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.