I have been holding and building my City since very close to the beginning...
I got my first card from 
Just for reference, I bought another card on the market today and it is listed as nr 384553
In the beginning I was not really that active and I should have been but I stayed in the top 100 for a while getting around 2 hive per day and some SIM. With that I started building up my cards slowly and then slept in the game for a few weeks.
I am currently at place 133 and dropping.
I could take my daily sim income and buy cards with population and popularity to grow my ranking but I have decided to go another route.
- I am not using my HIVE income for now. That is just going into my hive wallet and from there either powered up or into other projects on HIVE.
- I am spending all my sim income on cards. This is done either directly in SIM or by selling the SIM and buying in Swap.hive whichever is cheaper (and there are really big differences sometimes)
I set myself some goals to create a strong fundament to my city before trying to climb the ranks again through popularity and population.
- STEP 1: get my education to 25%
Education: the base for discovering technologies; 40 education = 1% chance to discover technology daily, with a max cap at 25% and I am now at 21%
I believe there are more technologies coming in the future and I want to be prepared. Once I am getting those double finds I can start selling them and get even more income. - STEP 2: Training Chance to 100%
On a daily basis your immigrants and homeless are trained into workers(80%), artists(10%) and scientists(10%)
Every homeless/immigrant card gives 0.01% chance for training.
Every Job Center card gives a 3% chance for training. 6% with Government Boost.
For training to work, you need both Immigrants and Homeless. 10 Popularity is required also.
I am currently sitting at 49% training chance and that needs to go to a guaranteed training per day. - STEP 3: get my creativity to 25%
Creativity: the base for finding a background; 80 creativity = 1% chance to find a background with a max cap at 25%
There I still have a lot of work to do as I am only at 1% right now. But in the long run NFTs are going to be a big market and if this game gets bigger then those backgrounds could be a lot of money in the future.
Now the whole rule for me during this thing is that I will not allow myself worker shortage. So If I see that, I buy a house or 2 to make sure that this moves over into slight unemployment. All my employment slots have to be filled always.
This is maybe a slower building style than most but I feel that in the long run, this might pay off better and it is more sustainable and in the spirit of the game.
If I look at the top position right now
https://steemcity.herokuapp.com/city?c=luca-legend
This is not something that is in the spirit of this game, this is just milking/gaming the system for all its worth and not looking at this as any kind of game at all. And in fairness, that is the entitlement of 
I believe 
- What do you think?
- How are you playing?