Breaking News: The Game we’ve loved to the point of complete frustration is ending in one week – December 9th.

Here’s the post from the original blog

We want to thank you, the loyal players, for making MONOPOLY City Streets a huge success. We know it’s been said many times, but it bears repeating – we are surprised, thrilled and honored with your response to this promotional introduction for the MONOPOLY City board game.

However, MONOPOLY City Streets game play will officially end on Wednesday, December 9.

We hope that you will enjoy spending the next several days negotiating, buying, selling and building right up until game play ends on December 9. And after the game ends, check out MONOPOLY City board game where you can continue building industrial complexes, skyscrapers or stadiums and sabotage your friends!

Thank you all for your passion and enthusiasm for MONOPOLY City Streets!

I’ll be posting last week strategies and reflections here shortly.

What’s your response so far?

Related posts:

1. Optimizing Your Game
2. First Day Insights to the New Game
3. Pre-Launch Game Strategy

By now most of you have a decent hang of the game and your own ’system’ and ’strategy’.  If not, definitely read up on some of the past posts here on monopoly hq.

This post will list out a few of the finer points to tweaking your game.  Keep in mind these are my own latest personal techniques and if you read through many of the comments and the chat wall on this site you’ll find plenty of other tips as well.

1.  The end date of the game has changed.

Originally the game was to end January 31st 2010, but the latest official FAQ states in December, and the general consensus seems to be the last day of the year.  This means your window for acquiring property with good return has shrunk if you want to have a decent return.  It also means if you plan on flipping streets you probably don’t want to wait till mid December as it won’t be all that valuable to anyone at that time.

2.  There are three new buildings to maximize your street.

spiral luxe $2.5m/1.05m
revolving restaurant $11m/2.1m
stairway to the future $60m/4.5m

The footprint seems smaller than their neighboring buildings, however I’ve got say the sky high towers are still the bulk of my building purchases.  Visit the tools page as some of the bots have been updated to reflect the new buildings.  Also see the building type specifications if you haven’t seen it already (if anyone has official specs on the new buildings let me know and I can update it)

3. Maximize your streets.

The 420 building limit is reportedly gone so you might want to focus on making existing streets more dense than acquiring streets right now.  However I’m still having problems on one of my streets for some reason.

Put your big buildings down first and squeeze in what you can from highest rent down.  This one is up for dispute and may depend on the shape of your street, but I generally fill with sky highs, then squeeze monopoly towers -> stairway to the future -> and for some reason there’s still room for some graduated megastructures.

5.  Examine streets before you buy.

There are some really expensive roads available for purchase that are actually really small.  Also, take note of streets that have duel paths close together.  While it’s great for putting green houses down each path, when you’re looking at the larger buildings with bigger payouts, they’ll generally take the width of both paths.  ie. that $25 million road will only have room for the equivalent of a $12.5 million dollar road generally.

6.  Strategically selling streets.

My gut feel is that it’s generally better to sell virgin undeveloped streets.  Everyone’s got their own way of playing and building up, and probably don’t care to be bothered with building over your junk.  You can possibly trick a few players into buying a street due to the added value of your properties, but for the most part people are looking for long streets, not purchasing buildings they can buy themselves at any point.

If you plan on selling anyways, at least wait till the end of the day for the highest bid, and then accept right before the next day begins, so you don’t need to pay for unnecessary tax on that street.

7.  Stay off the leaderboard.

If you’re at the bottom edge of the leaderboard and you’re sitting on a pile of cash, it’s safest to make some offers on streets you don’t mind owning anyways, as the cash offered up will instantly decrease your score until your offer is rejected.

8.  Avoid chance card bombs.

If you’re not a savvy street broker, and you need to build property to earn rent like me, well you need to take your chances at some point.  It really depends on where you’re at in the game and how much rent you’re taking in, but I generally use all my cash for trades.  I leave myself 1-2 billion for buildings.  For some reason I find when I’ve found that when I have that little cash on hand (while being substantial enough to build out), billion dollar accounting errors are much less likely.

No related posts.

Even with all the cheating and glitches in the game, there’s still plenty of room to play a good game with good clean strategy.

There seems to be two major ways people are playing the game right now.  One is probably the more ‘classic’ way of playing through building and earning rent, and the other is forgetting rent altogether and being a street broker.

Like many of you (i’m assuming), I don’t have the time to go searching for streets or the programming savvy to meaningfully mine the game data.  So most of my tips will probably go towards a more classic approach to the game… I’m still in awe of the folks who seem to have found land valued over a billion without property on it and how they manage to find dozens of high-end streets every day.  But not to worry, there’s still hope for the rest of us.

Here’s 5 Simple Strategies to improve your current Monopoly City Streets game.

1.  Play at a strategic time.

If you have a lot of enemies on your tail, you might want to play right before the next days rent so you can fix everything up and still collect.  You may want to ‘check in’ and not play at different times to act upon any potential trades as well.

2. Use legitimate tools.

See our post on the best monopoly city streets scripts, tools and sites.

3.  Spend before you Build.

Chance cards can still be deadly.  I’ve had days where I’m surprised that I haven’t received an accounting blunder that cost hundreds of millions, but don’t get sloppy, protect your cash.  You can do this by making offers for property you would want to build on anyways.  Build expensive property first like the sky high towers this helps keep your money invested in something with smaller frequencies of picking up chance cards (since the positive chance cards don’t mean much at this point in the game).

4.  Long Streets.  You still need them.

You can find some tips on long streets here.  Try to think longer term.  What’s best is if you can find streets you know you will invest in for the duration of the game, and invest big early.  You can think in stages as well, and buy streets for the next month, and invest accordingly.  If you’re playing daily and collecting rent, you will outgrow many of your streets due to taxation at some point.

5.  Fortify and Attack if necessary.

If you’ve got some time and a few million to throw around at the end of the day, just build and clear Green Houses.  This avoids any heavy tax allowing you to quickly pick up a ton of chance cards.  Add bonus buildings between large buildings on streets you want to protect.  Destroy hazards you may have.  And attack the heck out of someone who might be hazarding you repeatedly.  It doesn’t matter how big they are, it’s really not that hard to be a complete pain in someone’s side in this game with just a little bit of cash and intentionality.  They will back off.

What other tips & strategies are you using right now?

Photo Credit: BourneDesign

Related posts:

1. Gameplay tips early on
2. Advanced Tactics & Tips
3. Strategy for day two

Are you getting error messages like:

“oops sorry, some weird error occurred, please try again”

“it looks like someone else has beaten you to do this…”

Maybe you’re in the monopoly city streets dead zone.

I’ve got no fixes for you other than slamming the monopoly city streets development team with this feedback form

And focusing your current efforts outside the deadzone.

Obviously the game can’t continue like this, so please try and get the dev team’s attention even if your game play is just fine.

Related posts:

1. Finding Long Streets
2. Rent Calculator – Is your next street worth it?
3. An Open Letter from Hasbro

With an additional 3% of tax per street after five streets, maximizing the amount of property you can have on each street has become critical. Only problem is how on earth do you find these lengthy streets?

1. Discover them manually.

At this point in the game the best tip I can give you here is to seek out remote areas where others may have not considered. Think about regions where there may be less internet-savvy players who bought up big local streets early. There seem to be quite a number of lengthy streets of Alaska, or the parks in Oregon. Some regions in the world are completely barren of streets that are purchase-able period, but try zooming out and looking for highways and zooming in to see if they’re available.

Another tip is that sometimes you may see a long road but you can’t seem to get it to show up. The red M flags indicating that there is a street available are not accurate, as you can tell they’re arranged in a grid-like fashion. The point where it’s purchasable tends to be in the very center of the road, also if the road curves, you may find the ’sweet spot’ somewhere inside the curve than along the actual street.

2. Use Tools.

I’m strongly against any form of cheating, but if you can use an aid that can help you could have done manually then it’s okay in my books (ie. in the actual board game, having the person across from you roll the dice for you). There’s already a number of Monopoly City Street Tools listed, a few that can help in street searching:

Miself Script – allows you to buy and build at the ‘region’ zoom level, that is one zoom less than normal MCS browse zoom.

AroundUs has an early database of streets listed

Monopoly City Streets Enhanced Street Finder – this site allows you to plug in google maps coordinates and search through an area about 25x what’s available within the Hasbro game.

Extended street info script – I’ve yet to try this one, but it says it can easily figure out the initial value of a street – which is helpful on deciding whether to bid on a semi-developed street or whether to sell your own.

3. Trade & Bid.

There are a number of forums that people have begun offering up trades and auctions.
MyMonopolyCityStreets Forum
MonopolyCityStreets HQ Forum
Monopo.ly Forum
MCS Clans database listing with user names
Marketpoly – has a fairly active listing as well

Final tip – even if they’re not available, or listed, try putting a bid in for it anyways. If the 7-day auto-trade policy is in effect, and they scored a great road and dropped out of the game, it just might be yours.

* Note – the MCS team says they’re working on the glitch that is capping the number of properties on long streets – I’ve been hearing it’s currently maxing out at 400 or so buildings. Either way, long streets will still be critical over the stretch of the game.

Happy Hunting!

Related posts:

1. Can’t Buy or Build Streets?

Many Monopoly City Streets players seem to be doing everything they can to avoid tax, or even venturing into their sixth street.

My take is if it’s a worthwhile street, go ahead, venture out and buy a bit.

What’s worthwhile may vary depending on where you’re at in the game, but I’d ballpark as low as $5million for most players in the game who have been around since the beginning.

Here’s why:

1. The daily tax total may seem absolutely ridiculous compared to what you’re making in real life (if not, we need to talk), but using some really really crude math: 3% of your daily income < (97% of your income - 30% to chance cards)*invested into income generating buildings. ie. even if you're making 5 billion daily, and you're being taxed an extra $150million - surely you can make that all back with buildings on that street with your remaining buildings. (Yes, I'm aware at 33+5 buildings, you make literally zero, and profitability probably only works for an additional 4-8 streets)

2. Flipping it. There are plenty of people still hungry for $5-10million dollar streets, and frankly don't have the time to be searching for one if you've stumbled across one. Most of them are also sitting on hundreds of millions they'd love to quickly trade up for decent streets.

3. Refreshing your Strategy. I've got streets that were maybe $8 million dollar streets when I bought them, but they 'appear' to be worth a billion now. I'm sure plenty of you have something like this as well. Have the guts to let go of them. If you stumble across a $12 million dollar street - that extra 30-50% of roadway could be well worth it. Sell the property for 50% and flip the street for plenty more. Hold both streets for an extra day or two if you need to. It's a short term dip in income for a long term return on investment.

In conclusion, you can’t escape tax, but it doesn’t have to be that bad. Realistically I can see losing about a quarter of my income with 9 streets and still be actively progressing in my net worth.

I could be dead wrong though, so go with your gut and where you’re at in the game right now.

Next post will be on “finding longer streets”. Shout out if you’ve got thoughts on this post tax or easy ways of finding worthwhile roads.

Related posts:

1. Gameplay tips early on
2. Day One Strategy

Here’s a list of Monopoly City Streets tools I’ve come across.

To be honest, I’ve yet to try any of them myself, I don’t want to get banned from the game for any reason at this point, but they seem legit from what I can tell though I can’t say for certain.

I’d love to hear if you’ve tried them, if they feel within the ‘rules’ of the game and if they’re even useful.

* Please note the analysis from Scion in the comments below.

miself’s Monopoly City Streets utilities – helps browse streets and buildings

Monopoly City Street TOOLS by mcs clans – Compare Buildings, Streets Panel: filter, sort

Monopoly City Street bot Script – helps auto-build and clear

Another Bot on this forum with it’s own interface

OpenStreetMap data – available streets that MCS uses based on google maps – let them know if a street isn’t available

External Monopoly street finder

Monopoly Street/Rent Tracker Spreadsheet – thanks to 60minutedesigns for creating and sharing it.

Simple Rent Tracker / Calculator spreadsheet

Monopoly Signature – If they’re able to extract your scores/status what I’d love to see is a new expanded and sorted ranking list using this.

Share your monopoly city street stats via a wordpress widget

A site to help buy/sell streets here

Related posts:

1. Rent Calculator – Is your next street worth it?

I don’t know if there’s really any way of beating the cheaters, but below is a re-post I got permission from MindBlizzard to share. What I really like about it is how he shares the realities of the game as it is. Some people complain that there are no streets left to buy, or are frustrated with the cheaters or the kinks in the game, but MindBlizzard really shows what it takes to do well while playing legitimately in the game.

Before the cheaters can target you, you have to be noted. If you’re a bit serious and have bought some good streets, there’s a good chance that you’ll turn up in the local top 10. If you’re unlucky like me and tons of other players, you’re in an active cheating region and you get attacked pretty bad as they see your name appear on the leaderboard. If you’re very good, you’ll end up in the National or Worldwide rankings, but that’s probably far off…. Although, with my prime playing account I’m just under the national top 10 at 450M$ without cheating!

Which roads to buy

The trick to grow and avoid being noted is to stay below the radar, and here’s how you do it. Many of us have the urge to start in our own hometowns, like I did. The Netherlands is crowded with early adapters. A lot of players and cheaters live here, so towns get crowded fast and good streets are hard to find.

Especially in the Netherlands, but probably in the US and UK there are tons of small and cheap streets in the towns, but you have to stay away from streets below 1 Million M$. Streets prices 1M$ and up give you a return of 100% on the investment for the cheap houses. A 50K$ house will bring a 50K$ rent. Cheaper streets will have lower returns.

Just after the reset, it exponentially grew on the other end as well, so a 50K$ house on a 6M$ street would give a rent of say 250K$, but that’s off now, sadly as it made quite a few good bucks. One of the changes during the reset was the introduction of taxes, which means the more streets you have, the more taxation you’ll get. First 5 streets are free, every other gets billed 3% in taxes, meaning if you have over 38 streets you will have no income.

The long and winding road

So the trick is to find the longest road possible and build as many houses as possible on say just 5 to 10 streets, without being noted! And that’s what you see happening with the top Dutch players as well. On the leaderboard below, each of these top players has one or more long streets somewhere in Australia or Canada which are way less populated and have longer distances to cover than in the Netherlands.

NOTE: To find long roads the best chance you’ll have is to find one in big, scarcely populated countries, such as Canada, Australia or in Africa. However, please note that quite often only the major roads, Highways and such are up for sale here. Lots of city streets are just not covered by the game in these areas.

And that’s still possible! But you have to…

Stay below the radar

This will take some time, but scroll over the world map to lowly populated areas and look for a good street. As you start with only 3M$ (3 million monopoly dollars) you have to find a street prices just a little over 1M$ to get the best return and still have money to start building the street. There are still pretty good streets out there, just like the one below, which is priced 6M$. If you find one like this and it’s still available, keep close tabs on it!

Now, I’ve done some good business. I found a new street for 1.035 M$ and bought it. Back to the leaderboard you’ll see it’s empty! Only one other person has registered in this area! I’ve blanked out his name to protect his and my own privacy off course, but this is a spot to grow. No one will notice you growing on the local leaderboard and it will take some quiet growing to get up on the national leaderboard. Meanwhile, you have time to fortify your long and winding roads with plenty of parks, schools and stadiums to withstand a pretty severe hit later on in the game.

No related posts.

Hopefully by this point in the game your streets are resilient enough to withstand some demolitions and attacks, and you’re rolling in millions. Here’s some more advanced and nuanced tips that might give you some extra edge currently.

- Negotiations not responded to in seven days are automatically accepted. If you’ve got some time on your hands make several ridiculous offers to players with valuable property but likely inactive. ie. not anyone on the leaderboard, look for popular zones in cities where people got in one early action, but gave up (understandably) with the issues in the game. You might get a great exchange in seven days. You might have another week before their accounts are deleted completely.

- Long roads you might not expect to be free in major cities may actually be available as cheaters who owned some hot property are deleted and streets are being re-released for sale.

- Find some long streets with really interesting cone placement – where they’re not even on the indicated street – Sometimes you’ll notice after you fill up a street, it’ll still say there’s some room for a small building – find that spot, it’s likely quite hidden. But if it’s hard for you to find, it’ll be even harder for those wanting to demolish your bonus building to destroy.

- Cluster your bonus buildings – This just makes you psychologically an unappealing target. If another player instantly sees you’ve got at least three bonus buildings on a street they’ll known that they likely can’t take away your rent value for the day with their chance cards that day.

- There are long streets out in nowhere land still, but highways are still available. Follow the highways – sometimes they’re broken into different pieces as they cross different regions.

- Be strategic about when you log in. If you’re on or near the leader board, logging in early may instantly increase your score and make you a target for the rest of the day. A lot of people are suggesting that you log in right before the rent is calculated for the next day so you can fix up your streets – which is generally a good idea. But depending on your situation, if you’ve got some unprotected streets and you’re not on the leaderboard – it might be a good idea to log in, just to collect your cash before more damage happens in the day, and then log in again to fix everything up before the next payout.

Got other advanced tips or strategies?

Related posts:

1. Monopoly City Streets – Beginner Tips
2. Gameplay tips early on
3. Technical Tips

Depending on a few factors, right now most of you should be making at least 10-30 million dollars.

But what if you’re one of the unlucky few who got slammed because you were on your local leaderboard and logged into find you’ve only got the piddly million everyone gets each day?

1. If you’ve only got 1-3 million to spare, do not buy a street.
2. Build up on what you have if you’ve got space on streets, place as many green houses as possible. This way you can have the most opportunities at digging yourself out of this hole with a bonus building.
3. Clear your own hazards before seeking vengeance.
4. If you manage to clear your hazards, but don’t get a bonus building, at least try and fill up streets so there’s no room for hazards to be placed.
5. Find out of your attacker is a cheater – report them if so.
6. Decide if you want to retaliate or lay low. Odds are you won’t have much the next day or two to fight back, but if they’re a constant threat, make sure your allies know. They’ll know what to do.

Related posts:

1. Bonus Building Loophole