Megapolis: Periodic Collection XP vs. Buying & Selling for XP

I decided to write a separate post in response to Justin's comment regarding farming experience through periodic tax/population collection.  The tooltips in-game & the Wiki do not include how much XP you get per collection, so I could only sample some of the buildings that my city has.  Unfortunately, I don't have the time to gather all of that data in the game so I don't really have the resources to tell you which building gives you the most periodic XP per hour at various levels.

Instead, I compared how much XP you get periodically from taxing some buildings versus how much XP you get from selling the "best XP per coin" building.  This analysis was a little difficult because buying & selling buildings and buying periodic buildings are two completely different things.  So it was hard to break the buildings down into one variable to compare them with each other.

With that said, I decided to look at two things for each building:

     1) How long does it take to earn $40k coins? (the cost of Therapeutic Center Foundation, "TCF" henceforth)

     2) How much XP do you earn from that building in that amount of time?

When looking at these numbers, they probably seem confusing.  Let me verbalize it for you:

- Look at the 2nd to last column.  That number means that you earn enough to buy a TCF in that many hours from each infrastructure building of that type.  So essentially, you have invested that many hours which can convert to 1100 XP. 

- Look at the last column.  In the time it takes you to earn 1100 XP by buying a TCF, your infrastructure building only earns you that much XP.

With that information, we can conclude that you earn more experience for buying and selling a TCF than you do with periodic experience from these buildings that I have sampled.  I will rephrase it: "All of these buildings earn enough coins to buy a TCF faster than they earn 1100 XP."

One might argue that having more of these buildings gets you 1100 periodic XP faster, but then you just have more buildings earning you coins at a 1:1 ratio to your experience with each building.  I would guess that population buildings earn much less XP per hour than infrastructure buildings because you can't convert your earnings into TCFs in the end.

My final recommendation:  If you are looking to gain experience quickly, continue to build the most profitable infrastructure buildings and complete the most profitable contracts with only coins in mind.  Then, convert your coins into XP by buying and selling the TCF.

Megapolis: Experience Farming at Endgame

This post was inspired by an anonymous comment on my Megapolis: How I Spend my Coins post about buildings that give you XP.  I understand the desire to lvl up quickly because it is a reliable way to get 1 extra Megabuck if you are saving for that expansion or an additional neighbor slot.

I have broken my analysis into two sections: Buildings and Contracts.  We will compare the XP rewarded from buying & selling buildings as well as all of the contracts for the population-based production buildings.

This post is intended to help you get experience when you are at the "Endgame," not necessarily at the start of your city.  I do not recommend buying & selling any buildings if you are just starting out.

Buildings:

In this section, I take a look at buying buildings & selling them for the sole purpose of gaining XP.  I started calculating all of the infrastructure buildings in the shop before realizing that most of them were horrible for gaining XP.  I knew about the Crystal Pavilion because I had read about it somewhere a while ago, but I found one that is better.  Here are the top 3:

     1) Therapeutic Center Foundation
     2) Crystal Pavilion
     3) Yacht and Cutter Design Bureau

As you can see in the table below, the Therapeutic Center Foundation gives you 27,500 XP for every million coins you spend buying & selling the structure repeatedly.

As a side note, all of the buildings that I sampled that ranked below those listed above had a rate of XP per million coins of less than 5000.

I planned on adding more data that compares XP rates per hour for taxing or collecting population from buildings, but I just do not have enough time to sample all of them.  Unfortunately, the Wiki does not always list the XP rewards for collecting, and the tooltips in-game do not either.

Contracts:

While I always recommend purchasing the contracts that have the best coin rate per hour that you can manage with your login frequency, I figured you might want to know which contracts give you the most XP per hour instead.  Thankfully, the Nuclear Research Center and the two contracts that I constantly cycle through are among the best XP building contracts longer than 1 hour.

My city has only Nuclear Research Centers for my population based contract buildings.  I run the 3 hour contract during the day and the 9 hour contract overnight.

Please feel free to comment if you have a question or an analysis request.  The past two posts I have written are based on anonymous comments (you slavedrivers!).

Megapolis: How I Spend My Coins

This post was inspired by an anonymous comment on my Megapolis: Infrastructure Buildings post about how I spend my coins after I reach the point that I consider my city "Endgame."  I would say that "Endgame" means having an excess of coins and you can buy any building in the shop with coins without really having to save up.  I am currently lvl 140 and my city earns over 10 million coins per day playing casually.

I have broken my spending priorities into two sections: Beginning and Midgame and Endgame.

Beginning and Midgame:

In my opinion, the main priorities for spending your coins at the start of the game are:

     1) Contract Buildings that require Assets

The most important thing to do at the very start of the game is fill up your Wishlist and start getting in-game assets.  There are so many opportunities to get coins in the game, but assets are only rewarded by your neighbors once a day or purchased with Megabucks.

I recommend starting your train depot followed by the airport as soon as their starting buildings are available for purchase.  These two questlines involve many assets and grant you many contract "buildings" that are all very profitable.

     2) Contract Buildings with Population Requirements

Contracts are the most profitable buildings you can have until Endgame.  If you log in every 4 hours, the best building for you is the Household Goods Store and buying the Kitchenware contract for 968 coins per hour.  If you log in every 6 hours, the best building for you is the Assembly Line and buying the Solar Cells contract for 875 coins per hour.  There are more profitable contracts that complete much faster than 4 or 6 hours, but these are the ones I chose due to my activity level.

To increase your population quickly, I suggest buying Bosphorus Cottages for 120 pop/hour since they only cost 5,000 coins.  Only buying population buildings required by quests will still give you access to more contract buildings at a reasonable rate.

     3) Quests

Buy buildings that will help you complete quests.  Completing quests will reward you with more coins, experience, and potentially free assets.  I suggest completing the quests that require no assets first (aside from trains & planes).  You can usually spot a building that requires assets if the name of the building has "foundation" in it and if the building has an instant build time.

Endgame:

When you finally reach the point where you have so many coins that you can buy anything, I would say that your city falls into the "Endgame" category.  At this point, I would still say that the priorities I listed in the previous section still stand.  But with your excess of coins, you can look into the following new priorities:

     1) Build Many of the Most Profitable Buildings

In my infrastructure building post, I will try to keep you updated with which building is the most profitable.  As of now, the Kingkey 101 (or 100?) is the most profitable infrastructure building available.  With a coin rate per hour per square of 1181.25, it is even better than many of the contract buildings.

In the table below, I entered my city's most profitable buildings to show how the numbers look when you have bulk buildings.  At an earlier level, I built 88 Pet Dinosaur Shops which net me over 28,000 coins per hour.  I plan on replacing these once I replace all of my other less profitable infrastructure buildings.  By looking at the bold totals, you can see that these buildings alone net me over 217,500 coins every hour and I only have to log in once every 4 hours.

Although these 159 buildings were over a half-billion coin investment, the total ROI (Return of Investment) for all 4 building types combined is 105 days.  But all the while I am getting tons of experience every time I collect.  Besides, what else would I spend my coins on?  :)

     2) Beautify Your City

I am a numbers guy, so this step is not a big priority for me.  But if you have all the coins that you could ever need, then I would suggest redesigning your city with roads, parks, foliage, and buildings that "look cool" rather than those that are more profitable.