Tiny Tower - Tips & Strategies Thread

[C.Hannum]

Originally Posted by toochunky

At higher levels, it's possible that the best strategy is to basically save up enough for all five businesses and build them all at once to avoid the sales penalty.

Interesting idea although I wonder if avoiding the (poorly understood mechanics of the) demand decrease offsets the guaranteed upward of 5 days of revenue loss from not building the businesses as you go.

I suspect the answer is no: unless you are a machine and have an alarm to wake you up throughout the night keeping everything either in stock or stocking continually such that you are experiencing the minimum downtime, the decreased demand for most mere mortals just means the stock lasts longer so you have fewer fallow businesses at 4AM.

Interesting question to ponder on paper, but seems like the real-world application is probably not that important. If nothing else, the human factor rears its head: we want to keep seeing our towers grow, and only dropping a new set of floors every 5 days is a great way to get bored with the game and move onto something else entirely. But, if they ever have the Tiny Tower championships...

[edladd]

@The Embo - Great Post!! I like that the find the bitizen game is every 6m in active play - will try to confirm this on mine soon

[C.Hannum]

Originally Posted by edladd

@The Embo - Great Post!! I like that the find the bitizen game is every 6m in active play - will try to confirm this on mine soon

Sounds about right. I never paid attention to categories of where the bux were coming from, but I did my own testing on the rate of towerbux coming in and the average was right around 1 every 3 minutes when playing. If half of those were coming from waldo missions, then that's a tip or stocking bonus every 6 minutes to round out my findings and that's certainly seems in line with my observations.

[edladd]

Originally Posted by edladd

@The Embo - Great Post!! I like that the find the bitizen game is every 6m in active play - will try to confirm this on mine soon

lol Pretty much 6 minutes to the second between searches

[Cakebread]

Hey guys, I've got a question that I haven't yet seen addressed in this thread. Are the shops that appear (per which category you've specified) random? I have two floors that I keep rebuilding as creative and service, and I keep getting glass making and wedding chapel. Is the store that opens up based on anything or am I just encountering a fluke?

[lightskinnnn38]

Great thread for tips add me! lightskinnnn38

[toochunky]

Originally Posted by C.Hannum

Interesting idea although I wonder if avoiding the (poorly understood mechanics of the) demand decrease offsets the guaranteed upward of 5 days of revenue loss from not building the businesses as you go.

I suspect the answer is no: unless you are a machine and have an alarm to wake you up throughout the night keeping everything either in stock or stocking continually such that you are experiencing the minimum downtime, the decreased demand for most mere mortals just means the stock lasts longer so you have fewer fallow businesses at 4AM.

Interesting question to ponder on paper, but seems like the real-world application is probably not that important. If nothing else, the human factor rears its head: we want to keep seeing our towers grow, and only dropping a new set of floors every 5 days is a great way to get bored with the game and move onto something else entirely. But, if they ever have the Tiny Tower championships...

I'm sure the real-world application is not very important. Whether or not waiting on 5 floors at once is more boring than building a floor each day is probably up to the individual player.

As always, the optimal strategy depends on how active the player is. For a casual player who makes the majority of revenue from the high stock volume businesses, it's possible that the sales penalty makes a difference, because those are ordinarily fairly easy to keep continuously stocked.

The main point I was thinking about, though, is that I think (although I'm not 100% certain) that the penalty does not diminish as your tower grows. For example, adding your 3rd Recreation business outweighs any modest penalty to your sales rate, because you are increasing your sales volume by 50% or more. But when you have 10 Recreation stores, adding a Comedy Club has only a marginal benefit. Even if the sales penalty to your 10 Recreation stores is small, it may still outweigh the benefit of building the extra floor as soon as you can afford it.

From a certain point of view, all of those things are negligible anyway. But from that point of view, it may be perfectly acceptable never to build any of the Food businesses.

[iPhD]

I have 60 bitizens and 36 floors and I've noticed something about VIPs: they don't show up when they are actually useful. It takes 17 hours for me to build a floor and the construction workers now only show up when there is less than 2 hours to completion or when I'm not building a floor. Also, the delivery folks are similarly rare now that I have items that require 3+ hours to stock. When these items are fully stocked, the folks in brown are more common and stock items that requir 15 minutes.

My playing behaviors have not changed much. I still play for extended periods of time, often for 1-2 hoursa day. The VIPs behave differently when I do not need them.

[Parasaurolophus]

Thanks to everyone who recommended recruiting bitizens to rent, for profit. I'm sure that'll be key in the later stages of the game. (I've got 39 floors, 62 bitizens, albeit with IAP) I'm rather hoping to complete the game before upcoming parenthood consumes my time! Though I guess waking up to help with the baby feeding every couple hours would allow me to micromanage my tower... hmm...


Does anyone know if, during development, NimbleBit deliberately aimed for a 6-month in-game timeline before bonuses?

It looks like there are 132 storeys to build, with the first taking half-hour, and subsequent ones requiring an additional half-hour each. This means total build time to create a 133-storey tower would be:
132 x 0.5 [(1/2+132/2)] = 4389 h

That's an interesting number, since one calendar year has 24*365 = 8760 h
Half of that is 4380 h -- 0.2% different from the sum total build time in absence of towerbux or VIP's.

Just seems too close to be a coincidence. (Fortunately, at 3+ towerbux per hour from construction VIP's alone, that should be substantially trimmable, even without IAP tactics...)

[Tobtoh]

I've got a 38 storey building and a few levels ago I decided to focus on just building 'service' category floors with the intention of collecting the entire service set as the priority.

All has been going well until I got the tutoring center. Now when I go to add another service floor, I get the message of 'No new floors of this type for your level.' Does this mean I can't add any more service floors until I have a certain absolute number of floors (eg perhaps above 40 floors?) or does it mean I have to add more of the other categories (eg creative etc)? If it's the latter, I wonder if that is the purpose of the 'demand' rating for a category - currently my service floors have a demand of 38% and I have 38 floors ... I'm wondering if i the restriction is that you cannot build more floors of a particular category if the demand is equal to or less than the floor number ...

I'll be able to find that out in about 24 hours - but thought I would now to see if anyone had an answer first. Thanks.