DCity Card Analysis: Farms and Hotels; What Are Their Real Effects?

Where are the charts?!

No charts this time. Before I compare some more cards, I want to take a look at the real effects of two cards that have values for all four parameters: Farms and Hotels.

A Farm has values 5-6-5-11 (population-income-popularity-workers) and a Hotel has 4-10-5-15.

A Hotel obviously has a higher income, but what will be the effect regarding population and workers?

Remember that there is a feedback loop in that popularity increases population which may increase social costs and hence affect the real income generated. It is common to see a city that is fully employed suddenly show unemployment if a new card needs more workers than the available population. The actual effect depends entirely on your own city, and especially on your existing popularity score.

So how can you see the effect of these cards before buying one? The DCity Map view has a handy toggle for each card so you can see the effect of switching that card off then back on again. As you can see below, the green icon turns grey if the card effect is switched off. You can even toggle multiple cards.

Now, this great if you already have at least one card and consider buying more. But what do you do if you wish to buy a brand new card? Well, you can see the same effect on another player's city! Just scroll down the Rankings page and find a city that looks fairly close to yours in terms of population and other parameters and see if they have the card you wish to investigate.

We shall be using my own city for these examples, but I must stress again that the effects will be slightly different depending on the city size and structure. Also note that I may have changed some cards since writing this so, again, the effects may be slightly different.

So, firstly, just write down the main city parameters of population, income and popularity, as well as the excess population and social costs - too many numbers to store in human memory! Now, if I toggle the Farm off (write the new numbers) then on again, I can see the population has risen by +14, the income has risen by +6 (+3 after tax), the popularity has obviously gone up by +5 and my social costs have risen from -1 to -2 points. This social cost is the reason that the income has only risen by 3 SIM instead of the expected 4 SIM (after tax).

If I do the same for a Hotel, I see the population has increased by +12, the income has risen by +10 (+7 after tax), the popularity has risen the same +5 but the social costs remain the same as before, even though the unemployed have risen slightly.

Now we can make a better judgment as to the precise effect these two cards have. A Hotel obviously has a higher income and is also almost employment-neutral, meaning that you don't need to buy any extra population cards to supply workers. In contrast, a Farm delivers a much higher population than the workers it uses, thereby nudging up my city's unemployment.

Both of these effects can be useful, it really all depends on the structure of your city and your growth strategy.

One last thought on why the numbers turn out the way they do for my city. I have structured it so that the popularity is quite high compared to the city's size. This means that any new population is magnified - a Basic Home would yield over 9 people - hence why the 15 Hotel workers get used up but the 11 workers on the Farm are not enough. If your city has a much lower popularity score, you may well find the opposite effect: that the Hotel needs too many workers and you may need to buy more population.

All of which is why it is better to understand how to make your own decisions than to just follow other people's advice.

PS. If you feel the urge to look at a chart then click here. So much for markets being rational.