My dCity Log #2 - First Steps
My first move in dCity was just to see how other people are doing it. I looked around at lots of different cities. Of course, I looked at some of the Top 10 cities to see what that looks like. With the game being relatively new, there's no way people 'managed' their way to cities that size yet. They had to put in lots of Hive to do that. I wanted to see some model cities where people were putting in Hive but not a huge amount. At this point I still don't know if there's a way to play this game without investing some currency.
But then I specifically checked out small cities. How were other people starting? What were they buying? It's hard to hurt yourself at that early stage, but I'd rather know what I'm doing.
I found another small city with just a tiny population and a few forests. That was a card that I overlooked going through the dCity info page. But I like the elegance of it - a small clean city with few people but relatively good Income and good Popularity to counter the negative Popularity of Immigrants and Homeless I was using as my initial population. And I was bound to get more.
Forests were selling for just 2 Hive at the time. So it was a low-cost way to get some numbers happening in my city to get a feel for it. It was easy to play out a simple strategy while I learn the game.
It seems like I wasn't the only one overlooking Forests. I've read some posts where others don't see much value in it. I think they're a great card for an early city. The first metric I came up with from the spreadsheet that I was putting together was what I call Worker Productivity - how much income and other resources 1 population produces on a card. It's actually very high on the Forest, one of the highest in the game. So, I felt good about choosing a strategy that had some math to back it. I'll talk about that more in my next post.
Starting the game with Hive going in on a weekly basis presents its own challenge. I have to grow in a controlled and planned way, learning as I go, focusing on the simpler concepts and expanding as I get comfortable. And there are going to be challenges to that as some changes to the game are coming as 3rd Edition comes out and 1st Edition stops being printed. I wish I got into the game a little sooner to get a better handle before things change, but that's par for the course in crypto, isn't it?
The spreadsheet was just shaping up and I want to talk about that in the next post and go over some of the first things I was noticing.
See you on the streets!