Hi everyone,
My experience continues with the experiment on dCity. The account that I started with $10 is now four weeks old, and it had grown by more than 30%.
In the last two my city attracted two Homeless cards, and one Immigrants card, helping my population to grow. Also, with all the money collected in these two weeks, I managed to buy a new card - my first Forest.
The city has now a population of 64, has the popularity level at 38 points, and it generates 54 SIM on daily bases:
In general, the value of the cards had a slight increase in the last two weeks, but the main growth of this account is organic (driven by the new cards generated and the new Forest that I bought with the earnings of the city):
I started to track the history of this account from the very beginning, but also the evolution of the SIM token. So far, this was one of my best investments: the value of the account increased by one third in only four weeks; plus all the fun coming from managing the city.
I got a nice suggestion from 
First of all, let's start from the constrains I had: my city had already an unemployment of 4 people, and I was already spending 1 SIM/day with the social costs, therefore it was mandatory to get a new business card that will make use of these workers. Secondly it was the budget limitation. It was close to the end of the two weeks, and I only had about 800 SIM for my new invest.
There are two sources from where you can buy a card.
For 800 SIM you can buy a random card from the game itself (half of the earnings are used to pay for the development and infrastructure of the game, while the other half is used to reward top players). This is an option that might sound entertaining, but personally I don't think this is good for small account. Why? There are 43 different types of cards that you might get from buying a random one from the game. Some are more powerful, some others not. Also, the game has additional mechanics that I did not explained so far, but not so meaningful for small accounts (training homeless and immigrants into specialists, technology development which affects various aspects of the game, art - with no economic impact of the city and changing only the aesthetics of the game - politics, taxation, wars, production of various cryptocurrencies). Some of the cards are affecting these additional mechanisms, but are useless for the beginning (as an example, a Job Center card increases by 3% your probability to train a specialist, but is not meaningful when you have only two immigrants).
The other source of cards is buying them from other players using the market. There's an marketplace in the game accepting multiple currencies (HIVE, SIM, BEER, DEC, and many other ones), and several independent markets. Personally I'm using the one built into the game, as it has more cards listed. Buying a card from the market gives you the chance of selecting which ones are best suitable for your account, and gives you more options for your strategy.
Each type of card has different attributes. It can increase your population (and therefore affecting the number of workers available in the city), it can generate an daily income (SIM is the currency of the game), it can increase or decrease the popularity of your city (popularity has a major impact on the overall population), and has a number of required workers, and might have other special powers (see above).
To easy my decision process, I created a calculator that computes different scores of each card, for each of the generic attributes: population score (population bonus divided by the cost of the card), income score (generated income divided by cost of the card), popularity score (popularity divided by the cost of the cards), employment score (needed workers divided by the cost of the card). Based on these scores, I then compute the total score of the card, and I always adapt this formula on the current situation of my account. For example: if the city does have a huge deficit of workers, the employment score will have a negative impact on the overall score. If the city has lot of available workers, it will be great to have some cards that will need this places, as these will decrease the unemployment rate and therefore the social expenses.
Now coming back on how I reached the conclusion that a Forest would be a the best invest, I filtered only the cards that have the "income score" greater than zero (growth of the city is a major objective), and selected only the cards that can fit within my budget. Next, I adapted my formula to include the following: double the impact of the "income score", consider only half of the "popularity score" (no major focus on popularity for the moment, but still important as this is the one influencing the number of Homeless and Immigrants cards attracted by the city), and give a negative impact to the "employment score" (needed to reduce the unemployment).
The Forest was the one with the highest core, and a clear win:
Please let me know your thoughts, and suggestions. Would it be some that you would do very different from this?
