So a month has past since I wrote the dCity Beginner's guide, and like a new player I suddenly remember that I have a city! Let's check it out!
Okay, almost everything we had listed on the market place last time sold, including the Military Bases, so we have 91,000 SIM on hand - let's see what we can get up to during this play session!
The only thing we have left on the market is ruins and some graveyards. (Visible under market tab, user Panel button).
Under our notifications, we can see the last 50 of 'things that have happened' in our city. We have mined 9 Young citizens, 4 Students, 2 homeless and 1 immigrant so far.
We also got pretty lucky that we got in on the Priest Airdrop. Sometimes just playing is enough to get a special bonus!
Homeless and Immigrants seem quite expensive at the time of writing, we are going to sell them to someone else who has job centers to train them into more productive citizens.
Since we have plenty of SIM on hand, we can list them a bit higher than the bid with the ASK tab.
Students and Young Citizens I will be keeping on hand for now for their Tax Rebate as well as population/popularity boosts respectively. But in a pinch they generally sell very well.
Always remember to click on Cart to confirm any market actions you are wanting to do:
Education Starter pack
Our priests have education, but to beginning possibly mining tech cards each day, we need at least one research center. Because they were cheap, I also grabbed two related tech cards, free internet connections and open source, which give a +5% and a +10% bonus to education, respectively.
This is probably not the smartest move, but it gives us another number to work on over time (education). Remember that buying tech cards makes them work, but unlocking them on the TECHNOLOGIES tab gives you a chance to mine new cards. 80 Education points gives you a 1% chance each day.
Next I decided to buy some 20 farm and a GMO tech for just over 16k SIM. Let's talk about why I think Farm is one of the most flexible cards in the game!
The most flexible card for small cities: FARM
As your city grows, your needs change. In the very beginning, you desperately need people and popularity, something that FARMs are pretty generous with. As your Popularity gets above 2000, Farms start to become a population growth card; they add more people than they require.
They then get an income boost and a popularity retard from GMO tech. This can be applied or removed under appropriate conditions, like when taxes are below 100%.
And if that weren't enough flexibility, when you absolutely have too many people and you can't handle them all, there is a FARM-centric combine, the Farm Corporation.
This is viable all the way up into the largest cities. Truly the Farm is a great card no matter your city size or stage of the game you are playing at.
Rolling more 3rd edition:
I also took a stab at rolling a few more cards, lets see what we get:
It went pretty well, when I listed the one graveyard we landed, our city was able to stay positive population-wise, see the last edition for tips on balancing population.
Crime Levels:
Seeing crime levels get up so high, I think its time that I start doing something about it. The Drone Technology and Neural Network Tech cards will give you -5% and -10% crime rate, respectively; Police Equipment and Robocop techs apply to Police Station cards, from first edition.
I bought 3 of these first edition police stations, for around 6500 SIM.
Crime rate doesn't update automatically, just once per day at the snapshot, and this is to maintain some of the mystery over crime rate. So we will have to wait until tomorrow to see how well we were able to get crime under control by these measures.
In the meantime, I went to vote for @ecoinstant for president:
As a starter city its pretty nice to hold a bit of SIM, letting your SIM Power grow. We were able to do this by forgetting about the game for a month, and just playing a few hours once in a while. Now we are getting HIVE drips, we will just let those accumulate over the course of our playing of this game.
So I waited around, and we managed to get our crime rate down to just 3% with that move (down from 29%, see above)!
You can see the other results of our recent 'once-a-month' play-date with our dCity. It seems everything is going our way!
Also, it seems we started at a good time, if you remember we put 160 HIVE into the city, and now our city is worth some 190 HIVE, based on the buy-now value at least. We will keep up with this city over time, see if we can make any money while we have fun.
How is your city going? Are you following along, or did you forget about it all month like I did? Let me know in the comments -