The advantages are you gain a huge amount of money/xp in a short space of time.It is effectively min/maxing the game instead of building for aesthetics.Downside is people end up higher ranked, but lack the lower level buildings that reqire 24 hours to build.Re people not wanting house farmers...that's down to some people playing on devices that crash if peoples cities are too large. The density of items in a house farm city can cause people issues. However, the real culprit of performance problems is the "water". s i've got max friends, the only places I have issues with have water features and bridges.

hmm... I thought about building a few extra white houses cause its 200 every 12 hours, and the mission buildings like library and whatnot take ALOT of cash to build which takes days to get built up... I wouldn't be compacting them in there like i've seen others do... maybe just 5 or 6 extras of them...

davesangor05 wrote:hmm... I thought about building a few extra white houses cause its 200 every 12 hours, and the mission buildings like library and whatnot take ALOT of cash to build which takes days to get built up... I wouldn't be compacting them in there like i've seen others do... maybe just 5 or 6 extras of them... You won't have a problem.House farms typically have 200+ houses packed together with no space between them. 5 of 6 houses together doesn't really count as a farm.Also don't worry too much about people refusing to add you. People will add complete randoms and then thin their lists over time. city farm or not, if you are the player that visits their city daily and provides a low impact "landing spot" when they visit you, you'll find you'll be kept on lists.

cool :) Thanks! :) Now I gotta figure out which option is best... blue house costs less, makes only 50 less, and I think it also takes less time to collect so it might be better than white house... <.<

It's not really cheap in that it isn't cheating or really taking advantage of a loophole in the game. Frankly it's relatively strategic, the only problem is it looks hideous and it crashes some systems.I don't really care if other people do it, doesn't really both me. But it's certainly not cheap.

House Farming? | EA Forums

tyabolical
12 years ago
Most folks that are going full freemium (not paying for donuts/cash) usually house farm. I'm keeping mine up until I own all the land. It allowed me to keep my head above water and able to afford all the new buildings when I leveled up. I started with a Brown house farm, upgraded to some Purple and removed my Browns, then went full Blue. I just recently removed all my Purple houses since I started visiting my town less often. It depends on your play style, how often you check your town, that should guide you to the house choice for your farm.

I went full geek and calculated the payouts per hour and per tile. The Brown house is the clear winner as to getting the most cash per hour. Tapping hundreds of Brown houses every 5 minutes is going to wear you down though. You do have to take into account the footprint of each house. The White house has the smallest footprint, so you can cram more into the space, than say for instance the Purple house which has the biggest footprint.

Here's a quick breakdown. Payouts for XP have a similar trend, at one tenth the cash gain.

Brown- $72/hr $2.05/tile
Purple- $25/hr $0.60/tile
Pink- $18.3/hr $0.46/tile
Blue- $18.75/hr $0.59/tile
White- $16.67/hr $0.69/tile
Orange- $15.625/hr $0.49/tile
Zeosly
12 years ago
I started with like 20 brown houses then moved on to around 20 pink once I got tired of the constant taps on the brown houses. Now I have a little section in the corner for blues but im starting to wonder if im about ready to uproot all the living domiciles.
Yak_Fuji
12 years ago
Payout on the brown tends to get rounded up to $7 once you get any kind of bonus going. Not too hard considering there are free burning bushes on the map and one of the general bonus' is for having houses...easy in a farm :)

I had 84 browns before I converted to blue (was on holiday at the time of my brown farm so could focus on it every 5m) and as mentioned by finagenesse with the rounding up I was getting 2 xp per click. In the early days that was a shed load of XP per hour.
Airion69
12 years ago
I redesigned my SF, then decided to house farm. I just upgraded from brown to blue and it's working out okay for me so far. I really couldn't give a rat's chuff if people remove me from their friends list because they think my town is 'ugly'. Recently I've been squeezing the new buildings in but when I have the time and inclination, I'll redesign again. I don't even want the big money items, I think they're ugly, but I do want to have enough money to design exactly how I want.

Some people buy donuts, some people play 24/7, some people house farm. It's all relative dude, and none of us are in a position to judge how another person chooses to play. Just a shame players don't remember that.
direwolf987
12 years ago
I kind of miss my house farm in my side town. I had to take it down due to the size of it. There is no way the game would have worked with the Halloween Event, had I left it out.
mbaron312775
12 years ago
I can't really see any reason to have a house farm. It takes a while to make your money back from the house, the cost of the land, and the time you are wasting farming it. Might as well just play the game, make a nice looking city, and not get all stressed about paying off your house farm. If you plan to "stop" house farming, after you make your money at it, what then? Are you then going to make a nice looking city? If you do not plan on stopping your house farming, do you only play this game to tap houses and accumulate more houses to farm? It seems so pointless to me.
direwolf987
12 years ago
mbaron312775 wrote:
It seems so pointless to me.

Not if you fill the entire map up, get $600,000 a day, and buy experience points with money you have earned daily. Keep in mind, my house farm is a side project in my side town though.
DJDK-ec
12 years ago
mbaron312775 wrote:
I can't really see any reason to have a house farm. It takes a while to make your money back from the house, the cost of the land, and the time you are wasting farming it. Might as well just play the game, make a nice looking city, and not get all stressed about paying off your house farm. If you plan to "stop" house farming, after you make your money at it, what then? Are you then going to make a nice looking city? If you do not plan on stopping your house farming, do you only play this game to tap houses and accumulate more houses to farm? It seems so pointless to me.

I have had a farm of blue houses ever since last X-mas (back then it was beneficial to friends) and it covers about a tenth of my land (tucked away in the corner). If I tally up all the money that farm made me since then (I collect from it twice a day), I must have made more then 5 milion $ alone from farming. Without it I would have way less land and I wouldn't have the popsticle skyscraper. So there is a reason to house farm.
kuhn2632
12 years ago
DJDK-ec wrote:
mbaron312775 wrote:
I can't really see any reason to have a house farm. It takes a while to make your money back from the house, the cost of the land, and the time you are wasting farming it. Might as well just play the game, make a nice looking city, and not get all stressed about paying off your house farm. If you plan to "stop" house farming, after you make your money at it, what then? Are you then going to make a nice looking city? If you do not plan on stopping your house farming, do you only play this game to tap houses and accumulate more houses to farm? It seems so pointless to me.

I have had a farm of blue houses ever since last X-mas (back then it was beneficial to friends) and it covers about a tenth of my land (tucked away in the corner). If I tally up all the money that farm made me since then (I collect from it twice a day), I must have made more then 5 milion $ alone from farming. Without it I would have way less land and I wouldn't have the popsticle skyscraper. So there is a reason to house farm.

Also worth noting the amount of xp and donuts generated from leveling up is significantly higher with house farms. It very easy to have a farm on one side of your city while maintain a well decorated majority of the rest of the town.
annettemarc
12 years ago
In real life, in my sixty four years, I have found two sorts of neighborhoods in suburbs ... The middle class lives in tract housing, with a modicum of difference between houses, but not much. So to individualize, it's all about landscape. Then there's the upper middle class, free of monotonous tract housing.

I find it amusing that, though I currently have nearly fifty Characters in this game -- and many many more to come -- I am offered about five housing styles. I like to think that they should have representations of homes. Lenny and Carl and maybe even Otto and Barney -- not to even MENTION the Workers we never see or hear of.

I know the characters don't GO home in the game, but it seems skewed to not even have enough housing visible in my Springfield. SF towns I visit sometimes give only a nod to the need for housing. For me, these unseen characters are citizens of Springfield. I like to imagine my SF as a place people live and work. (E.G., I like to imagine the Gilded Truffle has more employees than just the valet.). And given the limitations in variety of house styles, well ... I'm gonna need some landscaping skill here. :)

Rambled again.