Just as in card games we have many tactics and possible approaches to fight the enemy, in dCity we are able to carry out many different and creative city management strategies. The aim of this can be to maximise revenue or minimise investment costs, it all depends on our approach to what business we want to get into.
Wait a minute, what are we even talking about? I am sure that regular readers of this guide know very well what today's part will be about. If you are new here, I cordially invite you to read the first articles about dCity on my profile. You will learn all the elementary things about running a city and optimising expenses, which is a desirable feature as a mayor.
OK, so let's get back to strategy. As you well know, the system of taxes, shares and rewards in dCity is very extensive. We have several taxes in the game, a few rankings and shares in which we can participate. There is no denying, we can earn a decent amount of SIM or HIVE on many of them. Today I will discuss to you 3 such main strategies we can take when managing our decentralized city.
Strategy number one - the universal soldier
If you have played role-playing games you know very well that we have different attributes or traits at our disposal when building our character. If we play the game for the first time we often decide to choose a skill, which makes us a so-called universal soldier, that is, a little in strength, a little in intelligence and dexterity. This bit-by-bit approach can also be carried out in dCity, hence the name of this strategy. I would recommend this approach to people who are seeing dCity for the first time and would like to try a low cost game and see what it is all about.
Everything unfolds around the balance between the cost of buying cards and the potential profits. When we buy our first packs of cards 99% of the time we will have to buy inhabitants because there are not enough workers or buy buildings because there will be no places to work. When our city is 100% satisfied, we can start developing the most important pillars of our city's development - Education, Creativity and Citizen Training. Let's try to focus on these three aspects evenly, so that we can see 1:1 the impact the purchase of a School, Art Gallery or Job Center will have on our town. By trying a little bit of everything and testing what kind of performance they give us we can move on to more advanced strategies.
Strategy number two - Profiting from wars
It is a very specific strategy to buy special buildings that will provide us with so-called War Shares. It works on the principle of activating War Tax, and when the President decides on such a tax, the mayors pay 10% tax on their salaries and 80% of this goes to the players who have the aforementioned War Shares. And these shares can be had by buying these cards:
- Military Industrial Complex - 1 War Share
- Military Base - 2 War Shares
- Drone Factory - 10 War Shares
When you look at the selling price of these cards you can get a little scared. There is no denying that it is quite an expensive investment, recently Drone Factory was bought for 200 SWAP.HIVE. So it is a strategy for bigger players but can be profitable as such a long term investment. Just look at it, today if we bought Drone Factory and had only 10 shares we could count on profits from about 230 to almost 800 SIM, quite a satisfactory result. Remember that the result can change and it depends on whether the tax is active and on the Lobbying how much margin there is for those who have shares.
Strategy number three - Educate tomorrow's employees
This is the creative name I came up with for the strategy because it will be about maximising two factors that are present in our city. They are not dependent on each other, but in my opinion it is very important to have them at a high level. I am talking about Education and the chance of Training, which is the acquisition of a profession by our resident. I will start with Education. It's a factor that influences the chance of discovering a Technology, I've written more about this in a separate part of this guide. Maximising the chance to 25% we are theoretically able to receive a Technology card every 4 days, which we can sell on the market and profit from Education. The important approach here is the skilful selection of cards. In my opinion it is worth to invest more in Universities and the whole Education tree in Technology. This will give you bonuses such as +5% and +10% to Education and double the amount of Education from Universities.
Time for Training! And no, this is not a gym advertisement. It is good to have high chances for our resident to change his profession for two reasons. The first reason is that if an Immigrant turns into an Artist he won't have negative Popularity points but will get Creativity points and the second reason is that we can make money on selling those cards. Currently the Artist is more expensive than the Immigrant and if we don't need additional inhabitants we will get more SIM for selling. To increase the chance of Training we need Job Center, this is in my opinion a cheap card considering the profits we can get in the long run. I have 33 of these cards so far and I am constantly on the hunt for more to get the best chances for Training. The advantage of this approach over Education is that here we can have 200 and 300% chance for Training and in Education we can have only 25% chance to discover Technology. It is worth to have Advanced Training card, it gives us 2 chances for Training in one day. It is expensive on the market, so it is worth to combine the Education strategy with Training to have a chance to discover it or earn money from its sale. I use this strategy myself and so far it suits me best.
These are my suggestions for strategies you can take when building your city. Remember that you don't have to buy cards to see what effects your city will have with them. Always check it in the Simulation tab. That way you can see if buying 50 cards is a worthwhile investment compared to, say, 20 cards chosen specifically for a given strategy. I wish you success in running your decentralised city and hope to see you in future parts of the dCity guide.