My Mini City is not useless

Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 2:54 | Posted in internet | 41 Comments
Tags: my mini city, virtual

StoiBär was wondering the other day what sense My Mini City could possibly make. In a comment I agreed that the founder of a virtual town, such as Larkovere, (see my earlier post) has little or no influence on the development of a town. Having now surfed around in My Mini City I must confess that both StoiBär and I were wrong.

As the number of citizens in a town reaches a critical mass, problems with unemployment, transport, crime and pollution start to effect the development of a town. When Larkovere eventually reaches a population of 50, I am going to get problems with unemployment. I then need to spread a link which brings industry to town or else my citizens start moving away to seek jobs elsewhere.

As the town grows ahead, similar links will be gradually activated for improving the transport network, increasing the police force and building parks to fight pollution. The success of a town very much depends on how the virtual mayor maintains a balance between visits to the town through different links. If a town has a high unemployment rate new factories are urgently needed rather than new citizens.

The mayor of Rakvere in Estonia has obviously neglected improving industry in his town which has resulted to an unemployment rate of 34 %. So if you want to help Rakvere the best way to do it would be by bringing them a new factory. Each click to the industry link starts a new factory in town (one click a day from a single IP).

Which brings me to another point what My Mini City is good for.

When visiting another town you can drop a line in the town’s news bulleting telling which is your town and what you brought with you: a new citizen, a factory, more roads or police units. The other mayor usually returns the favor and visits your town. Since only one click a day from each IP counts I tend to visit my friendly towns on a daily basis once from my laptop bringing them a new citizen and then figuring out what their most urgent problem would be and visit them accordingly through my desktop.

Some of the friendly towns in my unofficial network are Myllypuro, Liimalandia, Janila (all in Finland) and Spätzles-Town and Jansenhausen (in Germany).