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...
@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.
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?
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.
VIPs are fickle 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.
Tiny Tower game completion timeline 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...)
Can't build more floors 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.
There's only 16 different service businesses in the game AND the game will not duplicate a floor until after you have all of them. So, if you've already got your 16 service floors, you're done with those. You'll need to build the others (which is what you should have been doing all along unless your strategy was to grow your tower as slowly as possible by reducing demand for your existing businesses ).
I only have 13 of the service floors - I'm missing the last three: doctors, martial arts and private eye.
The available pool of stores is based upon tower height, so 13 is all the service floors you've unlocked for your tower height.
Tiny Tower Overlord, hear my plea Is this where I plead to the lords of TT to pleeeeease build a planetarium in my tower so the rioting bitizens will go back to stocking? I have four recreation floors and all employees working in them have 9s or dream jobs and yet there is this undercurrent of discontent because I have no planetarium. A floor is currently under construction and if it is not a planetarium, the TT security forces may have to be called in. Almighty programmers hear my plea! (and duplicate this message for a Soda Brewery; thanks)
Do more products mean more customers? Does anyone know whether the number of customers that visit a given store is related to how many products are for sale in that store? Or do the same number of customers come around no matter what, and then select from the products in stock? I always leave one store (whichever has the highest stock level) with only the 3-coin product stocked, in case the "I want it ALL" VIP comes around. Then I started doing that also for the "I'm a celebrity and my fans will buy your stuff" VIP, since that forces all the fans to buy the 3-coin product. And now I'm wondering if it makes more sense to only offer the 3-coin products in all stores. If I leave the other products out of stock, will that reduce the number of visitors/shoppers? Or will the number stay the same, and I'll make 3 coins from each visitor? (This is ignoring the possibility of running out of stock -- if I'm leaving the game overnight, I'll go ahead and stock up at all levels, since it will all sell out before I return to the game.)
"Select" is a strong word. Based on my testing here's how it works: At 100% demand, a customer spawns at a shop that has any stock about every ~7.5 seconds (8 items/minute). They randomly buy one of whatever is in stock. That's it.
short towers for big bux? Interesting! So it might actually work to keep only the higher-priced items in stock. I'd lose out on the "fully stocked" bonus, but earn a higher average per sale. I'm also thinking about a new early-game strategy of keeping my tower small (5 floors max) and focusing only on earning TowerBux until I've bought all the elevator upgrades. With so few floors, I earn TowerBux pretty quickly, since (a) I seem to get the same ratio of Bux tips even though the rides are short, and (b) the "Find the Bitizen" game is super easy when there's only a couple of places they can be. In my first game I was only up to 20 floors, but already I could see that both of these tasks would get tiresome with a tall tower. So I restarted the game, and my plan is to keep it to 5 stories and just ferry passengers for the first couple of days. I'll upgrade my elevators to 75 or 150 if I'm patient enough, and then sock away some extra TowerBux for later. At that point I should have enough coin saved up to build a bunch of stores all at once. Then I'll focus on the economics game, and I can skip the "find the Bitizen" game when I'm not in the mood for squinting. It's an idea, anyway...we'll see how it goes...
I think that the sales rate does in fact correlate with the number of items in stock. In part, I believe this just because it seems to be common sense to develop the game mechanic this way, rather than have a built in advantage for not stocking the less profitable items. It's hard for me to believe the devs would intentionally reward leaving the stores not fully stocked. Secondly, it seems to me that my sales per minute correlates with the number of items I have available for sale. The sales per minute is always higher at the end of the day when almost all of the stores are fully stocked or close to it. It's possible that the rate fluctuates in a set pattern, but that seems much more unlikely than the rate being based on some combination of how many stores are open, how many items are stocked, how many are fully stocked, how many are restocking. It's possible that the rate also increases with tower height and/or number of bitizens. The simplest version I can imagine is that the rate of sale just correlates just with how many items are available. Just as a quick example, C. Hannum mentioned that stores sell around 8 items per minute. This definitely fluctuates a lot. I have 38 businesses, and at 8 items per minute, my rate of sale should be 304. Of course it's much higher than that. It seems more plausible that the rate is something like 8 items per minute per item stocked. That would yield a perfect possible rate of sale of 912, although I've never seen anything close to that. But the rate was recently 720, and usually is in the mid-600s for my tower at the end of the day with most items stocked. That makes sense, because it is probably roughly 2/3rds stocked at any given time.
Technically, assuming you are a perfect machine, it might, but in the real world, very doubtful. For example, I ran a 96 hour simulation of 16 hours awake and playing *perfectly*, and 8 hours sleeping to test whether it made more sense to stock in terms of 3>2>1 or 1>2>3 coin product priority. In essence it didn't, there was a less than 5% increase seen for the 1>2>3 priority. But, the beauty is that test revealed the take from that business (optometrist) was just about 50,000 coins over the four days. If you *just* stocked the 3 coin product C and stuck to the 16 hours on, 8 hours resting you'd make about... 50,000 coins. There really are no big economic secrets to this game. I keep doing detailed number crunching largely to hammer home that point and people still keep assuming there's a trick beyond playing it as much as you can stand to play it
