Why do I want experience again?

[Will9455Nikki]

Not knowing about the dangers of breathing hydrogen sulfide gas, dragons seemed a reasonable explanation at the time. But regardless of the explanation, avoiding the cave systems was good advice.

Please tell me that you are not denying the dragons their heritage! For shame, for shame, for shame.

Sorry, the rest of the post was spot on.

[cdosr]

Please tell me that you are not denying the dragons their heritage! For shame, for shame, for shame.

Sorry, the rest of the post was spot on.

Didn't Yoda also warn Luke about going into the cave

[Edwin R Karat]

One of the beauties of this game is that it allows for many playing styles so "good / bad" are relative. One person's advice may not suit another player. There are some things that are worth a "rush to level", repairing the Airport or the Mine or the Co-op Building being three things that help in the long term development of the town. Getting a 2nd and then 3rd train too. Once you reach a comfortable playing level, experience can become less important and many folks do experience the "glut of CBs" due to leveling up too quickly and then trying to build them all. Things get more expensive too. At some point I did regret that my first few factory upgrades focused on Experience rather than Coins.

Secondly, I'm not going to label things as pure superstition but sometimes people assume "correlation equals causation". Some things appear to work. The "why" is a mystery and urban legends are born. Ancient peoples avoided volcanic cave systems because people died in them. Not knowing about the dangers of breathing hydrogen sulfide gas, dragons seemed a reasonable explanation at the time. But regardless of the explanation, avoiding the cave systems was good advice.

My personal superstition is that two things are true. One is that materials are provided using a uniform randomness, the simplest way to do things. Uniform does not mean a totally even distribution, just that over time, thousands upon thousands of samples, things come out "even". Flip a coin 100 times and you will hardly ever get 50 heads and 50 tails. Flip a coin 1 Million times and it will be very close to 50/50. However, you are not retaining every delivered piece of building material, you have a limited space barn plus you have other priorities and any excess materials is useless. Selling the excess in light of limited barn space is a good strategy hence the recommendation. This is even more true if you try to build more than 1 CB at a time, every piece of material that does not advance the building of one of them is excess. If you have the space, it will help with the 2nd building, if not, sell the excess.

The other thing that is true is that like a watched pot, it seems like forever before it will come to a boil. If you are watching for that last brick, every train that does not bring a brick is something you notice, often with irritation. I tend to check on my building supplies infrequently, sometimes only after getting the dreaded "barn is full" message. Then I go through my progressions of what I can trim / use / sell.

While it's not exactly "building supplies", for over 18 months I've been keeping track of my "barn expansion tools". Steadfastly refusing to sell any, allowing excesses to build up and shrink, sometimes hammers, sometimes nails. Over 7200+ tools, Red Paint is +12, Nails +9. That's the extent of the differences, almost a perfect 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 distribution. So I'm not convinced there's a biased algorithm lurking in the game.

However, the "build 1 at a time" is a sound strategy if you are trying to manage limited barn space. Selling the excess will help with that but will discard some material you will eventually need. You are trading off barn space now for waiting longer later. This is a game of tradeoffs.

I disagree with a lot of what you said, but I do think we share a common view of random processes, and it looks like we might analyze things in a similar way.

If the distribution of materials is uniformly random, then the more CBs you build, the less barn space you will need. Why? More CBs means more flexibility to accommodate lopsided distributions. For example, if I have lots of everything but brick, then I can build the CB that requires the least brick first, but that might not be the overall cheapest CB. In addition, since it is not the smallest CB, it will require disproportionately more of the materials I do have, reducing my stockpile even more.

As a new player, I haven't necessarily seen all the growth curves, but it looks like the game is balanced for you to store roughly 20% of your barn space for building supplies, and the amount you have to store roughly keeps pace with the size of barn increases. (Or so it seems so far -- things might go differently further on.)

Regardless, instead of optimizing space out of the 20%, it seems like it would be easier to optimize out of the 80% left. This can be accomplished in (at least) two ways:

1) Sell off gluts. For example, in the early game, you can easily produce far more milk than your factories can process, so you have a constant glut of milk to sell off.

2) Sell off your best items. This is what I just started doing, and it works like a charm. You get most of the value, and you don't get the experience.

Now, why is this a good thing? Let's back up and look at what "leveling too fast" means.

Leveling too fast doesn't refer to the rate with respect to time since the gold / experience ratios are the same no matter how much or little you play. (Not 100% true -- airport speed bonuses give you extra experience, for example.) Rather, the issue is that you level up before you amass enough money to comfortably afford everything you want. I think this is intentionally by design of the game.

So, selling things off can earn you a good bit of money without boosting your level. I've been doing it a bit to even things out and catch up -- just enough that I can afford to build all the factories. I had gotten 3 factories behind, and I needed to do something to fix this.

I admit that it's a bit counter-intuitive, but I do think it works if you get behind enough to need to play catch-up.

[Bessville]

I'm level 22 after playing for 2-3 days...

I disagree with a lot of what you said, but I do think we share a common view of random processes, and it looks like we might analyze things in a similar way....

No disrespect, Edwin, but I'm gonna say give it a minute. The game is a very different beast even by level 35, and it's very possible you may draw different conclusions a little way down the road. While your analytical methods may match Cdosr's, the sheer volume of experience/data to which you're applying them is so wildly different that going so far as to disagree at this point seems... brave?

So many tips for 'best practice' depend on what your priorities are, the xp question is a very open one. A competitively-racing player in a big coop will have very different demands on resources and ability to avoid xp than one who is town-building alone. My best advice is to read the tips for new players and select which advice, if any, you'd like to try out.

[Will9455Nikki]

The game is a very different beast even by level 35, and it's very possible you may draw different conclusions a little way down the road. While your analytical methods may match Cdosr's, the sheer volume of experience/data to which you're applying them is so wildly different that going so far as to disagree at this point seems... brave?

Spot on!

If the distribution of materials is uniformly random, then the more CBs you build, the less barn space you will need. Why? More CBs means more flexibility to accommodate lopsided distributions. For example, if I have lots of everything but brick, then I can build the CB that requires the least brick first, but that might not be the overall cheapest CB. In addition, since it is not the smallest CB, it will require disproportionately more of the materials I do have, reducing my stockpile even more.

And this may very well work. But at the same time, if the system believes you need 50 Glass, 50 Bricks and 50 Slabs for a community building, the general consensus is that you may have some disparity, but overall, there is still a balance. However, if you need 110 of each for two active community buildings, you may find that it becomes much more lopsided as your trains (and other sources of building materials) may focus more on one, leaving a bigger gap. Is it proven? No. (I tried to do that with my baby town, but failed.)

The other side of things is the question: what type of player are you? Are you one that drives to keep your factories churning out product, planes/trains never in for more than a few minutes, a heli pad that is more orange than green because of non-stop orders being dropped on customer doorsteps? The game itself may "react" differently dependent upon your style of play. (And before I get a slap for the word "react", I'm not saying that it is acting according to your style; I'm simply saying that it often feels as if it does.)

Now, why is this a good thing? Let's back up and look at what "leveling too fast" means.

Leveling too fast doesn't refer to the rate with respect to time since the gold / experience ratios are the same no matter how much or little you play. (Not 100% true -- airport speed bonuses give you extra experience, for example.) Rather, the issue is that you level up before you amass enough money to comfortably afford everything you want. I think this is intentionally by design of the game.

I'm sorry, but I disagree with this. Gold/experience ratios are wildly different based upon your style of play. You get experience from every crop you harvest, every time you collect milk/eggs/etc, every time you send a helicopter out. It also depends on how you upgrade your factories. (I once stopped sending out a heli just to minimise the incoming experience, except where required for regatta task. I would also sell items from my barn rather than using the heli, kinda like you said said.)

Do not ask me to quantify the word "too" that is upcoming, but my own experience would say that there is such a thing as playing too fast and I would presume there might be a similar side to playing too slow. It is definitely about finding a balance (or working around the difficulties if playing an extreme).

[Edwin R Karat]

Just to be clear, I do respect all of your experience. I'm still going to disagree because that's who I am by nature, but I want to do so with respect.

It sounds like CB strategy depends a lot on whether the materials are uniformly random or not. So far, it feels uniformly random to me, so I will remain skeptical. Of course, having lots of CBs waiting for materials takes up a lot of money and space that could be used for other things, so there's an incentive to not have half a dozen open at once.

As for gold/experience ratios later in the game, I'd love to hear more from you veterans out there.

Personally, I found myself a bit skewed, so I held off on helicopter orders a bit and sold from my barn to catch up a bit -- it worked. Also, I'm clearly not the first person to think of that.

So, I'd love to hear more about gold/experience ratios.

[TcT]

When I recently started playing I wanted fields and thought I needed to buy every CB as soon as possible. I had a terrible time getting needed building materials and the CB kept piling up. I finally read the 1 building at a time advice and it took forever until finally I paired it down to one only at a time. Ever since then, I have been able to build out completely the CB as soon as the wait time ends. Things get crowded in the barn as that wait time counts down, yet I rarely sell building materials. Maybe it's coincidence yet I'm 100% positive I will only build one CB at a time.

[Raneeta87]

No one is sure of an "algorithm". There are a number of "Best Practice" recommendations floating around that seem to work for most people. One is certainly the "build only 1 Community Building at a time". Another is to "sell of all but 1 of any excess building materials you have to encourage the trains to bring more". Since no one here has access to the game's code, we have no idea if there is an "algorithm" that takes your current requirements and inventory into account and then either biases the train materials in your favor (or as some other's claim, biases it against you). Take all such recommendations with the proverbial grain of salt.



What we do know is true is that the game will produce Helicopter orders and Plane requests for products from Factories you are at *able* to built because of your town level, independently of whether you've started building them yet or if they are under construction. The fact that you *could* build the factory is enough to trigger the request for those products. Helicopter orders can be cancelled, planes can be sent empty / incomplete so those requests cannot "hang up" your game. Trains cannot be sent partially full so the game will never request products unless you actually have the factory built / completed. And, of course, you have other ways of obtaining those products, market boxes, co-op requests, general requests for crate help, and/or hiring Raja, the Market Guy.

Good luck.

How do you hire Raja?

[dreadnought]

How do you hire Raja?

You go to the city market, tap the dealer (Raja) which you can find on the left side of the boxes, and choose for how many days you want to hire him for from the options that will show up.

[Raneeta87]

Sorry, I didn't notice the note collision with Ash, she types way faster than I do She may be right about the "have enough coins to purchase". I never looked that closely at the timing I've never really been short of coins by the time I reached the higher levels for factories so I would have always had enough. I know I avoided starting the last 3 (Bouquet, Italian Restaurant, and Festive) until recently and bought all I needed for planes and helicopter from Raja. Finally I dumped 2.5Million coins into building all 3 at once. Now the trains are asking for those but I didn't pay attention to when they exactly started asking, while they were building or when they were finished.

I'm trying to come up with some Yoda-like wisdom here...I got nothing

From my experience, I've never had the planes with orders from any factory that I did not yet purchase or even when it still building. There have been times when I didn't not get the factory and build as soon as it was available.