Important notice: I am creator of this game.
You already realized game is quite complex. In my response am going to focus more on game basic(:o) economy. Actual ROI at this tax level is from 70% to 200%, depends how your city is built.
When checking card stats you probably noticed fixed values for income, effect of that is high growing inflation of token instead of model with X tokens per day(most of the crypto projects). And that's why taxes and using percentage reduction on inflation.
We can group taxes by set by players(president elected for 2 weeks by players) and income tax. Presidents rarely play with taxes cause people prefer to (print)earn more tokens and sell it for less.
Income tax ~60% now is an effect of market - set by players buying and selling SIM. Formula for that tax is very simple - difference from peg 4 hive = 800 SIM, 0.005 hive = 1 SIM. So difference from 0.005 hive per SIM, right now 1 SIM is worth 0.00018 hive which is ~64% below peg and we have ~64% income tax. This is one of the most important rule of game that keeps price and ROI and inflation of token at reasonable level.
SIM power = 30 days average SIM holdings. Used for governance(president election and lobbying) and SIM holders earn daily hive, APR for holding SIM is now around 18%.
Holding rewards are paid from dcityfund which will be community governed game fund. Now it is centralized, I make decisions how $ from fund are invested(meantime players learning about governance).
How fund distribution looks now:
- 50k hive on dcityfund account doing nothing
- ~20k hive on dcityfund market maker, trading SIM to provide more liquidity on token
- 10k hive providing liquidity on beeswap, which is also my app for cheap deposits/withdrawals to engine, it earns shares from fees
- 7000$ is pooled on cubdefi, 50% of cub is compounded 50% is used to buy and burn SIM
Worth to mention about basic hive reward pool(~200k hive). 70% of this pool is powered up and makes 20% in year from curation.
This game was made to educate hive users on token economics, inflation, governance, and about defi mechanics. Inflation is still hot topic, some players would like to see 0% taxes and get 3x more tokens thinking that price will be still same if all of them sell it :)
Long term plan for the game is further decentralization, giving more game settings for players to set, by president or voting, proposals for fund investments, and improvements on sustainability of game(profits form curation and fund investments > rewards)
And this was about basics of game economy, not even touching relation between cards and possible combinations for better ROI. And ROI I mentioned above 70-200% is without technology discovery if someone have city with high education and discovers some technologies from time to time, can consider it extra bonus.
Game is complex and with 3rd edition there will be more complications. But gameplay will remain same, it's idle game, only thing that player needs to do is check city from time to time and adjust, buy new building or send some extra population away, kick out criminals decreasing popularity.
It's worth to check posts on /created/dcity
Some people run experiments like 10 hive or 100 hive city. In 10 hive case they probably earn more on posting weekly report :o