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I have had this thought brewing in my head for the past week or two: If i were to win a mega millions lottery, could i have my own imperial city?

I wouldnt want one to scale, god no. that would be unrealistic. maybe one about a portion of the size. around half if not 5/8 the size. i wouldnt only use it for personal dwelling, but i would host public gatherings at it such as festivals and conventions so it would need to be able to accomidate such.

it would need to be on a property with its own large body of water, one already there to avoid having to make my own, in order to build a revisioning of the waterfront.

I would want my own stone walls. Could be made from concrete so long as they're ascetic enough. Roads would have to be cobble stone, brick maybe. still smooth enough to accommodate some vehicles. The buildings could preferably also be stone or cobble stone, but im not sure how that would interfere with installing AC ducts, plumbing, and wiring.

I think i can live without the white gold tower, it would be incredibly impractical and frankly there are not nearly enough ayleid contractors.

The arena could be used as an ampitheatre, but it would still need to hold a large number of guests despite its reduced size. The arena is necessary though, for reasons

Basically, could a scaled down imperial city be built, considering buying the property, paying the construction crew, buying the materials, and implementing modernized utilities while keeping the atmosphere and not to mention furnishing the damn place, for a budget of 75 million dollars?

I have no idea but it would cost a fortune, I'd say as much as Rome.

I would presume that you intend to make the palace your home, which is where you have some difficult planning to undertake. You'll need to insert bathrooms. I don't know if you've noticed, but there is zero evidence that these people even have complete digestion systems, let alone a need for sanitation. Most habitations are built near a natural body of water or have a well present, but there doesn't seem to be a need to use water. The underground sewer system is little more than a modified dungeon, and, in fact, incorporates part of the prison. Its only purpose seems to be storm runoff management, for which it is grossly oversized.

Also notice that fireplaces dominate as the heating appliance of choice throughout Cyrodiil. That will probably work in reality, but isn't the most efficient means of heating your home. The enormous palace basement will suffice for housing your heating and cooling equipment, and can maybe be decorated to hide among the giant chair and hourglass that you'll likely want to store there.

Since structural masonry of the type that Ayleid design mimics is rare in modern day and ludicrously expensive, your palatial frame will most likely be of steel, making the grand columns little more than decorative enclosures behind which your duct, pipe, and conduit will neatly hide.

The arena alone, being a spectator venue, will have code-specific requirements based on the number of seats. You'll want to contact the authority having jurisdiction.

The remaining buildings as anachronistic props probably aren't going to require much more than basic lighting and power. Unless you are building a theme park and hiring seasonal staff to work as actors in these buildings (which would be pretty cool), I wouldn't bother running utilities to any building that you weren't planning on making your primary residence.

As for the walls, you're not going to get anything truly functional to fit in your budget. Your head would spin at the price of a chain link perimeter fence.

For your purposes, you're going to need approved plans for location, grading & utilities, architecture, structure, MEP (including fire protection), and maybe furniture layout. Your going to need to hire engineers and contractors, take bids from suppliers, account for laborers (likely unionized tradesmen), and pay for all manner of use and land fees, municipal fees, code reviewers, taxes, etc., etc. It's probably a four year project that will age you twenty years by completion and by that time will in no way be profitable, but, if you've got the scratch, I say go for it.

I think even scaled down you're still looking in the order of billions, not millions, to get something like this done and that's if land is cheap. Admittedly I'm thinking in terms of labour costs of a developed nation. If you were to try to get this done in a relatively poor nation you'd be saving a huge amount of money. And think about it, once the place is built you would have to spend money on maintenance. For $75 million I think you be better off thinking small, like reproducing a scaled down palace, and I expect the budget on that would be fairly tight. A modern arena in itself can run you from a quarter to half a billion right there. Sorry but there no way you're building an entire town for $75 million in a relatively well off country.

I'd say purchasing the land alone would cost a lot. So lets say you build it on the East coast to provide that nice moat around the city. An acre of farmland in Virginia costs $4700, which is one of the cheapest east coast states for this purpose. So assuming the city would take up about 97920 acres, the size of Denver, the cost of land would be a modest $460,224,000. Nothing has been developed yet, mind you.

Now some fine redditor approximated the cost of building a castle in Detroit, which came out to $9,946,056-$31,461,056, but we will factor out land costs for obvious reasons. So lets say your city will be about $15,000,000 in production per acre. $1,468,800,000,000 would be that hefty price. Then lets add it up. 18,360,000,000 + 460,224,000 = $18,820,224,000. So unless your lottery winnings are 18 billion dollars, I doubt this could be constructed.




EDIT: Very wrong maths

Well he did say scaled down but even at 1/100th the size it's $1.5 billion on a 100 acre plot. Thanks for that DarkEastwood, I quite enjoyed it.

Perhaps i should look into a kickstarter then.

What about anvil? A town like anvil could still serve the purpose i need it for.

Minus the chapel, of course.

and since its not the imperial city, we could even do away with the walls and just make it a visible community. I doubt there will be any oblivion gates around it in the near future

I'm not sure you're really grasping the numbers here. 100 acres is pretty small by amusement park standards and by the numbers Eastwood gave you would end up spending close to two thirds of your gross winnings just for the land.

Edit: Sorry seems more than one person using broken math today. Half a million for a hundred acres. Not a bad deal actually. I still have a rather strong feeling that you would go bankrupt trying to develop it though.

I think it would cost a couple billion. I could be way off, but I feel like to build it even if it's not to scale would still cost an extraordinary amount of money. Honestly I think only people like bill gates could have a chance at making something like that.

Everybody has a price. There is also a level of compromise that could certainly be reached with a set budget. Buildings that don't have to meet certain requirements due to not being used for anything that requires human safety or comfort can be erected very cheaply, especially if you're just building props. Land values aside, I bet you could find enthusiasts who would be willing to slap the Waterfront and a pair of fake boats together using old pallets and discarded fish nets for peanuts. Disneyland is made out of plywood and brilliant paint. It's all a matter of what you want your end use to be. Theme parks do require intense maintenance and routine inspections, but that's covered by the price of admission.

But building a cut stone fortress to spec, though? Just because? Yeah, that's the province of kings.