DrugsWars is currently trending on dapp listing sites such as SteemApps and State of the DApps. Had a little chat with @lpfaust today telling him that I think this game may catch on and he was like WTF is Drug Wars? So here are some of my thoughts on it.

Make more drugs, make more Steem.

Everybody's a virtual druglord in DrugWars. You make drugs. I make drugs. They make drugs. Everybody's just making drugs around the clock, 24/7. The game is at its heart, a management simulator like Farmville, except that it comically looks like the Deep Web. So in order to advance, you have the choice to do the following:-

• Upgrade various facilities from crackhouses to castles to increase your production yield over time for any of the three main resources: drugs, weapons, alcohol. These are the exact same resources required for everything you spend on in the game.
• Build your own private army. All they need are weapons and alcohol at the moment. I'd say they're quite a professional bunch for staying away from drugs.
• Attack other players. Just make sure your private army can take them on in numbers and you'll be able to steal their resources.

Maybe the developers will add more features soon, but that's about the gist of the game at the moment. Ultimately, just invest your resources wisely and make more drugs!

Is it pay-to-win?

This is the interesting part of Drug Wars. For everything you can spend using drugs, weapons, and alcohol on in the game, you can opt for paying in Steem instead. Doing so will enable you to upgrade your facilities and build your private army instantly. It's like a shortcut to improve your empire and thus, have an effect on the Steem rewards you get out of the game.

I've only spent a couple of hours inspecting the way it works, so don't quote me on this: my personal ballpark assessment of the costs & benefits for spending Steem on the game stops at about ~300-400 Steem at time of writing. For a single account anyway.

Here's my simplistic handle on the economics of the game. Upgrading a pharmaceutical lab from level 0 to level 1 costs $2.5 to produce 24.19k drugs / day, but going just from level 4 to level 5 costs $27 to produce only 120.96k drugs / day. Hence, it looks like the daily rewards of this game do not efficiently go to those who spend a lot of Steem on just pumping one massive account or two to god-tier level. The game instead, distributes its daily rewards more to the rest of the (smaller) players that don't even have to spend any Steem playing the game. That's how it looks like to me anyway.

At the moment, the account I've spent about 300-400 Steem on is currently producing ~150,000 drugs / day and is going to get 8 Steem in rewards today. Comparatively, a fresh account which I've spent ZERO Steem on is currently producing ~350 drugs / day and is going to get 0.018 Steem in rewards today. Way less rewards than if I spent Steem of course. But that's 0.018 Steem rewards / 0 Steem spent, which equates to "infinite" Steem rewards per Steem spent..

Misc thoughts.

I'm not sure how the rewards are being calculated and distributed, but there aren't any on-chain "smart contracts" behind this. Just like bidbots and other games on Steem, there's a reliance on a trusted third party here to keep scores honestly. However, I expect that having the game using the blockchain does it make audit-able to a certain degree, assuming the developers have been addressing the relevant interfaces. So play at your own risk!

Let's have fun.

It should be fun to gang around whacking each other in the future lol. I'm current playing on my rebel-account @etherpunk and here's my referral link if you feel like making me rich: https://staging.drugwars.io/#!/ref/@etherpunk

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Disclaimer: Not to be taken as financial advice.
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