Totally pay to win, paying players have a totally different and extremely disproportionate reward system on events, the game gives you scraps of "dollars" but will happily steal 20x that without even prompting you for confirmation just for single items you may be missing, the game will level you so fast you can't keep up with the buildings because the drop rate on materials required to complete said buildings is mentally low, so every comp you have tasks which cannot be complete.