dCity as a game is still very much alive. Recently, in exchange for different kinds of work, I got three friends to play. You can watch their cities grow like I do, they are 
I think now, in this nice bear market moment, is a great time to start playing dcity. To putting in a few hundred dollars and playing for a couple of years - see what happens. The game continues to be developed, check out the most recent news about the nature zone combine here. Experimenting on citizens is an upcoming mechanic being revealed in the SimMillionaires Club recently. Super soldiers? Yes please!
But before we get ahead of ourselves, how do we 'start' playing dCity?
For me the key has always been the citizen mining strategy. Its really the only effective way to generate passive income when you are starting out to start making changes to your city, as students and young citizens both sell for around 1000 sim due to their tax rebate.
This means the key statistic to setting up new cities is popularity - the more the better until a certain point (~5000).
Here's a small model with 1220 popularity:
The market costs for this are just 80 hive, or less than 40 dollars. From here you can start adding art galleries:
Credit to
It has lots of nooks and crannies to discover. Lots of things to figure out. One could attempt to measure the profitability ROI of every click in a game like this; or you could just play it.
2500 Popularity seems like the sweet spot to get started in, and that's if we don't see any more war. It all depends on how much money you want to put in - here is
At this level there exists the possibility to earn HIVE ranking rewards. 0.4 HIVE per day (146 hive per year or ~20% apr) might not sound like a lot with HIVE at 45 cents, but it does give some future upside exposure to HIVE for these players, which some of them don't otherwise have.
Remember, we are in a bear market - this is the real time to do onboarding!
I am using dCity to onboard players to the world of defi, nft gaming, blockchains, tokens and subtokens, and wallet accounts. It is a fun, gamified education about markets, relative values, mining and staking (LP). In other words, its the perfect thing to get new people involved.
Holding SIM and being in the LP are really important ways of being involved in the SIM economy, and non-players can choose these ways to participate. But playing dcity, for me, is choosing what to do with the 1000 sim you get from each student/young citizen. Its a game about positional reinvestment - within the game and within the wider world.
Continuous Development
The model of dCity is that by continuously upgrading and adding on to the game, the players who adapt the fastest will get the biggest results. Top player 
The drive for nature zones has lead to pushing up the price of parks, making them less viable as a backbone card of starter cities. The farm card still outshines in my eyes as a nice backbone card to gain both population (at the levels of popularity we are talking about 2500+) and income, with a bit of popularity as well. INCOME can be sacrificed for popularity by not having a GMO tech card as well, giving advanced flexibility with the farm card. This is a great card to continue to build up your population base and work toward being able to support late game cards like Military Bases, Networks, Temples, Industrial Zones, Farm Corporations and Drone Factories.
Almost every edition card has some level of popularity (although some are negative), so its up to our creativity as players to build these starter cities, something I have enjoyed doing. But I can't necessarily do it for everyone, and even if I did, in order to keep playing, some amount of card level analysis is needed from each player (learning to play the game):
I would love to see interested players from the Splinterlands realm reach out to me, let me help you or your friend get started and invest just the right amount for you to make it fun. Learn and play, expand your crypto horizons. Maybe after 3 years it turns out you never made all your money back. Or maybe somewhere in that time frame we enter a huge bull market and everything changes by an order of magnitude. Only time will tell, but I think its an asymetric risk
My goal is to see 100 new players with starter cities!