I have recently returned to playing Dcity after a brief try a year or so ago and have set myself the challenge of getting into the top 400 of each of the games rankings - Income, Population, Popularity, Education and Creativity
After some consideration I opted to try and get into the income ranking first, my thinking being, I need income to get that snowball rolling and keep using my income to get other rankings at a later date.
A look at the ranking tables shows that to make the top 400 you need to generate income of 10 sim (the asterisk shows that this is a tax refund for this particular user) - Sounds simple enough..
The current tax rate in Dcity is over 100% so all paid out income is generated from tax refunds which means buying/trading for/earning things that generate tax refunds like:-
Church: Gives you 1 tax refund.
Student: Gives you 1 tax refund.
Policeman: Gives you 1 tax refund.
Eco Activist: Gives you 2 tax refund.
Soldier: Gives you 1 tax refund.
Economist: Gives you 1 tax refund.
Professor: Gives you 1 tax refund.
Lawyer: Gives you 10 tax refund.
(You can find a more comprehensive listing at https://dcity.io/info )
But I learned the hard way that its not all that matters..
To generate a tax refund you actually have to have enough taxed income (obvious when you say it like that....) and although I was sitting with income way in excess of my tax refund I wasn't taking into account other factors that alter your income like social support, crime and the odd global crisis!
For the smaller city, like mine currently, these things have a big effect on where your income finishes and its a game of weighing up the advantages and disadvantages to get to the best chance of a positive income and staying in the top 400 to generate income and rewards.
Making sure crime is not affecting your city is probably the first place to start for me, a crime can quite easily wipe out all your income, general crime takes 5% of your base income but if you happen to have one of your car dealerships robbed for example then you are taking a 300 sim hit, which for the small city is a big problem.
So to help out in that ensure you have the technologies unlocked to decrease crime - the control branch
And starting adding buildings like Court, Police Station, Gym and Cinema
Then we have to consider the impact of global events which have a random percentage based chance of happening every day and they could even happen all at once!
Each global event has varying degrees of effect on your income either by a straight percentage reduction or removing some of your population so buildings you own become inactive as you have no workers to operate them, there are ways to prevent global crisis's happening by activating cards that are generated from combined buildings but as a small city i am a bit of a way off that.
As my population is currently perfectly balanced every global event has a large impact on my income so over the next few days I'll be building up my unemployed numbers to get me through that next pandemic or riot
I currently have tax refund of 93 sim but have missed out on payment 3 of the last 4 days because I didn't grasp the effect the above factors can have - lets see how I do over the coming days and I hope this helps someone understand how income works a little better than I did.
come visit my Dcity and see how I'm getting on