors common municipal-bond maturities (5, 10, 20 year). Longer terms reduce monthly payment but multiply total interest paid — the standard real-world borrower’s trade-off.
| Key | Value (months) |
|---|---|
| SHORT | 60 |
| MEDIUM | 120 |
| LONG | 240 |