... and yet more questions beyond that!
I've been "playing" dCity for close to a month now, and I don't feel like I'm understanding this game any better than before. Though I have to admit, it plays differently than most typical games. Even RisingStar you'd check in on several times a day, though even there you would not spend hours after hours playing it. With dCity it's more like a few times a week, as changes happen very gradually. Maybe that's part of the reason why I'm not anywhere closer.
Making Losses, Income Still Rising
In my last post about getting acquainted with dCity I discussed my finances in the game. Since then things have hardly gotten clearer; if anything, they are even more confusing now. So taxes are somewhere between everything you have or almost all of it. This way it doesn't matter how much of a Midas I am, or how wastefully my economy runs. At the end of the day I end up with zero. However, there is a tax refund of 1 SIM I get for students. And not only one: each student earns me +1 SIM. Not only that, but I get this refund even if I make a daily loss of 21 SIM. Interesting! No wonder I've been making a slight profit, even though I clearly have no clue of what I'm doing.
At this point I should acknowledge that I bought my town as a pre-fab city from @ecoinstant , so I guess it was designed to be profitable. I could probably earn an income if I just let it run on its own... until I mess with it too much (which is precisely what I would do in a game).
Pointless Fire Hall? Useless Internet?
In the top left corner there is a list of bad things and their likelyhood that could befall our cities (globally, as I understand). For a while the chance of fires was rising from day to day, so I tried to exercise good foresight, and bought a fire department. It was not too expensive, at least paying with SWAP.HIVE. The fires came and went, but I did not notice any income losses (remember those 100% taxes), or any reduction to those losses. Quite obviously, that fire hall was not needed! Oh well, at least now my town has a fire department.
The same can be said about my Free Internet technology, which I unlocked "by accident" at the very beginning. Once I realized that unlocking it wasn't enough, I went out to buy the card. Again, at a tenth of a SWAP.HIVE it was barely noticeable, while in SIM it would have taken me way too long to save up for it. So now I have Free Internet in my town, which gives me a 5% education bonus. Great! What's 5% of 0? Exactly! I can only guess what kind of websites my citizens are using this great technology for!
The Riddles of Employment
Things get much stranger when it comes to keeping my citizens occupied. In my last post I was worried about the homeless and immigrants who kept pouring into my town, because it's such a popular place. As I intend to keep it that way, I tried to see if I can find employment for them. In the end I sold my homeless (to a human trafficking ring, I guess) so I could buy a job center. And lo and behold, something seemed to have worked, because my two immigrants (on one card - I guess they're a couple) became workers. This raises a number of questions:
- Where are these two workers employed?
- How come my one homeless is not considered unemployed? (Population Status)
- Why is my job center inactive? (Same goes for my nuclear power plant...)
- And if it's inactive, how could my immigrants turn into workers?
- What about my 219 citizens? Why aren't they considered workers if they're not unemployed?
What Are The Chances?
Finally, what really puzzles me is the way "chance" works in this game. For example, my training chance was 0.03% before I got the job center. That's quite understandable, after all, how are those guys supposed to be trained without the proper facility? However, after I got the job center, the likelihood of getting trained dropped to 0.01%. How does that make any sense? Anyway, in spite of this slimmer-than-slim chance, my immigrants managed to turn into skilled workers. I'm impressed, but I can't figure out how it happened.
The other thing I've been looking at is how the chances of receiving new citizens has dropped from 30% to just 2% since I took the screenshot less than two days ago. New citizens are the only fun factor at the moment, where income doesn't matter, new cards have close to no effect, and the statistics are still shrouded in confusion. So I really hope this reduced chance of growth is only due to some temporary condition (I still have to figure out), otherwise I can see stagnation approaching, not only at what is happening in the game, but ultimately how I feel about it.