Preparing for the dCity 4th Edition

Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice. The post is just my speculations on the future edition of the game would be like. Do your own research before sinking some money into the game.

If you haven’t started playing dCity but interested and don’t know where to start, there are two approaches to “play” the game. It’s still a passive game where you get some kickbacks from your money by earning SIM and selling it for Hive.


The Passive Route:

You buy at least 8000 SIM and hold for 30 days to enjoy the passive holding rewards. The game gives incentives to players who hold the token via liquid Hive. Naturally, the more SIM you hold, the more liquid rewards you get daily. You can also add to the game’s liquidity pool to compound your earnings but that entails another set of risks you have to do research on. The takeaway on this route is that people don’t really need to play or understand the game to get access to the financial rewards it gives.

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The Active Route:

Depending on who you ask, actively learning how to play the game can be lucrative or asking for capital loss. You can see from this graph below how much the price of SIM has sunk over the course of months. Even when the release of the 3rd edition, it failed to generate more players buying into the game. However, the game has kept being alive because of the community enthusiasts supporting the mathematical game.

SIM2.jpg

Despite the low prices, I still find the game to be lucrative. You can hold SIM, add to its liquidity pool, trade back and forth, and when lucky, mint some cards that are valued in the game for more $. There's no single way to "make money" in this game and most new players would have a hard time grasping this because of the steep learning curve.

I initially thought that the falling SIM prices were the obstacle but these prompted me to think better about my city building and then it became the way. Again, it really depends on a player's win conditions on what they should be prioritizing. I prefer the delayed gratification route where my city building may or may not pay off but at least I'm playing the game and not be disappointed with the market.

If players want to actively play but are just in it for the quick money, the passive route serves them best in my opinion anyway. No need to give yourself some headaches with game mechanics if the $ is all you're really after from the game.


I use both routes to play the game. I still think starting to play now would be one of the time to do city building due to the sales in cards happening. You save more if you buy from the market specific cards than randomly minting for luck, that is if you got a strategy already planned out with your city building. I won’t be covering that part on this post as @ecoinstats has made a great job compiling those guides here.


The current meta of the game favors the passive route if you judge based on financial rewards. Due to the high tax implemented, it’s difficult to raise funds for your city to randomly mint buildings. SIM at Hive Engine is really cheap and you can further compound your gains by adding more to the liquidity pool from liquidity rewards.

Tax will always be the obstacle for players trying to focus on city building but this becomes the road for players that invested on Military Complexes, Bases, and Drone Factories (because they take a cut from the military tax and distribute SIM earned to holders of these cards). Law firm, MIC, Military bases, and Drone factories are a must have at these high tax conditions. Cards that also mitigate crisis (another name for random tax) events are also valuable. Players that have invested their resources on hedging against these conditions prior to the fall of SIM prices are doing fine.

As a mathematical game, the game really does a good job punishing players that don’t really take the time testing out the simulation tab and figuring out what optimal strategies prior to starting the game. Prior to the 3rd edition changes, players that focus on population stats had a dominant share on the holding rewards based on rank. This changed when the meta shifted to rewarding players that produce and hold SIM making the previous population strategy near obsolete. There’s a chance for focusing on population stat to make a come back if more votes are given to increase it’s ranking rewards and the costs of using this strategy are cheap.

The release of the 3rd edition which focuses on population control, tax control, and combined buildings leads me to believe the 4th edition will be following the same path. I previously thought that the loss of 1st edition meant players would have less options to have crime prevention on their cities but the Court card from the 3rd has been a good alternative.

4th edition would likely have some similar uses on their card set based from the previous editions. But this also leads me to stock up more 2nd edition cards as much as I can. Once 4th edition is released, 2nd edition will be out and a lot of the most useful cards that have shaped our game’s meta are found in the 2nd edition.

The education and creativity stat, the research centers, universities, stadium, hospital, law firm, laboratories, MIC, social aid, restrooms, and all the cards that are used in combining buildings. 4th edition may use some elements found in the 2nd and 3rd edition but I can argue that the loss of 2nd edition cards from circulation meant less ways to mitigate current tax events. The 4th edition buildings may even push more pressure to reduce the 2nd edition cards sold on the market as new combination buildings require a lot of these old buildings.

It’s great if you had a large city that can print a lot of new cards daily to hoard the rare stuff. The laboratory card would be a pain to find once the new cards are released. For those doing the passive route to “play”, these changes hardly matter unless the amount of holding rewards distributed daily got changed. But for players that are taking the active route to city building, the gamble to delay gratification and continue building may pay off IF the prices of SIM rises in an uncertain future.

The key takeaway is looking into the nature of the second edition cards and what the community may not readily have access to anymore once they go out of print especially when combined buildings are a thing now. The 2nd edition cards have shaped the meta of the game to how it is being played and dictated most of the cards to be a hot buy (War shares, Tax, Education and Creativity).

Despite the depressing prices of SIM, I don’t mind continuing to build my city further because it’s fun and challenging as a mathematical game. I don’t need to log in everyday to miss out on the rewards or be compelled to play if I don’t feel like it.

If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.

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