dCity Game Starterpacks (Re: dCity Helper 11 by @luca-legend)

Let me start my first ever dCity post by admitting I only took the game up recently and haven't spent as much time in it as other posters. On the other hand, I do run a TOP25 city already (honestly, anyone can have one tomorrow if they spend enough Hive). Anyway, I decided to chip in and I can name two factors that encouraged me to do so.

The Background

Firstly, a few days ago I happened to trade a card or two through the game market with a fellow Rabona League of Champions manager @manniman. His next move was to entrust me with 800 Hive budget to improve his city - apparently on the basis of my Rabona records that provide more data for assessment than my considerably shorter dCity history. OK, why not?

Secondly, I read the latest edition of dCity Helper by Population Ladder #1 @luca-legend and I was somewhat surprised that the level of advice given felt suboptimal to me. I gave it some extra thinking time to arrive at a conlcusion that the advice is still good value when you consider it is free for anyone to take and the current payout of 25 bucks should not only be related to other posts on Hive games (somewhat high) but also to top dCity player game dividends. If I understand it correctly, the $12 value of the city came out of Luca's pocket anyway (no need to correct me if you think it came from the post rewards, it's the same). I play more than I post so the business model doesn't really bother me. I just think I can do a bit better in the technical area even though I liked the post at the end of the day.

The Offer

So I figured there might be a market for a dCity Starterpack Composition service. You set a budget and state any preferences you might have I pick the cards, you decide to either buy the package or leave it. As a compensation for my efforts, I get to sell a few cards for a decent price. This might not look obvious but the win-win scenario works because dCity is designed to have cards that work well in a small town while being awful for a big city (and vice versa).

If you have heard about dCity giving a decent returns and want to own a piece of the pie without having to spend the time on learning the finetuning game mechanics and hunting the market, I will be happy to get in touch with you (jelly#6483 on Discord).

I don't do giveaways or freebies and it should work both ways so I am setting a 50% beneficiary on this advertisement post to Luca for renting up his stage for a minute.

The Gameplay Content

For anyone interested in a Proof of Brain, I will give a short feedback on the city Luca built to onboard Hive witness @roelandp while saving his time to work on improving the chain (which itself is a great idea). For 100 Hive, he went for 4 Apartments, 15 Ad Agencies and 4 Forests giving 171 SIM pre-tax income (165 SIM post tax but the current rate of 3.7 % is an outlier, expect something like 20 % longterm).

I am not going to question the selection of the Ad Agency anchor as it is currently a good-priced card and if I picked something else anyone could make another improvement post tomorrow (or in an hour) when prices move a little. So I am going to stick with that. I only wanted to point out that the bonus creativity points are not useful unless there is an Art Gallery in the city (required to mine those backgrounds) which is something that was perfectly understandable to overlook in the heat of the battle (just in case you missed @ecoinstant pointing it out in the comments on the original post).

However, I disagree with the use of Apartments. An Appartment card is actually a pack of 5 Basic Homes glued together so I will just refer to Basic Homes when comparing with the other 1st edition housing alternative of Luxury Homes. The thing is, Basic Homes are unloved. Most Basic Homes are located in big cities that fight for the share of the Reward pool that currently holds 200k Hive and pays out rewards to Top400 population cities (191 Hive was the latest Rank 1 daily reward). Many of those cities are negative SIM income (only relying on the leaderboard rewards) so they would just have bought 4 Worker cards (0 income, 4 population combined) if these hadn't been more expensive than 1 Basic Home (1 income, 4 population).

The price of the alternative Luxury Home (2 income, 3 population) does not suffer this demand pressure so it is only about 1.4 times as expensive as a Basic Home (it would be like 1.8-1.9 without the Leaderboard Effect as the one extra population is just a decent bonus for small towns while being a huge liability for big cities). In my book, that makes it a clearcut choice over the Basic Home for our enterprise (discussing the 2nd edition options is beyond the reach of this post). Double income for 1.4 times the price.

The Solution

The Ad Agencies need 25 Luxury Homes to provide the necessary workers. At the 1.4 price ratio, we are 5 % over the budget at 104,95 Hive (Luxury Home priced at 1,33) but the gross income grows to 185 SIM/day which is 8 % increase over the Basic Home approach. Purists can play around the 14 Ad Agency sceanrio in their free time. I would rather add that the 4% performance improvement change might not be a huge deal if the town stays like this. It is actually tighter than I expected but the town is under 100 population. My point is, you do not expect people to stick to $12 investment when they see the concept works (especially when you are on a mission to summon the whales). The Luxury Home version accomodates 8 % less people which (counterintuitively) is a positive thing. Ignoring the population effects, you prefer to add an extra Ad Agency at 1.88 daily-SIM-per-Hive-spent rather than an extra Home (Luxury at 1.50, Basic at 1,05). It is the tiny villages that can do with Basics as the extra population is highly beneficial but as the town (and the popularity) grows, Luxury Homes add enough (and later they add too much) workers. Try taking two copies of either of the proposed balanced cities. Merging them together produces unemployment you have to deal with.

The Conclusion

Follow the dCity Helper series, it is a good content. Think about the numbers critically to improve your game. Verify your concepts if you invest non-trivial amounts. If you like the gameplay, have fun. If you don't, enjoy your passive profits. If you do, enjoy earning even more (hopefully).

If you read this far, think of someone you can talk into taking like $20 off their physical pocket in exchange for you setting them up with a Hive account, bit of HP and a dCity like one of those. They can actually start enjoying the full Hive experience next year when they look at the profits.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta