Financial

As with most facilities, financial facilities come in three sizes. These facilities are:

• Brokerage Costs about $950 to build and $400/month to maintain.
  

• Credit Bank Costs around $1700 to build and $700/month to maintain.
  

• Investment Bank Costs roughly $2400 to construct and $1000/month to maintain.

The larger the facility, the more income it will generate. Financial facility income is heavily dependent upon the wealth of the planet. Rich planets will provide much greater returns than poorer worlds and you may receive over $75 a day from an investment bank if you face no competition on one of these planets. As with any service or commodity however, there will be a level of demand for financial services on each planet - as more financial facilities are built the demand will be reduced and so profits will fall. In order to maximise your financial profits, you should therefore make agreements to limit competition with other Houses operating within this sphere as much as possible.

Loans: You may set up loan offers by clicking the 'Finance' link from your HQ page once you have begun operations in this sphere. This will take you to your Financial Operations screen from where you may view all your current loans, both offered and taken. You may lend in set amounts from $500 right up to $25000, and fix a loan period and interest percentage as you see fit. The loan capital plus interest is repaid as a single lump sum at the end of the loan period, there is no facility for repayment by instalments. Should the borrower have insufficient funds to repay you, or deliberately choose not to do so, then you have just cause for Feud against that House. You may also wish to bring the matter to the attention of the Emperor if a large amount is involved.

You may wish to set up multiple identical loan offers. Rather than adding many different offers separately, the '# Available' dropdown can be used to select the total number of that loan offer that you wish to make available. For example, you may wish to offer 10 loans of $1000 each - for a total outlay of $10000.

You may limit your exposure to bad debt by setting the minimum credit rating required in order to take out a loan (see the Treasury section). Setting credit rating to anything other than 'D', the lowest rating, will prevent starting players whose reputation is unproven from taking your loans. You may also optionally choose to offer the loan to your allies only, or to just a single specified House - useful for pre-arranging a loan with another House, for example. In fact you may quite reasonably choose to make loans only on an 'on-approval' basis.

As soon as you submit a loan offer, the money is set aside and deducted from your Treasury. You can withdraw a loan offer that has not yet been taken up at any time if you need the money, and the amount will be recredited to your Treasury immediately. Otherwise, you will not see the money again until the loan has been taken up and repaid at the end of the loan period.

Loans can only be offered to and taken up by Houses within your own operational range. This prevents a House on the other side of the galaxy from taking your loan and then withholding repayment, with you unable to retaliate since the House is outside of the striking range of your military.