I have been talking about this - Here was my original starter pack post of the new meta, prices are WAY up on these starter cities now, people are realizing how much fun and profit they are able to generate with a cheap starter city, especially now that STUDENT mining is in play.
These students are quite valuable, and key to the future high-tax gameplay through their 'tax rebate mechanisms'. Many of the students transformation cards have special abilities like crime reduction, war shares and education and income boosts.
In extreme tax environments, tax rebates are king. 1 tax rebate is worth 10 INCOME with 90% tax, 20 INCOME with 95% tax, and 100 INCOME with 99% tax.
So we want to build efficient citizen mining cities, we don't want to invest too much to start, but want to make sure we are taking full advantage of the citizen mining options that exist within dCity.
I have made up a number of different models, and have been checking their performance - they are performing!! Here is the largest model I have:
It is not clear to me that these 1.9k popularity models are performing significantly better than the 900 popularity model. I will let them go another months but by then if the results aren't clear I will probably downsize the bigger ones to support my growing super city, more on that later.
I have seen cities mine students without a church, but models with a church do seem to produce more citizen mining overall than models without churches. It is likely that once a student appears the tax rebate from the church is unnecessary, so that might be a way to avoid buying a church building for budget conscious players.
In the end, just like homeless and immigrants can be turned into more exclusive citizen cards, students as well can gain (debt) and have that debt paid to turn into other, more rare tax rebate cards.
They can also turn into homeless! But hopefully we can get lawyers, policemen, Eco Activists, Soldiers and Economists, Professors also get the tax rebate.
dCity is a long term game, and its a game of chance and playing with numbers. Right now, there is some serious battle going on for control of the reward pool.
Alt cities are getting eaten up and its becoming more exciting than a long time to compete for the reward pool on dCity, mostly because now there are 5 different categories. But if you want new cards and not market cards, you better move fast - education and creativity are not found in third edition but only in Second, which will soon becoming discontinued in less than two weeks.
Even though I have put money back in, I have done it carefully and selectively, and I have also taken out a ton of joy and coin from playing dCity. Even now, I am pushing the top players to buy more second edition cards by beating them in the ranking board game:
Of course I have not managed this first place everyday, just today, frequently the top players adjust to changes and many days I take third in prizes, or second, but today I was able to top both of the goliaths. Jelly seems to be a solid 4th player with his unique 3-city strategy and 16+ hive per day, and many top ~40 players are earning between 4-12 hive per day from their city.
And SIM is cheap. You can keep accumulating it or maybe better just turn it into 2nd edition cards (or third edition).
If anyone was crazy enough to ape into this world's oldest nft defi game, I think they would be pleasantly surprised what they could get for just a few thousand HIVE.
SIM recently bounced off of 0.00036 with the recent HIVE pump, appears to have recovered to 0.00037, the liquidity pool is quite deep so theoretically one could get some really deep SIM pockets pretty effortlessly and APE into 2nd edition.
Will someone do this before second edition closes? Maybe, maybe not. Probably some long term holders think, this would only dilute us if they would.
I think about it sometimes, although - I am already a top player - so I have to be careful about all the eggs in one basket type things. And, my number hasn't hit yet, maybe one day I will buy the dip on SIM. But for now, I have had a different strategy, to try to buy the dip on 'distressed property', sometimes family emergencies or surprise dental work.
This has happened more than a time or two before, and its one of the benefits of keeping some liquidity on hand, itself a product of habitually taking profits. Take profits young ones, always.
Then you can use the profits to 'buy the dips' or to 'pay your rent', or buy the dip when the other guy needs to pay his rent.
Eventually it will just grow so big. It just keeps compounding. Even now, as I calculate based on my best case scenario of 90% taxes and me hitting the top of the leaderboard, we are looking at a 72% apr on the ranking plus sim income rewards. This is not counting my efforts documented above to become the greatest citizen token miner ever. There is still gameplay fun to be had playing dCity.
Who knows what crazy excitement @gerber will cook up next. Rumor has it he is working on yet another secret project. I'm still holding and selling his last project XCHAOS for incredible gains from great market timing.
Play with your own money responsibly. Being a degenerate gamer/gambler requires great discipline.