DCity Card Analysis: Basic Homes and Apartments

This is the first of a series of articles looking at specific cards in the DCity game.

With the 1st Edition cards soon to be discontinued, and the 3rd Edition cards a mystery, I'd like to analyse the different permutations that are possible to achieve specific ends.

The 1st Edition cards were largely dedicated to developing population and income; the 2nd Edition added new parameters, such as education and creativity, plus a set of Technology cards.

The question that needs to be asked is: what will the 1st Edition cards be worth once they stop being printed? We can't know precisely, but we can see which ones can be created by bundling existing 2nd Edition cards and which ones may be more difficult, or more expensive, to construct in this way.

I'm going to start with the blindingly obvious! Basic Homes and Apartments are the only non-citizen cards that are an exact multiple of each other.

Using the standard parameters of population-income-popularity-workers, a Basic Home is 4-1-0-0 and an Apartment is 20-5-0-0. So, without the need for a calculator, 1 Apartment has the same parameters as 5 Basic Homes. Do their market prices reflect this?

As you can see from the above graph (courtesy of DCity Statistics), the two prices have often been out of alignment from their theoretical 5:1 ratio.

If we switch to the price chart in SIMs, we see that it is even more volatile. These are market prices in SIM unadjusted for the SIM/SWAP.HIVE value at the time, so some of that volatily may be a reflection of the changing price of SIM. I think it is equally likely that this is due to players seeing the SWAP.HIVE prices first on the DCity market and hence trades in SIM are less likely - and thus more volatile.

It is always worth checking the card market prices in SIM as there are sometimes bargains to be had there!

Those graphs are great for visualising trends, but they take a day to update, so let's look at the live market. We see Basic Homes have dropped to 1.46 HIVE (and 339 SIM) while Apartments are at 7.33 HIVE (and 1695 SIM). The ratio in HIVE is 5.02:1 and for SIM it is exactly 5.0:1.

So the live prices are currently at their correct ratios and in line with the parameters of the two cards. However, the fluctuations as seen in the graphs show that this is not always the case.

Basic Homes have been holding on to a rather narrow range of 1.6-1.8 HIVE for a couple of months and this recent slide further downwards may suggest an oversupply of population cards.

We can compare these by looking at the Supply graph.

We see that the supply of Basic Homes is much higher than for Apartments. This is not surprising as their probabilities of being created are 30% and 5% respectively, so the supply should be in a ratio of 6:1. Strangely, the figures given in the graph show a ratio of just 5.6:1.

This is not the effect of a demon random number generator! The above graphs show players' holdings and exclude on-market cards. Add those to the numbers and we do, indeed, get the correct supply ratio.

One last graph, just to show the wealth of information now available, is the Market Cap in HIVE. Given the mathematical stress of whether the two cards should be priced according to their parameters or their supply, we see that their market caps do follow each other, with Apartments being slightly lower much of the time.

What does this all mean for players?

Even in this simplest of comparisons, we have discovered a slight tension between the supply ratio and the population/income ratio. In theory, this means the Basics are slightly over-supplied and hence have a tendency to drive the price downwards, thereby bringing down the price of Apartments with them. This may mean it is cheaper to buy 5 Basic Homes than 1 Apartment, but just do the calculation as this is not always true.

What stops these prices nose-diving is that population is needed to generate income, and it is that income, subject to taxes and SIM market prices, that puts a floor on card prices. We shall look at such break-even calculations in future articles.

I shall try to post again tomorrow. If there are any requests for particular cards then just leave a comment. Prices are quite volatile at the moment - and had to scrap an article as procrastinated over editing it - so what was a great buy yesterday could be expensive today.

Images from DCity Statistics, created by @rafalski.