House Color Production Analysis

Reposting image

http://www.signaldisarray.com/serink/images/house_exp_chart.png 

I've got 353 white houses that border the southern and eastern perimeter of my town, which yield $169,440 per day. The "creep" factor is a problem, and I usually lose 1 collection per week as a result.

You really can't discount the payout per square. I used to have the same land area dedicated to purple houses before I sold them off and built whites; each individual purple house made more per day than $480 each white house nets, but I was able to pack in far more white houses in the same space, and I only have to worry about collecting twice a day.

ehoffa21 wrote:
One item that you have not accounted for is the size of the buildings. Since people will be limited by the amount of available space they will need to take into account how many buildings they can fit in the space. For instance if someone had a four by four space, they are able to fit many more white houses as compared to pink house in that space. In this case your caculation should take into account additional white houses or less pink houses.

Also, you see a lot of brown houses because they are the cheapest and build fast.

Agree with this. I started getting annoyed with how much space my farm was taking up, so I eventually converted to all white houses. It takes up half the space as my purple farm.

chrismcb wrote:
you short changed white. Assume that you can hit Blue 3 times a day, and White twice a day, white out performs blue by 16%.

Your calculations are probably typical of what most people have done, which is to ignore sleep schedules and the "creep" effect. I wanted to do a more realistic analysis, which is why I went through all the work of creating a simulator. I found that hitting blue 3 times a day was actually quite difficult to maintain on a regular basis, because it requires a strict play schedule in order to keep the creep to a minimum. For those who work an 8-hour shift plus 1-hour lunch, the timing probably doesn't work out well enough and most days will be only 2 hits per blue house. White might be easier to manage as the timing better suits a work day, but creep will still result in occasionally missing the 2nd hit. How often that happens will of course depend on your consistency, and how many hours you sleep at night.

I agree that for house farms, it makes sense to take into account the size of the house. Evaluating production on a per-square basis works fine on a large scale (many fields), which is what most farms probably are. For those who prefer to layout their houses in nice rows with roads in between, the per-square amounts are of less importance.

I've got some new charts, these ones showing the cash payouts rather than experience, and generated using a 7-hour night instead of 8. The first one shows cash per house, the second is cash per square. If someone could repost these images for me that would be great!

http://www.signaldisarray.com/serink/images/house_cash_chart.png
http://www.signaldisarray.com/serink/images/house_cash_per_square_chart.png

It does seem like white is the way to go for a house farm, no matter what your play interval is. The problem is that it's a very big investment, costing $7700 for each one. Thus it takes about 20 - 25 days just for the house to pay for itself! And that also means that when you're just starting out and have a low cash-flow, it could take a long time to establish a white farm. Another thing that's pretty clear: when it comes to earning cash, brown farms really suck. Sure they may only cost $355, but they'd still take 2 - 3 days of hourly play to pay for themselves, which incidentally is about the same amount of time a purple house would take to pay for itself.

still don't understand about the graphics.
so what's the best house to farm?

brown house farms dominate because ypu can sit there for an hour or two while doing other things and collect every 5mins. my single brown house pays out nearly $60. having 100 would result in 6000 every 5 mins. but house farming is lame and no longer required as an 850% multiplier turns every building and task into a cash cow. I pull in around 350k a day on 24hr tasks. cant even spend that.

i have a small purple farm for aesthetics. they look like a row of townhomes. so there's that. and im trying to decide which house to use to build a development neighborhood. im going with blue. god price and best payout/time for my play schedule.

thank you, bjserink, for the work you put into this :thumbup:

This all looks really complicated :? What I've done is make a brown house farm but then I just worked out how much money I get from like a round of clicking them, so every time I click all my brown houses, I make $1057 but I'm still adding more brown houses as I gain land so that figure is continuously rising. On the weekends, I can spend a good 4 hours broken up throughout the day, clicking on these houses so they paid for themselves ages ago.

Ok, so while the purpose of this thread was to have an in-depth discussion about house production, some people just want the answer to "what is the best color for me to farm?". So here's the conclusions that can be drawn from my analysis:

1) If you play more often than once every half-hour, brown houses are probably your best bet. They're cheap, and if you can tap them at least 78 times a day (about every 10 - 15 minutes) they'll pay out better than any other color. For a play frequency of 30 - 45 minutes, brown will still generate the most experience but less cash. If you don't play this often, then brown is a very bad choice, so continue to 2:

2) If you plan to completely fill up an area with tightly packed houses, then the amount of space they take up is going to matter. In this case, white houses are the best for both money and experience, for any playing frequency. They are quite expensive though, and can take 20 - 25 days to pay for themselves. So they make a good long-term investment, but not great for new players with little capital. If you're new, or if you want to keep your town in tidy rows (space is not important), then continue to 3.

3) When house size is not important, purple houses will generate the most cash and experience for most play styles with a frequency of every 4 hours or shorter. If you only play 2 or 3 times a day, blue is probably your best bet. For the once-a-day player who doesn't care about size, the orange houses can generate more exp & cash per day, but each one costs $24500 so it would take about 3 months to pay for itself! So you might want to stick with blue.

Edit: I also wanted to mention that the fact that brown houses are so cheap doesn't really matter in the long run. What is really important is which houses will generate the most experience and cash. After all, does it really make sense to pay $355 for an investment that pays $200/day, when you could buy an investment for $1100 that pays about $477? After 3 days the former will have earned you a net of $245, while the latter nets $331. In a week the former nets $1045 while the latter nets $2239. So please don't pick brown just because it's cheap! Consider the conditions for each of the 3 possibilities above, and make your decision based on that!