On the eve of my departure last week I noticed the new interface of dCity was online and checked the date.
Yep, it looked the right date to have 3rd edition cards released too. Unfortunately, I had about a minute to look around so I didn't see much.
Now that I'm back and playing catch up, I remembered to check out dCity today.
I was mostly dormant the last few weeks on my city, allowing SIM to pile up, even though taxes slashed and continue to cut most of the daily SIM income. We don't even have to bother too much about disasters, riots, pandemics and such, taxes do a much better job, and there's not much we can do to fight them.
But, apart from this nagging element of the dCity economy, we have quite a few improvements which I remarked with the new interface and the novelties introduced with the 3rd edition cards: combined cards (which can also be uncombined, unlike Splinterlands cards, for example), loading and unloading for special cards and the two additional tech tree branches for economy and health.
The UI is not even fully released (still disabled Info, Stats and Explorer tabs), but it shows considerable improvement, in my opinion. With a few constants (like the city map), I believe the entire UI has been redesigned and more features added. But something I really appreciate is the speed optimization, probably accomplished through a better resource management.
What puzzled me at first glance - and I saw in the discord it wasn't just me - was the 70% 'luxury tax' I have on my city:
The explanations given in discord related to this luxury tax is that it is set for the Hive rewards for cities with no income.
Now, if we are talking about SIM income, my city definitely produces SIM income, although taxes reduce it seriously.
So, I'm not really sure how to interpret this. Or how to mitigate it.
As far as I know from previous communications, this attempt to combat no-income cities receiving Hive rewards based on population ranking shouldn't be active yet. But when it will (if it isn't), it better have no glitches. Players are not very happy when it comes to the taxes topic as it is.
My city saw some action today after quite some time. Loading artists into the ad agency, unlocking a tech from the new branches, creating a few combined cards (and getting ready to combine others), I even needed more population to fill in the job offers - it's been a while since I had this issue.
Maybe this big update will be the catalyst for another exciting period for playing dCity. Hopefully taxes won't ruin everything.