Millionaire City Beginner’s Guide and Planning Strategies

Millionaire City Beginner’s Guide and Planning Strategies by Patsy and Secretsquirrel

So you’ve decided to be a city developer!
Welcome to Millionaire City!
This is an excellent game if you like realism, strategy and making money… lots of $$$

You’ve started off, same as everyone else, so what now?
It’s decision time, because if you plan what you’re going to do, you’ll make less mistakes and hopefully prevent needing to delete/destroy/move buildings because they’re in the wrong place as this will cost you money/lose you Worth in your total city value.
Unlike other games, you can’t just rearrange your city at the drop of a hat, without losing a load of money. That’s the whole point – this is not a cheeky ‘fun’ game – it has lots of realism built into it so it may not suit everyone.

1st choice…?

• Do you want a city with lots of commerces because you are able to visit city regularly to make/increase your $$? (commerce income is every 3mins) or..
• Do you want a city without commerces being mega important where you’ll select your housing for it’s ability to give higher rents and the lower number of tenants will not matter because they won’t be turned into customers for commerces, perhaps because you can’t visit a few times in every day?2nd choice..?
• Do you want a wandering interesting looking city with apparently random layout of housing etc?… or
• Do you want a city of straight rows of uniform appearance buildings?… or
• Are trees and fountains (and eventually gardens) important to the way you want your city to look?So you see you have to make your own choices and then plan where you’ll put any buildings, counting the squares/plots as you go.
  The counting and planning are needed because your city is not a blank canvas, it has contours and you can’t build on them so may find your next building won’t go exactly where you wanted it.
  If all you want to do is copy all of someone else’s idea… then, IMO why bother playing?(I love the fact that this is a less frivolous strategy game where having to move/delete a building because you’ve made a mistake costs money so you’ll lose profit, hence thought and planning are important and very much needed for financial world domination )

  Right, now hopefully that’s clearer, here are some tips:

• Most houses and commerces are 3 x 3 size so that’s useful to take into account in your plan – will mean less changing or moving of buildings as you upgrade your properties,
  ie you can replace one building without affecting the ones next to it,
• Buildings need to be connected to a road which is also connected to your HQ building.
  This means one square must touch – doesn’t have to be one complete side or all the way around,
• There are guides to show you
  1. Possible layouts for best commerce income, post #1 on
     http://forums.digitalchocolate.com/s…ead.php?t=3032
  2. Comprehensive guide, loads of excellent detail
• Using outline plots to layout how you wish to progress, can save time when you return to play at a later time. The $$ spent on these plots are the only $$ which are refunded $ for $ if deleted.

E.G….

Note: The MC HQ are not in the centre of your land area, and it’s the only building that you can’t move at all so no matter what planning/counting you cannot make everything perfectly symmetrical!!

Your 1st area of land is 30 plots across by 20 plots tall. Future expansions are differing sizes as shown here…

A continuation on some fine points

I was a bit dissatisfied with some of the existing guides, which is not to say that they are not very useful, but because they tend to gloss over some of the finer points and the nitty gritty.

People play the game for different reasons. So maximizing profit is not for everyone because they will choose aesthetics over profit. That being said there are ways to maximize profit.

Commerce or not to commerce?

In general its more profitable to avoid commerce all together unless you can very, very frequently check on your city. Why? Commerce only generate income every 3 minutes. So if you’re gone 24 hours and come back you still only get that base 3 minutes of income. Houses on the other hand can be quite profitable in 3 minutes, but also provide variability. You can choose longer rental periods if you’re not on all day long. The longer rental periods are not as profitable as comparable shorter periods, but they still allow you to generate extra income over a longer period whereas commerce does not.

In addition to really get much value out of commerce you need to have a fair number of tenants. If you only have 10-20 tenants a commerce isn’t very profitable compared to a house.

You’ll also notice that there are, essentially, two types of houses in the game. Low base profit/high tenant, and high base profit/low tenant. The duplex, Apartment Block, Loft Block and Skyscraper are part of the former, while the Townhouse, Three Story, Colonial House, Villa and Chateau are part of the latter. For commerce you want to surround them without a lot of high tenant types.

Houses get their most value through decoration. Decorations are a one time cost that don’t require additional clicks that increase the value of rent for surrounding houses. A grid of Chateaus That gains the benefit of 8 Big Gardens (30% each) and 8 (14% each) fountains is producing 352% more rent than it would by itself.

There is also a space consideration. How much value are you producing per square? A chateau, for example is 6×4 so 24 squares. It makes a base of 211.458 per square in 3 minutes 5075/24). However due to its size you can affect it with a lot of decoration. A big garden that affects 8 Chateaus means its adding 30% value to each of those Chateaus. 30% * 5075 = 1522.5 * 8 = 12180 / 15 squares (Big garden is 3×5) = 812 per square. A Cheateu with 8 Big gardens and 8 fountains with that 352% bonus is making 17,864 in 3 minutes. In addition your decoration bonus works for all rental periods regardless if its 3 minutes or 3 days.

A commerce property, on the other hand isn’t very profitable by itself, but instead relies on the added value to commerce. The skyscraper has the highest tenant to space ratio, 35 tenants and 9 squares = 3.89 tenants per square. (A luxury skyscraper is 4×4 so 16 squares and 50 tenants, so only 3.125 per square)
That skyscraper produces only 1540 in 3 minutes for a lowly base value of 171.1 per square. However if its in the range of 3 casinos which generates 85 per customer means its adding 35*3= 105 * 85 = 8,925 in commerce every 3 minutes. If you add that commerce bonus on top of its base of 1540 you get 8,925 + 1540 = 10,465 / 9 = 1162.8 per square. Which is quite profitable, but under this form of calculation you’re adding all the value of tenants/commerce into the house which means your commerce is effectively producing 0 per square.

Thus, for all except the most ideal setups of the most frequent players houses are generally much more practical in terms of maximizing profit.

A few final points:

I wasn’t taking into account the cost of rental agreements, but they are small and don’t have a huge factor. There is also the question of scale. In the early days of building up you can’t build chateaus and Casinos so you have to work with what you got. The missions aren’t considered as well. When starting out you probably want to focus on building the most cost effective buildings and doing missions as practical. Cheaper buildings yield a far better profit for their cost than the more expensive ones but yield less profit per square. Eventually you’ll probably want to replace the earlier buildings with more expensive ones to yield more profit.

Also early on you probably want to do a bit of both commerce and high value housing. You need experience to level up and since space does become an issue you’ll want to be adding in the most expensive buildings you can at a good pace. Its just a good idea to separate your high base profit buildings from your commerce district with the high tenant buildings. High tenant buildings surround commerce, High base profit get decorations.

This doesn’t cover everything there is to know but it may prove useful for some people who are interested in the math.

Cheers!