DCity Card Analysis: Banks and Ad Agencies

In the previous post, I briefly looked at how an Ad Agency can be used to construct a holding similar to a Factory. However, here I'd like to compare Ad Agencies to Banks.

A Bank has always been considered an expensive card. It has the highest income value of any card and also one of the highest income ratios at 1.5 SIM per worker. However, an Ad Agency also has the same income ratio plus some further bonuses: it is cheaper and it can't be robbed. So how do the prices compare?

A Bank has a profile of 0-30-10-20 (population-income-popularity-workers) and a rarity of 3% of the 1st Edition.

An Ad Agency has a profile of 0-9-5-6 and a rarity of 5% of the 2nd Edition, plus 5 creativity points.

This means that three Ad Agencies come to 0-27-15-18, which is pretty close to a Bank. Indeed, the extra popularity will generate some extra population that can be used as workers. This may be important if you have a modest-sized city running close to zero unemployed.

From the above chart, we can see that an Ad Agency has been running at just below 4 HIVE per card for the best part of the last two months. The recent drop in cards on the market has given both Agencies and Banks a price boost. But as Banks will eventually stop printing, the Ad Agencies can easily fill the same role. Hopefully, the creativity parameter will be given some extra features in the 3rd Edition to make this card worth a bit more than a third of a Bank.

It's all very well analysing the relative prices of cards, but is there any way to establish their absolute value? I mean, is 12 HIVE for a Bank good value or not? (I wrote this yesterday, and perhaps we should ask ourselves whether Banks are worth 20 HIVE!)

One calculation that can be done is the break-even point for each card. This establishes the number of days needed for the income generated by a card to equal the purchase price; anything beyond that is pure profit, including, of course, selling the card and taking back the capital.

For example, a Bank generates 30 SIM per day. At the par 0.005 HIVE price, that comes to 0.15 HIVE per day. Now, if you got this card randomly for just 4 HIVE, that's a break-even point of 27 days, but if you paid 12 HIVE for it on the market that comes to 80 days. (And if you paid 20 HIVE, that goes up to 133 days.)

Most cards have a break-even point of somewhere between 80 to 100 days. However, there are complications to this simple estimate. The biggest influence on this is the level of taxation. If taxes are 30% then your income is 30% lower - and your break-even point is increased by some 42%. Those 80 days have thus risen to 114 days!

Also, if you need to sell your SIM for HIVE, then the market price is also an influence. You could, of course, wait for the price to rise or buy more cards using SIM, but if you're selling them at, say, 0.0045 HIVE, that's a 10% drop and hence extends the break-even point by a further 10% (actually 11%!)

On the positive side, your city is probably also earning HIVE rewards, so that will bring your break-even point downwards a little.

One extra consideration that needs to be made is the cost of the workers. That Bank requires 20 workers, and although the popularity score may create 4 or 5 of them, you still need to buy the rest. For example, an Apartment plus a Bank will generate 35 SIMs of income but at a cost of maybe 20 HIVE or more, giving a break-even point of some 115 days. Maybe you only need 4 Basic Homes instead, but the point being that income-generating cards also need a population of workers.

So, instead of juggling so many numbers around, the simplest thing is to just open up a spreadsheet and generate your own income and expenditure table. Just don't forget that income is only really a profit if taken out; if reinvesting in new cards then that is a fresh expenditure. It's perfectly valid to compound your investment, just don't pretend it's profit until it has been realised!

You may also use the DCity Analytics page, just input your DCity username, as shown in the image above. But just be aware that this utility can only take transactions that are done through the formal DCity game, and cannot include private transactions. For example, if you buy a card from a friend using some other token, that card will increase the value of your city but the cost of doing so will not appear.

In terms of making instant decisions on whether to buy a card from the market, if it is for income then I'd just quickly calculate 100 times the income and see what that comes to. For a Bank, that comes to 15 HIVE, and for an Ad Agency that gives a price estimate of 4.5 HIVE. Then you can either add or subtract any extra features, such as more popularity or creativity - or "robbability"!

The issue of being robbed is significant for smaller cities. A Bank can be robbed 150 SIMs; that's equivalent to the income of 5 Banks. It may thus not be worth holding just one or two Banks, but that's a personal decision.

Enjoy building!

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Related DCity Posts: Factory, Zoo, Circus, Hotel & Ad Agency - Shopping Malls, Cinemas and Stadiums - Basic Homes and Apartments - How to Construct a Small dCity With a Big Income

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Images from DCity Statistics, created by @rafalski.