My dCity Log #8 - Overview of My Early Strategy

Cityscape1

I've been playing dCity for about 2 months now, investing a small amount of Hive (and converted Steem) every week and budgeting a little to buy something every day. Since my income has started to become meaningful, I've been reinvesting that as well. So, I thought I'd share my overall strategy since the beginning and how it might be changing as my city grows.

1 The Training Machine. My first goal was to get enough Job Centers so that I could regularly convert Immigrants and Homeless to Workers, Artists, and Scientists. So, I set my target at 10 Job Centers for a 30% chance to train (60% with Jobs Tax) which I felt was a good start. I got that one done first, managing to grow my population to support that, as well as getting some infrastructure along the way such as a couple of Police Stations and a Law Firm once my income could get a return from it.

But with my Popularity at the 500ish level now, my immigration rate is maxing out at 30% (chance for a new Immigrant or Homeless card every 2 hours but capped at 1 per day) and outpaces my training production. So with that first goal achieved (along with several others outlined below), I'm looking to now expand to another 10 Job Centers.

2 Creativity. Early on in the game, Popularity is good because it increases your immigration chance and it adds a Population bonus. So I added a few Art Galleries for the Popularity boost it gave. They also give Creativity. After a while, I noticed that I was close to the minimum Creativity score needed for a 1% chance per day to get a background. So, I added a few more Art Galleries and some Ad Agencies (more for the Income but the Creativity helped) to get to that minimum. It has already paid off with a Rockies background. It's not a priority for me, but it aligned with my other goals so it's just a bonus. Also, I suspect that Creativity will be used in other ways in future game editions.

3 Education. This is a priority for me but it's expensive to develop a decently productive Education level as I analyzed in my last post. I bought a couple of Tier 1 Techs but decided to go ahead and get to the minimum Education level to be eligible for Tech drops. Schools, Universities, and Research Centers have been at really good prices on the market lately, so I managed to do it cheaper than I had planned. It's still a significant investment of workers and resources for a small city, but I'm itching to get into Tech production.

4 BEER Token Generation. As I started playing the game, I wanted to pick an outside token to generate and I decided on BEER tokens because I like the idea of producing Hard Workers from the Beerfest. My target was 10 Breweries as I figured out (roughly) that I would be able to produce enough tokens to have a Beerfest once a month. I've been slowly picking up Breweries as I spot them relatively cheap on the market but I'm not quite at 10 yet.

I've wanted to do this while trying to optimize for income if possible, grow my population effectively, add infrastructure properties as they become available and when needed, and take advantage of market opportunities. I've just about completed all of these small goals and I'm re-evaluating my situation.

I was originally thinking that I would just have one city and grow it as much as possible. But then I began to play with the idea of having several smaller cities and optimizing for different things, specializing each city but in a larger overall strategy. I've already added a second city without really having any goals for it, but I think it will be part of this specialization strategy. I'll go more into what my new plan is in a later post.

Thanks for listening and I hope any of this helps you develop your own strategies!