House Color Production Analysis
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 fi...
Forum Discussion
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.
