Monopoly Secrets

That’s right. Just a few more days to enjoy Monopoly City Streets. It officially ends December 9.

Overall, reviews have been mixed. Many serious gamers felt the game was not as developed as it should have been. Cheating ran rampant throughout. Hasbro intended this game for families, and many parents have enjoyed it with their kids.

As the final days of the game come to a close, what’s your take? Good game, bad game, or indifferent? Share your reviews in the comments.

If you even play Monopoly City Streets occasionally, I’m sure you’ve noticed the occasional HUGE fines by now.

What’s the deal? Are they truly tied to percentage of your current balance? (Some have suggested it’s 75%.) Sure, these fines are part of the original game, but taking 75% of your balance every day–isn’t that a little much?

Scott shared a great strategy to minimize the impact of these fines. What’s yours? And what’s the most you’ve been fined?

Here is the conclusion of my approach to Monopoly City Streets.

6- Sabotage and Bonus Buildings – Although I recommend never sabotaging, it is of course possible that someone else will sabotage your streets.  Early in my days at this game, I would build many Green Houses because I was trying to trigger a demolition card to remove a Hazard building, or a Bonus Building to protect my street.  Of course this tactic quickly filled up my streets with low paying buildings and triggered many other cards that I did not want.

So I abandoned that approach. The card will turn up eventually without me trying to make it happen.

Also, you can build a Bonus Building on a street that already has a Hazard and that will counter the sabotage without actually removing the Hazard.

Build 2 Bonuses on each street, and even 3 on the longest ones, because anyone looking to sabotage you, will probably pass you by to hit a less prepared opponent.

7- It is better to reduce the likelihood of sabotage, so I focus on equalizing the value of all my streets to not attract attention in the first place.

Let’s say 4 of my streets are valued at $2M each but the 5th is valued at $10M, it stands out like a billboard that says “Sabotage Me”.

Even if the original prices of my streets are very different, I buy buildings on the lower value streets first to raise the value to match the others, and then equally from then on.  If my Revenue is $50M, I divide it by 5 streets and build a $10M building on each street.

8- Fines – Few things are as hateful as the Chance cards that fine you almost all your money, especially in contrast to the cards that win such little money for you.

I haven’t found anyway to predict or avoid the occurrence of these cards, but I do have a strategy for minimizing their impact.

Since it appears that the fine is a percentage of your current bank balance, it is best to lower the balance before getting this card.  So, as soon as I receive my Revenue for the day, I immediately buy the largest buildings I can afford. When the “fine” card eventually appears, I have already spent most of my money, so even a 75% fine is relatively small in dollars.

While it remains possible that this card can turn up early in your turn, it rarely does.

Have fun and good luck.

-Scott

Here are some more suggestions for your building strategy:

3- Buying buildings is of course the primary way to increase your rental income, but is it better to buy a lot of lower priced buildings or fewer high priced buildings?

Well, yes and no.

In the first few days of your game, your focus should be to find the longest streets you can afford, and maximize your ROI by buying houses and cottages because they get the highest revenue per $ spent. (100% return on streets over $1M).

After a few days you will start to see ever increasing daily revenue, and you should build more expensive buidings.  ROI is not as good, but you earn more revenue per building site, and as your streets start to fill up, that becomes the more important factor.

4- Since I have chosen to have only 5 streets, the shortest streets quickly run out of sites to build.  I have lots of money to build huge buildings, but there is no room left to build them.  Although it seems reasonable to just go out and buy another street, I don’t want to trigger taxes, so I choose to sell the smaller buildings to free up space to build huge buildings.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but taking a loss on 3 Green Houses that earn $150K to replace them with a single Photat building thet earns $697K is not a bad trade.  Later in the game, you may find it expedient to sell 2 adjacent Photat buildings to build a Sky High Tower that earns over $3M per day!

5- The Hazard and Demolition cards that pop up regularly appeal to your vindictive or vengeful nature to sabotage your enemies. Often the objects of your wrath will be the cheating scum that dominate the top of the Leaderboard, so you feel justified to lash out at them with whatever small power you can.

Well then, you need a sharp dose of reality.  The fact is that not only does that approach add nothing to your own score, it is like an engraved invitation to somebody who has infinite resources to crush you like an ant.

So, in spite of the fact that these cards appear more than any other, NEVER use them on another player.  I discard them every time, unless there is a hazard on my street that I want to remove. As a result, I have only been hit twice with a hazard in the last 12 days since the Reset.

More tomorrow.

Ciao,

-Scott

There are several different opinions on the best and fastest way to increase your portfolio value. For example, some say buy the most expensive street you can find, others say buy lots of lower priced streets. Some say to use the Hazard and Demolition cards to attack other players and prevent them from collecting rent.

I have tried each of these tactics by trial and error, and have settled on a restrained approach that I will share with you over the next few days.

1. Cheating is simply a hard reality in this game, so get over it.
   Playing fairly according to not only the rules but the spirit of the game, will never produce higher scores on the leaderboard than the incorrigible vermin who treat the game like their own Kobiyashi Maru.
   I am not endorsing cheating; merely accepting that it happens, so manage your expectations accordingly.
2. Taxes are a significant factor in this game.  No tax is levied if you have fewer than 6 streets, but as soon as you buy your 6th street, all your streets are taxed.
   I have a visceral disdain for taxes, so I have chosen to limit my portfolio to 5 of the longest streets I can find.  As a result, I pay no taxes, and can apply all my daily revenue to buildings.

I hope you find these suggestions helpful.

Check back tomorrow to read my thoughts on Hazards and Bonus Buildings.

Ciao for now.

- Scott

Is anybody else noticing a significant decrease in chance cards?

It seems that I’m hardly getting any these days, especially when compared with before the restart. This makes it a lot harder to get bonus buildings, which makes the game a lot more risky for me.

I’m curious what the chance is you’ll get a chance card for each move you make–1%? 2%? 5%? No official word yet on that.

At the same time, any chance card I discard, I’m still getting the option to use it again the next time a sign in. Sometimes it’s annoying, but it can also be helpful when I decide I really DO want to use that demolition card!

I’ve been reading reports that players paying hackers real world $$ for Monopoly City Streets cash.

Apparently, hackers have found a way to hack their computer’s communication with Monopoly’s servers to trick them into giving certain players enormous sums of cash.

Can anyone confirm this? Have you seen it happen?

If this is happening, the developers should be able to put some simple safeguards in place real quick to prevent it. Oh, I don’t know, maybe they could flag accounts for review that somehow earn $1 trillion in the middle of the day?

The storm seems to have passed, but some players are still upset about the announced change in rent rules.

Personally, I think I lost a few million due to the large purchases I made right before the rules changed. If I knew that rent was going to go down so far so soon, I would have put those big purchases off.

Some players are suggesting there should be another rent change, however. For instance, increasing the  multiplier when a street is 50% built, or finding other ways to bring the rent value of expensive properties back up.

What do you think? If Hasbro was to change the rent rules again to give more value to expensive streets, how should they do it?

The official blog update today promises system maintenance, starting this morning, to deal with multiple account cheaters.

The game will be down for 3 hours starting sometime between 10 and 11 AM Eastern. During that time, systems will be put in place to eliminate the multiple accounts many cheaters are using.

And the official word on multiple accounts? One account per player, please. But we’ll let you have up to 5 per computer, just in case you’re sharing it with your family.

In other words, cheaters can now only use 5 accounts per IP address… A good change but still probably too easy to work around. I expect to still see plenty of multiple account abusers until more stringent measures are put into place. A good additional step would be to allow users to report abuse within the game.

Lots of players are still very angry with the unannounced drop in rent values yesterday. Some have even quit the game.

What do you think the developers should do to get rid of multiple account cheaters, for good?

What about families? Is anybody playing with their kids? In spite of all the setbacks, it is a very family-friendly game.

It’s confirmed. Rent values on large properties has completely changed.

It looks like the old cap of $1 MIL property values has return, except only as it applies to rent values.

You see, rent is calculated in part by the property’s value. (Building Rent = Street Purchase Price x Building Purchase Price x Rent Multiplier — details here.) When a lot more expensive streets appeared after the restart, they were very attractive for this reason.

Then, yesterday, without warning, the developers changed the rules. It looks like the “Street Purchase Price” when it comes to calculating rent has been capped at $1 MIL. In other words, even if your property cost $30 MIL, your building rent calculations will only “see” $1 MIL of that value.

Anyone that made sacrifices to purchase these more expensive streets, expecting greater returns, are now left out in the cold.

And the official Twitter and blog has been silent for almost 24 hours. Hmm…

So what’s the new strategy?