Maybe you've heard about it, maybe you haven't yet. This is one of the most thrilling new projects around here in my opinion, and I have been happy to learn from the beginning, almost as soon as the game came on the web. And I am happy to be in.

I learned about it from a post, of course. I think it was @muru's and it was shared by somebody I follow. As soon as I found the time I joined the SteemCity Discord server and so it began.

The game is the first that I know of that makes good use of the NFT tech and of various tokens across the Steem-Engine engine (engine, engine, engine, and here's one more engine for you in this sentence...or wallet, all right).

And it comes down to buying tokens for your city. They are all structures with their own stats, like:

The workers they need;
The population they bring;
The income they bring;
The popularity they bring;
Their relation to your crime rate.

The tokens you buy are cards...

A snapshot from the Info page

...which are, at the same time, represented as small round tokens in your city view.

That's a snapshot of my city from about 10 days ago. It looks pretty much the same now...with one huge difference I am going to tell you about.

So, yeah, you buy those. It is not a Free-to-Play game. You may wonder how you start. I did, too. Receiving an airdrop of one building does almost nothing and you still need to buy more cards. Random ones from the game, or the ones you need from the secondary market.

Yup, it's a game of Investment.

And you are like the realtor. Or rather like an exchange broker, since you buy and you sell NFTs, looking to increase your assets portfolio, on one hand.

It's also an Engine-Building game.

You keep the parts you decide and sell those you decide. This is the filter that shapes your cityscape. Which starts working for you.

On the top left of the image above you can see my city's stats — the income per day, the chance to attract free citizen tokens per 2 hours, how much workers you have available or how much workers still you need in order to power each and every building in your city. Workers come in two ways — by acquiring Basic Home, Luxury Home, or Apartment NFTs; or by attracting those Immigrants, Homeless, Workers, and Hard Workers (the last two only available when and if you organize beer fests with Beer tokens). Immigrants and Homeless NFTs are the only free assets you can get (although they need time and time is arguably not free since you have a limited amount of it). They do increase your workforce but they punish your popularity. Which gives you two things — the chance to attract them plus some bonus to your total population. At 25 % popularity and above your Basic Homes practically bring you 5 workers instead of 4 (their base stat). At 50 % it probably increases to 6 workers per Basic Home. That's my guess since I haven't reached 50 % popularity yet.

My investment and my experience so far

I am generally reluctant to pay Steem for anything right now since I value it much more than the mere cents it presently trades for. I consider each Steem spent a necessary investment into something. Or someone. Anyway. I thought I wouldn't play a game that needed me to pay for it all the time in order to grow.

But this is where the beauty is. The game is, in that regard, a simulation of reality. And in business, you need to spend money to make money. And every NFT you buy at random costs 4 Steem. Or 800 SIM tokens. Which is what brings value to them. A good move, since they are thus bound to the Steem at about 200 to 1.

So, during the snapshot above, I was at about -100 Steem. But that was not a problem anymore. Because I had assets that could be sold for more. Double, probably. It was not the time to do so. The game had just started for me. I was still 100 Steem behind but I had spent about 400 Steem and 300 of that had already returned. Those 400 were a dynamic investment, actually, and most of that came from the game, already. So only about 100 Steem invested from outside.

(Which actually meant that a few planets had to burn in NextColony so that a few buildings could be built in SteemCity. Ashes to ashes and StarDust to dust.)

And weekly payouts had just begun. Those are rewards depending on your population-based ranking.

A snapshot from my ranking screen.

Yeah, I am steadily going down in rank. Because more people join. Some of them with more purchasing capabilities. And because I wanted to come clean.

To get all my investments returned before I make this post.

And I did it. Yesterday, less than three weeks since I started. I admit I was a bit impatient about that. So I sold some of my assets on the market.

A snapshot of the market and my Shopping Mall NFT on it.

Without the market, you have only your SIM daily income (and a chance to get some of it robbed from time to time, due to your crime stats), and your weekly rewards. This is the slow but steady ROI some people are going for. And I also trust in this project. But a lot of things out of this ecosystem can influence it, as we all know by now, and I was so close anyway...

So I decided to sell about 1/6 of my assets and drop back down to the level of the snapshot above — my state 10 days ago.

Which is not that bad.

I worked for my NFTs. Now my NFTs begin working for me.

I still have my city producing about 1.75 Steem per day for me, passively. Even when in-game Crime happens, I lose about 150 SIM at most, for now, and that leaves me with about 1 Steem income on that unlucky day.

And I still qualify for weekly rewards.

And I should be attracting 3 random citizens each day on average. Still not convinced in those stats, though. But stats need time and more data to work.

And also development. Which is there all the time, almost. People like @gerber and @mys (forgive me if others are as active, I just don't know about it) seem to almost never sleep. They are there for you. For all of the Steem Universe, I hope.

Do you want to join us in this brand new venture? Visit the Discord server I linked above and invest away!

Yours,

Manol