Chance Penalty IS NOT BASED ON WHAT YOU HAVE!! LOL

I continue to read over and over that the chance penalty is based on a percentage of the money you have on hand with no reason given as to why people think this, I have posted on this before but lets try and go through it again for that one random person who might read this blog :-).


If the chance penalty was based on a percentage of the money you had on hand there would be no possible way you could be taxed into a negative balance, in less the tax was completely random with no set value allowing it to exceed 100%. Otherwise if you have $10 and your fined 100% you now have $0 if you have $10 and your fined 50% you now have $5 if your fined again lets say 50% you now have $2.50 but once you reach a balance of zero any percentage you are fined will equal zero (100% of $0 = $0)


Now that we have covered why you ARE NOT fined based on the money on hand let explain the 2 basic reason we should all know this by now.

1.) If all your streets are sabotaged and their rental value is Zero all chance penalties will also equal zero, thats right if you have no income value the penalty percentage reflexes that and the zeros cancel each other out and you are fined no money. Remember even 200% of Zero is still Zero (I Have experienced this first hand on more then one occasion)

2.) If that chance card penalty is based on your total rental income and not the money you have on hand it becomes much easier to explain the high fine values, if you setting on only $10 of the $100 you made but the percentage taken still reflects you having $100 then even small fine % appear to be bigger and can result in being fined into a Negative balance. Because we all know if you are fined 100% of $100 but you only have $10 on you well now your $90 short.

From the Official FAQ Section-

Q:       I have a negative bank balance. What do I do?

A:        If you receive a Chance Card that fines you more cash than you have in the bank, you will find your balance fall below zero. The quickest way to get back into the positive is to sell some of your streets to the bank! Unfortunately, for half their total value, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Please let me know if you have anymore question about chance card penalties, I can only hope that one day I will stop seeing uninformed post regarding how this work or that someone will provide some kind of proof that I am wrong ;-) :-) 

Farm Chance Cards to protect you bigger income streets

   The more bonus buildings you have the better protected your street is, but getting those cards is few and far between and so I suggest the following. Buy a 4-10million dollar long street but nothing you would keep forever build nothing but green houses on it and whenever you get a bonus building place it on your highest income street. Once your little street is full, wait one full day to recoup 100% of your cost and then sell everything on it and start building over again to farm more bonus cards and continue to place them on your high income street.

If you street is worth over 200million you want to have 20+ bonus buildings on it to make it a hard target for anyone single player to take out and to also even make multi account players think of picking on someone a little easier.

Dealing With Cheaters!!!

I think by now most of us have had a run in with a cheater or a person playing from more then one account, you sign in only to find that all your bonus buildings have been bulldozed and your street has been sabotaged by people with strangely similar names all located in the same place. What can you do, how can you play against a person who has a multiple account advantage against you, they simply have more chance cards coming in...

I suggest this, if your using twitter as many of us are and tired of cheaters and sick of reporting them to hasbro and not seeing anything done or having them take so long that your account is destroyed. Start reaching out to your fellow City Streeters who like you are tired of it. Hashtag #CityStreetCheater and #MonopolyCityStreets with the account name and one of the accounts Streets and location (Ex. Bedwards- Canyon Rd Salt Lake, UT USA) and lets start dealing with cheaters ourselves with bulldozers and sewers etc.

It might take more then one tweet to make this happen but I think we will all be surprised by the amount of people who are glad to use some of their bulldoze cards on people who are taking the fun out of the game.

If you agree Tweet #MonopolyCityStreets and #CityStreetCheater and lets make it clear we no longer going to put up with peoples bs :-)

So you decided to Sell

So you have been playing for awhile now and your raking in the millions, you want to keep expanding buying bigger streets but your trying to stay under 5 to prevent being taxed. Here's three simple tips to help you expand your empire but maintain and expand your income at the same time.

1.) Buy big!!!- The bigger the street the more you can build and the more money you will make, don't be afraid to spend 40+Million on a street, you should be taking in more then enough to cover that cost and have money left to build and in the long run its going to pay off having the longer more expensive street vs a 2-5 million dollar short one.

2.) Don't sell more then one street at a time, when you sell a street you only receive 50% of the value so no need to sell more then one per day. If you buy a street and put all of your money into building it up it will be easier to recoup the 50% loss on your next turn, if you sell more then one street in a turn chances are you rental income will take a dramatic drop and you will be waiting multiple turns to recoup from the sell of the street.

3.) Sell your street last- You log in and receive your rent money for the day, go ahead and buy your next potential street but don't sell your small straight right away. If you sell your street right at the start of your turn you risk having that income taxed away through random chance cards, since the tax from having 6 streets is not going to impact you until the next day buy your new street build as much as you can on it and then sell your small street and use the cash to continue building.


As always remember to finish what you start by maxing out one street before you move on and buy another one, its much easier to build up and protect one street at a time then trying to spread rental income across several streets in a single turn.

Chance Cards, the good, the bad, and the suggestion

If your like me then you have gotten paid only to be slapped with a few bad chance cards that have taken 70-80% of your cash. Ouch I know, the chance tax is random based on the total rental value of all your streets (not the money you have at the time) this is in a way stated in the Hasbro faq when they cover being taxed into a negative number.

So what should you do to minimize the impact of being chance taxed? Buy big, but stick to the 500k rule the only way you can minimize the amount of chance cards you receive is to make fewer purchases since it based entirely on your buy/sell/construction activity. Building 500k structures still offers a 90% return investment in a single turn but also allows you to go through you cash more quickly which means less chance cards, of course you have to take the good with the bad because less chance cards also means you have less of a "Chance" to get the bonus building cards which are vital in protecting your buildings (at least 5 bonus buildings should be placed on any street with an income of 20Million or more).

Remember when your building 500k structures on your street that there will most likely be room between the streets that you can fill in with either "Green Houses" or "City Centre Cottage".

Well thats the rub, the chance tax cards suck and should have a lower percentage closer related to the board game but hey what can we do at least we are not forced to pay every player 1 Million dollars if we draw the wrong card ;-)

New Rental Calculator, Estimator, and Maximizer (Crazy I know!! lol)

I just finished part one of my rental calculator and estimator, this is the first step in what I hope will become a very comprehensive tool for everyone to use. I plan on adding more to the sheet as I find time including the ability to enter your streets length(millage) and receive an estimate of how many of each type of structure you will have room to build on the street.

In the mean time here is something I find very useful and that I wanted to share (Currently it saved in Open Office format because for some reason my open office is not letting me save it in excel 2003 format sorry I'm working on it)

Please let me know here or via twitter if you have any question or suggestion.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?jyjuhjtne2m <-- Download link  (Open Office Format)

http://www.mediafire.com/?ivrymnjjndj (Excel 97/2000/XP Format) Read instruction below as they did not save properly when converted to excel format

Important- All Street at a cost above 1 Million are equal to 1 and all street costing less then 1 Million must be divided by 100, at the top of the sheet and to the right of the Capital Cell there is a place that will do this for you. Just remember that for any building costing more then 1 Million you must still only enter 1 Million dollars or the calculations for you rent will be wrong. Anything below 1 Million dollars and simply enter the amount as its listed on the game, everything else will be filled in for you.    

Out of Room? Are you Sure?

The amount of space you have to build on a street is indicated by the cones that show up when your building, but the amount of cones you see is relative to the building you have selected at the time(since each building is a different size). This means that if you have been building bigger more expensive buildings non stop and you run out of room there might actually be space left for smaller structures between them.

Before you write a street off as finished click on a "Green House" or another small building and make sure you are truly out of room. I find in most cases you will be surprised at the amount of space left between buildings that you can still build on, the more structures you have the greater the rent will be on the street.

So always double check, once you are truly out of space the card will let you know that there is no more room to build and then its time to move on :-)

What Should I Buy?

 So as we all know by know the rent value multiplier has changed, old news, been there said that, but what does it mean. So here is the rub as I understand it for everyone, when you buy a building with a value less then 1Million there is a multiplier that is used to determine what the rent for each building should be on the street, before the change this multiplier increased with the value of the street with no cap. What this boils down to is if you bought a 30million dollar street the building rents would be enormous as the cost of the street was applied to the multiplier, well now that is capped and you get no more rent on a 30 million dollar street then a 1 million dollar street.

So is this good or bad? Well that all depends on how you look at it and where you stand in the game, if you had already spent the money on a high value street in order to take advantage(not in a bad way) of the multiplier your hosed because your no longer making more. If you are just starting out or started out small its not going to have as big of an impact on you in the long run as you can change your build and investment strategy to accommodate the new change (still sucks though lol).

So below is part of the multiplier scale that determines how much rent your making, the important part since the street value effect is now capped. When building on a street you want your multiplier to be as close to 1 as possible since 1 means your getting even money for your investment, whatever you pay you will make back in 1 day. As you can see by the scale and as I stated in my blog prior to this anything over 500k and your return begins to lower steadily to the point where you are paying for a building but you wont be making any profit on it for several turns. Since profit/income is what your position is based on you want to make as much money as possible in the shortest time with the least investment to build your wealth fast and keep it up.

Building Name	B	Multiplier	B*M
Green House	50	1	50
City Centre Cottage	75	1	75
Cane Top Multiplex	150	0.8333	125
The Sentinel	175	0.85714	150
High Reach Place	200	0.875	175
Nova Tower Block	300	0.9	270
Polyhedron Plaza	400	0.875	350
The Grid Building	500	0.9	450
Four Sided Fortress	600	0.8333	500
Nori Place	750	0.7333	550
Honeycomb Complex	900	0.7222	650
Blanco Bastion	1100	0.681818	750
The Photat Building	1500	0.56667	850
Cubic Quarters	2000	0.475	950
Opaque Overlook	2800	0.39286	1100
Tri-Rectangle Tower	3900	0.30769	1200
Spear End Summit	5000	0.26	1300
Unbounded Megaplex	6000	0.23333	1400
Hummer Head House	7000	0.21429	1500
Tobo Place	8400	0.21429	1800
Hips Plaza	10000	0.2	2000
Difo Square	12000	0.18333	2200
Brouette Tower	15000	0.16667	2500
Blemith Centre	19000	0.14211	2700
Graduating Megastructure	24000	0.125	3000
Sky High Tower	30000	0.13333	4000
Monopoly Tower	100000	0.05	5000

So now that we have all that covered with a little more detail what should you spend on a street? Well your going to make the most money on a street that is 1 million or more in cost, as stated your not going to make more rent on a street higher then 1 million dollars but you are going to make then buying several lesser valued streets. 


So my tip in a nut shell is this, buy streets that are greater then 1 million dollars in price but buy them based on length and not location or any other factor. If your going to pay more then 1 million for a street do it because its very long, a long street means more space to build and therefore increased rent because you have the room to build more structures. When building remember that once you cross the 500k mark on cost your spending more and taking several turns to recoup the cost of the building instead of 1 turn to recoup 90-100% of the cost after which everything made is pure profit. 


So my final words are this...


Buy streets costing 1 million plus, buy long streets, and build more little things vs big things :-)

Tip of the day "Value vs Price"

If you have been building big expensive towers its time to change your strategy. With the recent change in rent values bigger is not better, once you go over the 500K mark for building cost the return values on your buildings plummets and while it might seem your making more money in reality due to the different sizes of the buildings and depending on your street space you will end up making less or breaking even compared to smaller buildings.

If you concentrate on building smaller buildings with a more even return investment ratio in most cases you will be able to fit more of them on your street to equal a greater income or at the very least in equal income with a short return wait. The "Green House" and "City Center Cottage" in one day return 100% of their investment cost meaning you can build faster without losing any money.

If you tired of building 500 little houses then consider building building a "Nova Tower Block" costing 300k and returning 270K or 90% of your investment in a single day(Can also be applied to all other buildings between 150k-500k with only a small difference in return rates).

Monopoly City Streets Tip of the Day

Don't be afraid to make friends, if your a small player and being picked on by some people on your local leader board or just in general see if anyone around you wants to group up. Two people working together will end up with 2x or more chance cards, while friends CAN NOT demolish hazards on each other street they can demolish bonus buildings on their enemies street.

Take out multiple bonus buildings and build multiple hazards on your shared enemy's streets and make them think twice before picking on either of you again. Most players will go for an easy target and two people working together provide a bigger challenge for the bully then just one small player trying to defend themselves with less money and therefore less chance cards.

Remember chance cards are give only when actively building or destroying in the game, so if you catch a person with no money saved and no rent coming in you can essentially force them to sell streets or eliminate them from the game all together.

Just remember it works both way :-)