A Restrained Strategy Part 3 – Sabotage & Fines
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
7 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
at one point, I thought there was a slightly smaller chance of getting Chance cards (good or bad) when zoomed-out one click, now I’m not so sure.
One thing I have noticed (not related to chance cards) is the new message about “you are making too many requests too quickly, please slow down”. It’s weird. Yesterday I had bought this really LOOONG road up in Alaska that had 300+ greenhouses on it. I wanted to decon the houses and replace with cubics, so I figured I’d decon the entire street manually, then use MCSTools to rebuild with cubics. Yesterday MORNING, I could manually decon as fast as I wanted (or as fast as the server would reply), and I NEVER saw the “too many requests” message. Then yesterday afternoon I started deconning again, and that freaking message popped up after 4 or 5 houses. For like 2 hours. Then this morning I start deconning again, and it lets me go as fast as possible and never shows the message.
I’m starting to wonder if that message is related to the database backend somehow. Maybe if their DB servers get too busy, they send a message to the front-end, and the front-end is then generating the “too many requests” message.
Or it could be that they are gauging “too many requests” by IP address instead of by user/session. I’m at work, and we use a NAT firewall, so if there are other folks here playing MCS, all of the requests for builds/sells would come from the same IP.
Either way, it’s strange. Not related to your original chance-card post, but thought I’d pass it on.
Boring advice.
[...] Scott shared a great strategy to minimize the impact of these fines. What’s yours? And what’s the most you’ve been fined? Share and Enjoy: [...]
Darklurker and MonopolyPoor report being fined for greater amounts than their Cash on Hand, so that means that there is really no advantage to my Fine Reduction strategy. I have not lost more than my balance in the 3 weeks since the Reset, but their experience proves it can happen.
Oh well, I still prefer to build only the largest buildings on my streets, so it ends up reducing the number of builds anyway.
The large-buildings idea highlights one of the flaws of the game logic itself (aside from the bugs and cheaters). To avoid the hellish taxes, you have to reduce the number of builds you do, so you have to buy high-dollar buildings. But, a $30mil Skyhigh only returns $4mil/day rent, so for 7-8 days that $30mil investment is just sitting there spinning, trying to pay for itself, before it gives you the first penny of profit. And even once it DOES start paying, you’re only making a little more than you would if you had built 4 cubics, and those cubics would have been making profit for 6 of the 8 days you had to wait. Not only that, but 8 days is FOREVER in the pace of this game.
I think the whole rent scale is just whack. I mean, I can see why Tribal/Hasbro did it that way – if the big buildings paid close to their purchase price the game “scores” would wind up being inflated like they were right after the reset when greenhouses were paying 10+ times their price. But right now, I think the stuff above Cubics needs to be adjusted up a little bit. Not a lot, just maybe 125% to 150% for the level 4 stuff, and maybe 200-300% for the level 5 stuff.
As to the taxes/fines, if you look at it a certain way, you see that the game is built to punish, not reward, the players. Think about it – you lose more in taxes/fines than you’ll ever “win” from the pitiful bonus-cash cards. If you have more than 5 buildings, you get taxed in a ridiculous cumulative manner. A single demo card can tear down a $100mil Monopoly tower that hasn’t even paid for itself yet. And the big buildings pay squat for rent. It’s becoming apparent that there’s really no way to WIN at this game, the best you can do is just not LOSE as badly as everybody else.
But I do like the game. In spite of the massive problems they’ve had, it’s still a cool concept.
Best way to aviod big fines is to always have an amount you are prepared to lose in your bank account.
To do this you will need another account
As soon as you get your rent paid, make an offer to one of the streets in your 2nd account. This will take away the money from your account. Now build/buy until you runout of money in your account. Then reject your dummy offer from your 2nd account to free up the money for your main account.
Keep doing this…
eg. Suppose you get your daily rent paid and you have 100M in your bank. Say the maximum you are prepared to lose to chance cards is 20M, make an offer to your 2nd account for 80M. Now your main account only has 20M and the maximum fine you can get is also 20M.
Use your 20M to do what ever you what. Once your balance runs out, goto 2nd account and reject the offer. Now your main account will have 80M again. Again make an offer to your 2nd account this time 60M. Again you are left with a 20M to do your work. Repeat the process
Hope that helps
I did some testing today to see how many of each type building will fit in a given space. The results are at
http://www.linuxhangout.com/mcs/density.html if anybody is interested.