duder
11-11-2011, 10:24 AM
The economics of Crime City is pretty much my favorite part of the game. I've posted a few times in a couple of threads, but my passion leads... no DEMANDS... that I pull this information into a single thread (that will probably disappear down the list, though I'll feel satisfied having posted this).
I've been playing for the better part of a month and a half, and I really haven't felt much motivation to level past level 8 (ok, ok, I just want to see if I can get to have the highest income at my level...). Right now my stats come in at just about 21K per hour and I gross around 300K per day. I did lose one fight and one robbery each in my first week, but I've won every other encounter. This guide is a summarization of my economic approach. I hope it helps folks trying to figure out how to increase their hood value, and I welcome any feedback, insights, or questions into hood development.
Summary
Start out by upgrading/building/expanding based on expected return on investment (ROI):
Expected collections per day * increase in income per collection / Cost ( Upgrade or building cost + Lost Income from Upgrade (for upgrades) )
Once cash is not a problem anymore switch to upgrading/building based on increase in revenue (IR):
Expected collections per day * increase in income per collection / Upgrade time (in days)
Take roads into account when expanding
Don’t shy away from high level buildings
Background
A strong economy can help any Crime City player. As pretty much everyone knows, in game cash is necessary to complete missions, to arm up for pvp escapades, and to make your hood look cool. While waiting for buildings to generate income isn’t the flashiest or funnest way to play, it is probably the most consistent over time. Robbing from folks who either haven’t figured out how to use the vault or who have more confidence in their defensive arsenal than they should is probably the quickest way to generate income, and those higher level missions certainly can return a lot of the needful.
This guide is meant to be a resource for folks trying to figure out ways to generate cash directly from their hood more quickly. It will look at growing an economy beginning at the start of the game and carry through some of the later factors that should be considered. It will cover some of the decision points around what and when to upgrade. While players who are lower lever and starting out will probably get the most value out of this guide, the concepts and approach should be applicable to any player at any point in their growth.
Getting Ready
I may be a huge nerd, but I’ve found that having some kind of a resource from which to make decisions makes it easier to evaluate what to do. Between this and an unhealthy obsession with Excel, I encourage anyone playing to build up a spreadsheet that tracks information about your current hood. The stuff you’ll want to know is:
a) What buildings do you have out there?
b) How frequent do those buildings return cash?
c) What is the current income per collection for each building?
d) What is the current upgrade cost on each building?
e) What is the upgraded income?
f) How long does it take to complete that upgrade?
A great place to look for most of this information (if you wanted to look into the future) is TLoord’s guide (link (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkPDmk8Lr8yadEZoX1RGd19pajJncVVzR282SEN3N Xc&hl=en#gid=0)). TLoord took the time and energy to start an awesome google spreadsheet which tracks information about Crime City. I give many thanks to him for starting his guide as it has been an invaluable resource. Thanks also to the players who continue to go in and add new information. Having this information evaluated at this level of detail will allow you to make some good comparisons between different decisions.
Keep Poking the Hood!
Some additional information that will help you to grow your hood is to have some kind of understanding about how often you are going to check your buildings. I’m going to assume that folks who have taken the time to find this post are aware of the mechanics of collecting cash (poke that building more!). How often you check your buildings will shift which buildings should be upgraded and also effect the likelihood your buildings get robbed. If you think you’ll check in 100 times a day, buildings with more frequent pay outs will generally have better yields for you. If you’re only going to check once a week, those buildings with a smaller frequency that hold onto more cash can be awesome.
Ok, so, now that you know what you have and how you play, we can begin to look at the different decision processes.
Early Development & ROI (where did all my cash go?)
So, you’re starting out in Crime City and trying to figure out how to grow your economy (or have been playing a while and never have enough cash). Well, my friend you have come to the right place. Starting out is great! You start with some income, buildings are cheap, upgrades are quick, and you have open space to build into. This will last, I don’t know, an hour or two? Don’t fear, we can get you back to building whenever you have the opportunity!
Starting your economy is all about making decisions based on the expected Return on Investment (ROI). Basically, with development times being relatively short, the biggest limiting factor on your ability to build quickly will be having enough cash on hand. You’ll quickly be evaluating whether you want to build new buildings, upgrade existing buildings, or expand your hood.
For upgrades and new buildings the math is pretty easy, with one quick caveat. A simple equation to use is this:
(expected collections per day * increase in income per collection) / Upgrade or building cost
Basically, this equation will give you an index which allows you to calculate the percentage return per day of your building investment. The key here is to make certain you evaluate based on your expected collections per day rather than the ideal number of collections per day. While it is possible to collect on a Laundromat 288 times every day, it is unlikely that you will do so. By estimating how often you expect to collect on a building each day, this will allow you to compare this index across buildings with different collection frequencies. For buildings which take longer than a day to present income, you can estimate by calculating a number of collections divided by the number of days in which you will collect. This would also work if you know that over the week you will collect more on weekends than on the work days.
One quick side note on this equation: it is slightly off for upgrades. A stronger model for upgrades would be to roll the opportunity cost of not being able to collect while waiting for the upgrade into the total upgrade cost in the denominator. To calculate the opportunity cost, multiply the upgrade duration (in days) by your expected daily income from the building:
Opportunity Cost = expected collections per day * income per collection * upgrade duration (in days)
If you decided to go the spreadsheet way, play around with the expected number of collections per day as you try to figure out what to build. This can have a big impact on your higher frequency collection buildings. As I said above, Laundromats can have an absolutely absurd ROI. The ideal collection on a Laundromat is 288 collections in a day. If you make that many collections in a day, you will collect 14 times your investment the first day and this will be far and away your best ROI. However, if you only make 10 collections a day on a Laundromat, your ROI is only 50% per day and it will take you 2 days to cover the building cost. This is the difference in your second building being a Laundromat and your second building being a Pizza Parlor.
Early Expansions
Expansions are a little harder for quantifying a decision process. Since expansions are relatively expensive and take a relatively long time to complete when compared to building new buildings, they can be rough to plan for. Ideally you will want to start expansions when you still have enough space to build one or two buildings.
A slightly more rigorous approach to take at this point would be to build the expansion cost directly into the ROI for the second to last new building you would build in your current space. The reason for working the timing this way is to ensure a smoother building process. If you wait until your hood is too full to start new expansions, you will be waiting for expansions to finish in order to start that next building. At the point where the ROI on a new building with the expansion built into the cost is the most cost effective, you are not going to want to wait for the expansion to complete. By starting the expansion before that second to last building, you will be able to build while waiting for the expansion to complete.
This doesn’t address one behavior which is out there which is to upgrade in strange directions. If you’re trying to figure out in which direction to upgrade, check the section “Which Expansion Should I Take?” below.
Continuing to Build/Upgrade/Expand (Finally, I’m Holding Onto Some Cash)
The next phase of hood management occurs once you realize that your economy is making more cash than you immediately need. How quickly you get to this point depends heavily on two things:
1) How quickly are you leveling
2) How much are you spending on equipment
Leveling affects you by increasing the number of buildings that you can build and thereby increasing the number of expansions you will want to invest in. Spending on equipment slows down how quickly you can amass wealth. However, you will eventually reach a point where building, expansion, and upgrade times are long enough that you cannot invest back into your economy fast enough. This is a great time!
Once you get to this point there are a couple of keys:
1) Always have an upgrade in process
2) Build everything you can
3) Expand early
You will quickly realize that only being able to upgrade one building at a time is an enormous limitation on the growth of your hood. If you find your reserve cash drifting downwards and you need to choose between upgrading, expanding, or building, choose upgrade!
Since time instead of cash is your biggest limiting factor there is a new decision process around upgrades - increase in income per upgrade duration. At this phase in the game it is important to know which upgrades will have the largest impact on your income in the quickest time. The increase in revenue index (IR) that I use at this point is actually a little simpler than the equation I use for ROI:
Expected collections per day * Increase in income per collection / upgrade time
As long as you have enough cash on hand to build your new buildings and to expand your hood, selecting the upgrade with the highest value IR will increase your overall income the most quickly.
New buildings should continue to follow an ROI based decision process. While expansions should be started as soon as you recognize that you will use the available space and (assuming an upgrade is in process) you have enough cash on hand.
More Upgrades (Why do all the buildings cost so much??? / growing and saving and growing)
Depending on how much you are willing to devote to your income (and to defer leveling), you may end up in a situation where you’ve built all the buildings at your level, you’ve unlocked the higher mafia requirement buildings, and there is a huge divide between those buildings and the buildings at your level. This can lead to interesting decisions.
I highly encourage building the higher level buildings. Again, at this point in your economy, your biggest limiting factor is time. A great place to see the value of these buildings is by comparing the upgrade of a Movie Theater from level 1 to level 2 against a Tattoo Parlor from level 6 to level 7. The ideal ROIs are:
ROI (Tattoo Parlor) = Increase (3,255-2,310) * Collections (2) / Cost ( 9,761 + Current Income (2,310) * Upgrade time (1.25 days) * Collections per Day (2) ) = 12.1% per day
ROI (Movie Theater) = Increase (9,300-3,100) * Collections (2) / Cost (233,800 + Current Income (3,100) * Upgrade time (0.167 days) * Collections per Day (2) ) = 5.3% per day
The Tattoo Parlor has a bit over 2 times higher ROI. However, the Tattoo Parlor upgrade will take 30 hours compared to the 4 hour upgrade on the Movie Theater. Since you have to wait for the Tattoo Parlor to finish, the Movie Theater upgrade should allow you to increase your economy much faster. Take a quick look at the IRs:
IR (Tattoo Parlor) = Collections (2) * Increase (3,255-2,310) / Upgrade time (1.25 days) = 1,188 more income per day per day of upgrade
IR (Movie Theater) = Collections (2) * Increase (9,300-3,100) / Upgrade time (0.167 days) = 74,400 more income per day per day of upgrade
The Movie Theater upgrade increases your income roughly 70 times faster than the Tattoo Parlor.
The decision process around which upgrades to make when saving up for a relatively high cost item blends the ROI and IR approaches. There are three things to consider:
1) At your current income, how many days will it be before you can afford the building
2) What is the ROI index for an upgrade which takes the same number of days from (1)
3) What upgrade has the highest IR while still having an ROI lower than (2)
Assuming you’ve set up a spreadsheet which has your current incomes per collection and expected number of collections per day, we can calculate (1). Basically multiply all your current incomes by your collections per day and sum the results to get an expected income per day. Divide the building cost by your expected income per day, and that is the number of days before you can afford the building. To calculate (2) calculate the inverse of (1) (divide 1 by the number of days before you can afford the building). If you rank your upgrade IRs, you can find the best rank upgrade that is below the ROI cut off. This will ensure your economy grows as quickly as possible without delaying when you can build. This approach works for any high value investment.
Make this decision based on ROI. This should mean that you start saving for the Loft once your Theaters are level 3 or 4. While ROI is an index which easily translates between upgrades and build times, IR does not. The cornerstone of the IR’s usefulness is the fact that you can not make another upgrade while an upgrade is in process. Since the Loft decision is a build decision and not an upgrade decision, it is not really applicable here.
Which Expansion Should I Take?
Here is the deal with expansions. Your hood will start with four 10x10 building spaces. Expansions will increase your buildable space by 4 squares either towards the south-east (SE) or towards the south-west (SW). Every 16 building squares in the SE direction, there will be a road that can’t be built on and the expansion will complete on the other side of the road. This means that the second expansion in the SE direction will have a road through the middle of it. In the SW direction, the road comes in at 40 building squares (thanks 617Pats). This means, from the point of view of buildable space and buildings that are larger than 2 squares in both directions (which may cover all cash buildings), those expansions with a road through the middle only yield half the buildable spaces while the next expansion yields 1.5 times as many buildable spaces. Keeping this in mind, it is possible to determine the number of buildable squares you will gain from an expansion. For expansions that don’t have a road running through the middle:
# of buildable squares in the static direction * 4
So, that’s kind of a weird expression. Applying this formula to your first expansion, the number of new buildable squares is:
# of buildable squares in SW direction (10) * 4 = 40
For expansions that have a road running through the middle:
# of buildable squares in the static direction * 2
What Else?
There are a few other things which, while not strictly related to building your hood, can be useful information for folks starting.
1) Selling buildings
2) Generate income from mafia
3) Skipping the vault
4) Knowing your opponents’ stats
5) Knowing your play style
Selling buildings may present itself as an attractive option when you see a building which can more quickly improve your economy that you don’t have space to build. I haven’t done the math, but unless the building you are selling is level 1, I can’t see this as a good thing. You will probably reach a point where you have space and you don’t have any buildings to put into it. However, it is unlikely you will reach a point where you have no more upgrades to complete on your buildings. By selling a level 2+ building, you are chucking the time you’ve invested in upgrading that building instead of another building. While it will defer the expansion cost, chances are you will still need to make that expansion later.
Early on, you can get an extra 100 in cash from visiting your mafia members. You can get this revenue from visiting up to 25 of your real live mafia members every day. You can visit the same members over and over and farm this income. Having 25 folks in your mafia as quickly as possible can give you a great early bump in your income. I still make it a point to visit at least 25 folks in my mafia every day to get that small percent increase in my overall income. One thing to note: it’s possible there is a level cap on when you can do this.
Every time you use the vault you sacrifice 10% of your deposit. The tradeoff is when folks attack you, those deposits do not get touched. If you can find a way to have such a strong defense that folks who are strong will decide not to attack you and folks who don’t pay attention to stats when attacking will always lose to you, you can skip the vault altogether and feed that 10% back into your economy. This strategy is the most alluring at low levels when the equipment has similar attack and defense values and defensive buildings can, with a relatively small time investment, heavily outweigh those attack values. A good rule of thumb is to maintain a defense building total which equals roughly half your attack. At that point, you can probably fend yourself off – if you were to try to attack yourself.
One big economic sink can be opponents robbing you and your buildings. Trust me when I say you do not want to lose 50% of the income from any of your buildings and if you’re skipping the vault, you really don’t want to lose up to 40% of what you’re holding onto. By browsing the rivals list (going into the list and clicking rob on the opponents) you can develop a good understanding of what is normal for folks at your level and mafia size in terms of attack and defense. This, in turn, can allow you to map out what you need to have defensively to ensure you have a good chance at winning those skirmishes. If you really don’t want to get attacked by stronger opponents, check their comments. A good percentage of folks out there will post their invite code on their comments wall. Fold your stronger opponents into your mafia through inviting them or dropping your invite code off. While this won’t mean that you can completely skip on developing your defensive arsenal, it will lower the odds that someone much stronger than you will take a look and decide it’s worth figuring out if they can take your candy.
Know yourself. For these strategies to pay out best, it is important to have some general understanding of your play behavior. If you’re the type of player who loves to watch things count down in Crime City all day long, you should make different decisions than the type of player who checks their hood a couple times a week. This probably comes as no surprise, but players who check their hood more often have the potential to grow faster than other players. However, making intelligent decisions can even the playing field a whole lot. The key here is to be patient and believe in your decisions. Sure, it is tempting to start upgrading your warehouse like a fiend to get the tons of storage goal completed. However, completing quests at the wrong time will slow down your overall growth and generally make you a less efficient Crime City player. If you are already struggling to fill your bank account and you decide to push towards the tons of storage goal instead of upgrading your pizza parlors and gas stations, it will probably take you longer to pull together the funds to start the upgrades on the warehouse.
-duder
674 597 607
I've been playing for the better part of a month and a half, and I really haven't felt much motivation to level past level 8 (ok, ok, I just want to see if I can get to have the highest income at my level...). Right now my stats come in at just about 21K per hour and I gross around 300K per day. I did lose one fight and one robbery each in my first week, but I've won every other encounter. This guide is a summarization of my economic approach. I hope it helps folks trying to figure out how to increase their hood value, and I welcome any feedback, insights, or questions into hood development.
Summary
Start out by upgrading/building/expanding based on expected return on investment (ROI):
Expected collections per day * increase in income per collection / Cost ( Upgrade or building cost + Lost Income from Upgrade (for upgrades) )
Once cash is not a problem anymore switch to upgrading/building based on increase in revenue (IR):
Expected collections per day * increase in income per collection / Upgrade time (in days)
Take roads into account when expanding
Don’t shy away from high level buildings
Background
A strong economy can help any Crime City player. As pretty much everyone knows, in game cash is necessary to complete missions, to arm up for pvp escapades, and to make your hood look cool. While waiting for buildings to generate income isn’t the flashiest or funnest way to play, it is probably the most consistent over time. Robbing from folks who either haven’t figured out how to use the vault or who have more confidence in their defensive arsenal than they should is probably the quickest way to generate income, and those higher level missions certainly can return a lot of the needful.
This guide is meant to be a resource for folks trying to figure out ways to generate cash directly from their hood more quickly. It will look at growing an economy beginning at the start of the game and carry through some of the later factors that should be considered. It will cover some of the decision points around what and when to upgrade. While players who are lower lever and starting out will probably get the most value out of this guide, the concepts and approach should be applicable to any player at any point in their growth.
Getting Ready
I may be a huge nerd, but I’ve found that having some kind of a resource from which to make decisions makes it easier to evaluate what to do. Between this and an unhealthy obsession with Excel, I encourage anyone playing to build up a spreadsheet that tracks information about your current hood. The stuff you’ll want to know is:
a) What buildings do you have out there?
b) How frequent do those buildings return cash?
c) What is the current income per collection for each building?
d) What is the current upgrade cost on each building?
e) What is the upgraded income?
f) How long does it take to complete that upgrade?
A great place to look for most of this information (if you wanted to look into the future) is TLoord’s guide (link (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkPDmk8Lr8yadEZoX1RGd19pajJncVVzR282SEN3N Xc&hl=en#gid=0)). TLoord took the time and energy to start an awesome google spreadsheet which tracks information about Crime City. I give many thanks to him for starting his guide as it has been an invaluable resource. Thanks also to the players who continue to go in and add new information. Having this information evaluated at this level of detail will allow you to make some good comparisons between different decisions.
Keep Poking the Hood!
Some additional information that will help you to grow your hood is to have some kind of understanding about how often you are going to check your buildings. I’m going to assume that folks who have taken the time to find this post are aware of the mechanics of collecting cash (poke that building more!). How often you check your buildings will shift which buildings should be upgraded and also effect the likelihood your buildings get robbed. If you think you’ll check in 100 times a day, buildings with more frequent pay outs will generally have better yields for you. If you’re only going to check once a week, those buildings with a smaller frequency that hold onto more cash can be awesome.
Ok, so, now that you know what you have and how you play, we can begin to look at the different decision processes.
Early Development & ROI (where did all my cash go?)
So, you’re starting out in Crime City and trying to figure out how to grow your economy (or have been playing a while and never have enough cash). Well, my friend you have come to the right place. Starting out is great! You start with some income, buildings are cheap, upgrades are quick, and you have open space to build into. This will last, I don’t know, an hour or two? Don’t fear, we can get you back to building whenever you have the opportunity!
Starting your economy is all about making decisions based on the expected Return on Investment (ROI). Basically, with development times being relatively short, the biggest limiting factor on your ability to build quickly will be having enough cash on hand. You’ll quickly be evaluating whether you want to build new buildings, upgrade existing buildings, or expand your hood.
For upgrades and new buildings the math is pretty easy, with one quick caveat. A simple equation to use is this:
(expected collections per day * increase in income per collection) / Upgrade or building cost
Basically, this equation will give you an index which allows you to calculate the percentage return per day of your building investment. The key here is to make certain you evaluate based on your expected collections per day rather than the ideal number of collections per day. While it is possible to collect on a Laundromat 288 times every day, it is unlikely that you will do so. By estimating how often you expect to collect on a building each day, this will allow you to compare this index across buildings with different collection frequencies. For buildings which take longer than a day to present income, you can estimate by calculating a number of collections divided by the number of days in which you will collect. This would also work if you know that over the week you will collect more on weekends than on the work days.
One quick side note on this equation: it is slightly off for upgrades. A stronger model for upgrades would be to roll the opportunity cost of not being able to collect while waiting for the upgrade into the total upgrade cost in the denominator. To calculate the opportunity cost, multiply the upgrade duration (in days) by your expected daily income from the building:
Opportunity Cost = expected collections per day * income per collection * upgrade duration (in days)
If you decided to go the spreadsheet way, play around with the expected number of collections per day as you try to figure out what to build. This can have a big impact on your higher frequency collection buildings. As I said above, Laundromats can have an absolutely absurd ROI. The ideal collection on a Laundromat is 288 collections in a day. If you make that many collections in a day, you will collect 14 times your investment the first day and this will be far and away your best ROI. However, if you only make 10 collections a day on a Laundromat, your ROI is only 50% per day and it will take you 2 days to cover the building cost. This is the difference in your second building being a Laundromat and your second building being a Pizza Parlor.
Early Expansions
Expansions are a little harder for quantifying a decision process. Since expansions are relatively expensive and take a relatively long time to complete when compared to building new buildings, they can be rough to plan for. Ideally you will want to start expansions when you still have enough space to build one or two buildings.
A slightly more rigorous approach to take at this point would be to build the expansion cost directly into the ROI for the second to last new building you would build in your current space. The reason for working the timing this way is to ensure a smoother building process. If you wait until your hood is too full to start new expansions, you will be waiting for expansions to finish in order to start that next building. At the point where the ROI on a new building with the expansion built into the cost is the most cost effective, you are not going to want to wait for the expansion to complete. By starting the expansion before that second to last building, you will be able to build while waiting for the expansion to complete.
This doesn’t address one behavior which is out there which is to upgrade in strange directions. If you’re trying to figure out in which direction to upgrade, check the section “Which Expansion Should I Take?” below.
Continuing to Build/Upgrade/Expand (Finally, I’m Holding Onto Some Cash)
The next phase of hood management occurs once you realize that your economy is making more cash than you immediately need. How quickly you get to this point depends heavily on two things:
1) How quickly are you leveling
2) How much are you spending on equipment
Leveling affects you by increasing the number of buildings that you can build and thereby increasing the number of expansions you will want to invest in. Spending on equipment slows down how quickly you can amass wealth. However, you will eventually reach a point where building, expansion, and upgrade times are long enough that you cannot invest back into your economy fast enough. This is a great time!
Once you get to this point there are a couple of keys:
1) Always have an upgrade in process
2) Build everything you can
3) Expand early
You will quickly realize that only being able to upgrade one building at a time is an enormous limitation on the growth of your hood. If you find your reserve cash drifting downwards and you need to choose between upgrading, expanding, or building, choose upgrade!
Since time instead of cash is your biggest limiting factor there is a new decision process around upgrades - increase in income per upgrade duration. At this phase in the game it is important to know which upgrades will have the largest impact on your income in the quickest time. The increase in revenue index (IR) that I use at this point is actually a little simpler than the equation I use for ROI:
Expected collections per day * Increase in income per collection / upgrade time
As long as you have enough cash on hand to build your new buildings and to expand your hood, selecting the upgrade with the highest value IR will increase your overall income the most quickly.
New buildings should continue to follow an ROI based decision process. While expansions should be started as soon as you recognize that you will use the available space and (assuming an upgrade is in process) you have enough cash on hand.
More Upgrades (Why do all the buildings cost so much??? / growing and saving and growing)
Depending on how much you are willing to devote to your income (and to defer leveling), you may end up in a situation where you’ve built all the buildings at your level, you’ve unlocked the higher mafia requirement buildings, and there is a huge divide between those buildings and the buildings at your level. This can lead to interesting decisions.
I highly encourage building the higher level buildings. Again, at this point in your economy, your biggest limiting factor is time. A great place to see the value of these buildings is by comparing the upgrade of a Movie Theater from level 1 to level 2 against a Tattoo Parlor from level 6 to level 7. The ideal ROIs are:
ROI (Tattoo Parlor) = Increase (3,255-2,310) * Collections (2) / Cost ( 9,761 + Current Income (2,310) * Upgrade time (1.25 days) * Collections per Day (2) ) = 12.1% per day
ROI (Movie Theater) = Increase (9,300-3,100) * Collections (2) / Cost (233,800 + Current Income (3,100) * Upgrade time (0.167 days) * Collections per Day (2) ) = 5.3% per day
The Tattoo Parlor has a bit over 2 times higher ROI. However, the Tattoo Parlor upgrade will take 30 hours compared to the 4 hour upgrade on the Movie Theater. Since you have to wait for the Tattoo Parlor to finish, the Movie Theater upgrade should allow you to increase your economy much faster. Take a quick look at the IRs:
IR (Tattoo Parlor) = Collections (2) * Increase (3,255-2,310) / Upgrade time (1.25 days) = 1,188 more income per day per day of upgrade
IR (Movie Theater) = Collections (2) * Increase (9,300-3,100) / Upgrade time (0.167 days) = 74,400 more income per day per day of upgrade
The Movie Theater upgrade increases your income roughly 70 times faster than the Tattoo Parlor.
The decision process around which upgrades to make when saving up for a relatively high cost item blends the ROI and IR approaches. There are three things to consider:
1) At your current income, how many days will it be before you can afford the building
2) What is the ROI index for an upgrade which takes the same number of days from (1)
3) What upgrade has the highest IR while still having an ROI lower than (2)
Assuming you’ve set up a spreadsheet which has your current incomes per collection and expected number of collections per day, we can calculate (1). Basically multiply all your current incomes by your collections per day and sum the results to get an expected income per day. Divide the building cost by your expected income per day, and that is the number of days before you can afford the building. To calculate (2) calculate the inverse of (1) (divide 1 by the number of days before you can afford the building). If you rank your upgrade IRs, you can find the best rank upgrade that is below the ROI cut off. This will ensure your economy grows as quickly as possible without delaying when you can build. This approach works for any high value investment.
Make this decision based on ROI. This should mean that you start saving for the Loft once your Theaters are level 3 or 4. While ROI is an index which easily translates between upgrades and build times, IR does not. The cornerstone of the IR’s usefulness is the fact that you can not make another upgrade while an upgrade is in process. Since the Loft decision is a build decision and not an upgrade decision, it is not really applicable here.
Which Expansion Should I Take?
Here is the deal with expansions. Your hood will start with four 10x10 building spaces. Expansions will increase your buildable space by 4 squares either towards the south-east (SE) or towards the south-west (SW). Every 16 building squares in the SE direction, there will be a road that can’t be built on and the expansion will complete on the other side of the road. This means that the second expansion in the SE direction will have a road through the middle of it. In the SW direction, the road comes in at 40 building squares (thanks 617Pats). This means, from the point of view of buildable space and buildings that are larger than 2 squares in both directions (which may cover all cash buildings), those expansions with a road through the middle only yield half the buildable spaces while the next expansion yields 1.5 times as many buildable spaces. Keeping this in mind, it is possible to determine the number of buildable squares you will gain from an expansion. For expansions that don’t have a road running through the middle:
# of buildable squares in the static direction * 4
So, that’s kind of a weird expression. Applying this formula to your first expansion, the number of new buildable squares is:
# of buildable squares in SW direction (10) * 4 = 40
For expansions that have a road running through the middle:
# of buildable squares in the static direction * 2
What Else?
There are a few other things which, while not strictly related to building your hood, can be useful information for folks starting.
1) Selling buildings
2) Generate income from mafia
3) Skipping the vault
4) Knowing your opponents’ stats
5) Knowing your play style
Selling buildings may present itself as an attractive option when you see a building which can more quickly improve your economy that you don’t have space to build. I haven’t done the math, but unless the building you are selling is level 1, I can’t see this as a good thing. You will probably reach a point where you have space and you don’t have any buildings to put into it. However, it is unlikely you will reach a point where you have no more upgrades to complete on your buildings. By selling a level 2+ building, you are chucking the time you’ve invested in upgrading that building instead of another building. While it will defer the expansion cost, chances are you will still need to make that expansion later.
Early on, you can get an extra 100 in cash from visiting your mafia members. You can get this revenue from visiting up to 25 of your real live mafia members every day. You can visit the same members over and over and farm this income. Having 25 folks in your mafia as quickly as possible can give you a great early bump in your income. I still make it a point to visit at least 25 folks in my mafia every day to get that small percent increase in my overall income. One thing to note: it’s possible there is a level cap on when you can do this.
Every time you use the vault you sacrifice 10% of your deposit. The tradeoff is when folks attack you, those deposits do not get touched. If you can find a way to have such a strong defense that folks who are strong will decide not to attack you and folks who don’t pay attention to stats when attacking will always lose to you, you can skip the vault altogether and feed that 10% back into your economy. This strategy is the most alluring at low levels when the equipment has similar attack and defense values and defensive buildings can, with a relatively small time investment, heavily outweigh those attack values. A good rule of thumb is to maintain a defense building total which equals roughly half your attack. At that point, you can probably fend yourself off – if you were to try to attack yourself.
One big economic sink can be opponents robbing you and your buildings. Trust me when I say you do not want to lose 50% of the income from any of your buildings and if you’re skipping the vault, you really don’t want to lose up to 40% of what you’re holding onto. By browsing the rivals list (going into the list and clicking rob on the opponents) you can develop a good understanding of what is normal for folks at your level and mafia size in terms of attack and defense. This, in turn, can allow you to map out what you need to have defensively to ensure you have a good chance at winning those skirmishes. If you really don’t want to get attacked by stronger opponents, check their comments. A good percentage of folks out there will post their invite code on their comments wall. Fold your stronger opponents into your mafia through inviting them or dropping your invite code off. While this won’t mean that you can completely skip on developing your defensive arsenal, it will lower the odds that someone much stronger than you will take a look and decide it’s worth figuring out if they can take your candy.
Know yourself. For these strategies to pay out best, it is important to have some general understanding of your play behavior. If you’re the type of player who loves to watch things count down in Crime City all day long, you should make different decisions than the type of player who checks their hood a couple times a week. This probably comes as no surprise, but players who check their hood more often have the potential to grow faster than other players. However, making intelligent decisions can even the playing field a whole lot. The key here is to be patient and believe in your decisions. Sure, it is tempting to start upgrading your warehouse like a fiend to get the tons of storage goal completed. However, completing quests at the wrong time will slow down your overall growth and generally make you a less efficient Crime City player. If you are already struggling to fill your bank account and you decide to push towards the tons of storage goal instead of upgrading your pizza parlors and gas stations, it will probably take you longer to pull together the funds to start the upgrades on the warehouse.
-duder
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