I have been playing dCity for a few months now, and really enjoy it.
My city has grown a lot over those months and is now earning a decent bit of SIM every day.
Recently, I decided to start a second city under this account as a demonstration of how a completely self-sustained dCity can be started and how it will grow over time. While this post is aimed at new users it isn't a complete "How To Play dCity" guide. There have been some good tutorials that cover all the basics if you want to learn more about all the details.
Plan for My City
This city and series of posts is going to be for people looking to get involved on a low budget. I'm going to target around 10 HIVE, or about $1.50 total investment (as of this writing), and then will track the growth of the city and income over time.
I plan to track the growth of population including separate notes on the number of scientists and artists along. I will also track the change in some of the other city attributes like popularity, training rate, and chance of immigration.
Of course I will track the change in daily SIM revenue (in SIM, HIVE, and $) over time. Graphs of those should show exponential growth, although early on it will look very small, and tax changes with impact the growth curve. As time goes on the exponential growth of the city should lead to ever increasing revenue which should look pretty impressive for a $1.5 investment.
How I Will Grow My City
For this study, I will invest all SIM earned back into the dCity to grow the city, but I will not invest any additional funds. I don't recommend this approach for your city as I believe in continually investing in your dCity (especially early on) to really improve your earnings, but I want to document what a very low investment can grow to in a month, a year, 2-years, 5? years.
Initial Purchases
So $1.5 currently is about 10 HIVE, which at the current SIM selling price would be right around 3000 SIM. With that little initial investment and no future investment, I will focus on getting profitable right off the bat.
First I will be buying off the market rather than buying cards. Buying from the market I can buy exactly what I want ensuring I can be profitable and balanced. From what I've seen buying new cards seems to be a good deal (especially with the price of SIM down lately), but the randomness of it will make it hard to ensure I get cards that fit my needs.
I want to focus on cards that will give the best return on investment. I did a post awhile back about the costs and return on investment of the various dCity cards on the market. . The prices have changed a little since then, but they haven't changed much.
From my post I see that Job Centers provide some of the best ROI so I will start by focusing on job centers. Job centers also provide a good increase to popularity and will help with training the homeless and immigrants that my city will mine. I used to factor in the costs of the workers when determining ROI but since you can buy houses and apartments that ultimately pay for themselves from their income I now consider workers "free" and don't include them.
Job centers are currently selling on the secondary market for around 560 SIM (I have seen them go for as much as 620 to as little as 500). Three job centers cost 1680 SIM. So lets buy three.
Those three cities have increase my little cities training to 9%, and my popularity to 21. Training won't do much for me for awhile, but the popularity will reduce the number of workers I need to run my city and eventually help increase immigration which will be key for long term population growth.
Next I need people to run those job centers. Each Job Center will need 10 workers which comes out to 30 workers needed. Note all citizens count as a worker (homeless, artists, etc.) not just those cards called workers. The cheapest way to buy workers is in bulk with an Apartment. Not only is the price per worker the lowest, but an apartment also earns decent SIM income as well. One apartment currently costs around 770 SIM and provides 20 workers. So lets buy one.
That leaves me with 550 SIM and needing 8 more workers (my increase popularity has already reduced the number of workers needed from 30 to 28!). A basic home is selling on the market for 137 SIM and provides a population of 4 and a SIM income of 1. Lets buy two of those.
That gives me a balanced city with no unemployed workers, and a SIM income of 15 SIM per day, with 276 SIM left from my 3000 initial investment which I will hold for now.
15 SIM times 365 days equals 5475 SIM per year for an overall return on investment of 183%. I probably could have gotten the RIO higher by starting my city with forests rather than job centers. But I wanted the popularity increase from the job centers to improve my immigration chances and reduce workers needed as the city grows.
Things I Will Ignore For Now
Starting out there are some things you don't need to worry about.
- Crime Rate. I never worry about crime because I don't buy any of the items that can be robbed. Banks, Strip Malls, and Casinos are the only buildings that get robbed.
Don't buy those and you can ignore the crime rate and not worry about buying police stations. - Technologies. I will not spend any SIM on unlocking technologies early on. Unlocking technologies allows you to mine technology cards but that won't happen until you have a pretty high education.
- Education. Education improves discovery of technologies. Again, this is nothing I need to worry about early in the city development. So no need to buy scientists, universities, schools, or research centers.
- Creativity. Creativity improves the chances of mining a background. Again, this is later game concerns so I don't need to worry about that for now either. As such I don't need to buy artists or art centers.
Thanks for Reading
I hope this post will give you an idea of how to get started with your own #dCity. Drop me a comment with any questions or ideas, and check back on this series from time to time to see how my little city grows over time.