Archive for CityVille

CityVille Factory and Premium Goods

By | Published March 11, 2011
CityVille Factory

The new factory in CityVille.

One of the newer kinds of buildings in CityVille is the Factory (also known as the Goods Factory). This factory adds a new type of commodity to the game, premium goods. Premium goods are produced here and can be used in any of your businesses, providing a 10% bonus to collections.

Getting Your Factory Started

You’ll find in in your inventory and can place it anywhere in your city, but it takes up a very large footprint: 6×6 squares or one-quarter the space of an expansion. Once you place it and do the initial construction, you’ll need to finish the building. You’ll need 10 each of the following items, which you earn as gifts from friends: Robotic Arm, Safety Goggles, Lunchbox, Work Uniform, and Hard Hat.

Running Your Factory

To actually produce premium goods, you need to ask friends to take on jobs in your factory. Unlike with Community Buildings, where the job assignments are permanent, these jobs expire after each factory shift and you’ll need to keep asking your friends to come back in order to produce premium goods on an ongoing basis. Here’s how the different jobs work:

  • Chill Charles – 25 premium goods per worker, 4 hour shift, 72 coin cost, potential of 150 premium goods.
  • Fast Paced Frances – 40 premium goods per worker, 8 hour shift, 92 coin cost, potential of 240 premium goods.
  • Diligent Denise – 55 premium goods per worker, 12 hour shift, 98 coin cost, potential of 330 premium goods.
  • Hardwork Harry – 75 premium goods per worker, 1 day shift, 124 coin cost, potential of 450 premium goods.
  • Taskmaster Tom – 90 premium goods per worker, 2.1 day shift, 142 coin cost, potential of 540 premium goods.

After you select the kind of job/shift you want, you’ll get a pop-up to invite your friends to take the job. The first 6 who respond within the allotted time will take the job and get a coin bonus. At the end of the shift, you’ll get premium goods for each of the workers (up to the maximum of 6 workers). When the job ends, you can collect the finished premium goods at your factory and start the process all over.

Premium Goods Bonus

CityVille Premium Goods Counter
The premium goods, shown with a purple box, have a separate counter in the goods section at the top of your game window. Whenever you have premium goods, they get used first when re-supplying your businesses. If you don’t have enough premium goods to re-supply, the business will get some premium goods and some regular goods.

Premium goods provide a 10% bonus, similar to the bonuses you get with decorations. However, the bonuses from premium goods do not stack or compound with decoration bonuses. Instead, they are added on top of any bonuses provided by decorations. So if you currently get a 50% bonus from decorations around your business, using premium goods will yield a 60% bonus.

Are Premium Goods Worth It?

Assembling your factory takes a fair amount of work, and continually inviting friends to take on new production jobs can be a bit of a chore. Although premium goods provide a 10% bonus, all the effort required to produce them may not be worth it. Let’s look at one example using one of the most profitable businesses in the game: the Tower Eats Restaurant.

Normally, a Tower Eats yields 900 coins at collection time and consumes 165 goods. So using 165 premium goods on this business (requiring an 8-hour or longer factory shift) will yield an extra 90 coins in profit. That’s not very much considering the time and effort involved to produce those goods. You’ll get coins faster just by visiting your neighbors.

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CityVille Farming Guide

By | Published February 23, 2011

CityVille’s success follows in the footsteps of one of Zynga’s other massively popular games, FarmVille, so it’s not completely surprising that farming and crops factor into CityVille’s gameplay. In fact, farming is a critical part of the game and will be the primary source of goods for your businesses throughout.

Crops

The basics are very simple and should be very familiar to graduates of FarmVille. First, you place plots on the ground (use your farming menu) and then you can plant seeds for the crops of your choice. Each of the different types of crops has a different growth cycle. Currently, they range from Strawberries (5 minutes) up through Peas (3 days). Certain crops have level requirements to plant. For example, you won’t be able to plant Peas until you’re level 25.

CityVille Farming Crops

If you’re playing frequently and logged into the game a lot, then strawberries are definitely the best bet for you to grow. They have a 5-minute growth cycle and produce 15 goods for a cost of 20 coins. Assuming you could harvest every 5 minutes and have enough energy points to keep going, strawberries would have an impressive return of 180 goods per hour on each plot.

Don’t want to spend all your CityVille time growing crops? Can’t say we blame you. Another long-term strategy is to plant lots of Corn (1 day) or Peas (3 days). If you stagger the planting times of your crops (such as one group of Peas each day), you’ll always have crops available for harvesting.

Crops Table

Here is a look at all the crops available in CityVille.

Crop Harvest Time Cost Goods/Hour Cost/Goods
Strawberries 5 minutes 20 180 1.33
Carrot 8 hours 46 8.75 0.657
Corn 1 day 62 4.58 0.563
Eggplant 1 hour 28 20 0.933
Watermelon 4 hours 36 11.25 0.8
Cranberries 12 hours 49 6.675 0.612
Pumpkin 18 hours 52 2.71 0.577
Wheat 2 days 71 2.15 0.546
Peas 3 days 85 0.54 0.548

Storage

Planting and harvesting crops is only half of the equation when it comes to CityVille farming. You also have to have adequate storage in your city to store crops until they’re used to re-stock businesses. Your primary means of storage comes from constructing different storage buildings, starting with simple silos and moving on to much larger buildings. Just like other buildings, storage buildings require coins and energy to build and take up space, so plan wisely and only grow your storage capacity as you need it.

Storage Buildings

Here are all the storage buildings you can build in CityVille.

Name Cost Capacity (Goods) Size Storage/Cost
Silo 250 100 2×2 0.4
Red Barn 1,000 415 4×4 0.415
Sticks 1,125 485 6×3 0.431
Cargo Shed 20 cash 1,000 3×3 n/a
Pier 5,000 420 4×4 0.084
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CityVille Visitor Center

By | Published February 23, 2011

There’s another new quest available in CityVille called Open for Visitors. This quest is given to you by Samantha and becomes available at Level 15. The quest is to build and staff a Visitor Center, which is a new Community Building in the game. The building appears in your inventory instead of the Build Menu. It requires 5 builds to complete and requires 4 staff members. Once built and staffed, it allows an additional 230 population.

Open for Visitors CityVille quest

One subtle change with the new Visitor Center is that when you select Hire Friends to staff the building, Zynga prompts you first to invite non-CityVille friends to staff the building. If you’d rather invite friends who are already playing CityVille, just click on the Recommended Friends tab.

CityVille Visitor Center Invite

Click on recommended friends to get a list of people already playing the game.

Once your Visitor Center is complete, it will provide interesting statistics about your city, including how much space it takes up, the total value of the city in coins, and the total number of residences and businesses that you have. Friends who visit your city will be able to click on it to see the details of your city as well. A second tab, called, Top Visitors, will show which of your friends have been helping out with your city the most.

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CityVille Housing Guide

By | Published February 10, 2011
CityVille Housing

Housing in CityVille keeps your population growing.

Housing is essential for your city as it provides places for your citizens to live. Each type of house can hold a certain number of citizens, which make up the population of your city. The capacity of each type of house can vary considerably. You can only build houses until you reach your population cap, which appears in the bottom-left corner of your screen. The way to increase the cap is through Community Buildings, which are covered in another guide.

Each house also allows you to collect rent and the amount and frequency also differs between the different house types. You should strive to build houses that correspond with your playing style. For example, if you are going to play frequently and stay logged into the game for long stretches of time, the Country House is a good option to get started. It allows you to collect 10 coins in rent every five minutes and provides 30 population. If you’re only going to play for a few minutes every day, you’ll probably want to start out with the Suburban House, which holds 40 population and delivers 180 coins in rent every 18 hours. It’s entirely up to you what kinds of houses you decide to build, but generally most players have success with building the larger population and higher rent homes.

CityVille Housing Menu

To build and place a house, select the Build button on the main menu and then click on the House icon on the far left to see the houses available to you. From there, simply purchase the house you want and place it in an appropriate spot in your city. Remember that houses must be connected to a road, either directly or via a sidewalk, to be operational.

CityVille Housing Table

Name Cost Population Rent Collection Time Coins per Hour
Apartment Complex 4500 90 210 1 Day 9
Colonial Chalet 10000 120 158 8 Hours 20
Country Home 600 30 10 5 Min. 120
Cozy Cottage 200 10 50 1 Hour 50
Family Townhouse 400 20 100 4 Hours 25
Glass Condos 600000 160 165 8 Hours 21
Hotel Suites 12500 130 231 2.1 Days 5
Lake House 10 City Cash 90 180 2 Hours 90
Loft Apartments 1000 50 220 2.1 Days 4
Modern Chateau 1500 60 200 1 Day 8
Ranch House 6000 100 189 18 Hours 11
Skyscraper Condos 500000 150 105 4 Hours 26
Sprawling Mansion 15000 140 195 18 Hours 11
Stylish Contemporary 3500 80 240 3.1 Days 3
Suburban House 800 40 180 18 Hours 10
Terraced Brownstone 2500 70 150 8 Hours 19
Upscale Condos 8000 110 52 1 Hour 52
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CityVille Expansions

By | Published February 9, 2011
CityVille Expansions

Grow your city with expansions in CityVille.

As you start to gain levels in CityVille and construct more buildings, farms and roads, you’re going to eventually run out of space. That’s where expansions come in. These are items that you can purchase to allow you to add another 12×12 area to your city. To get started, you’ll need some coins saved up and have a Zoning Permit, which is an item you can get from friends through gifting. Note: you’ll also get one Zoning Permit as a quest reward for completing the Become Mayor quest, but more likely than not you’ll be expanding even before you get to that point.

To get started, click on your Build button and then choose Expansions from the menu. Right now, there’s only one choice available: the 12×12 expansion. The first one costs 20,000 coins and 1 Zoning Permit. Future expansions cost more: the number of Zoning Permits required goes up by one for each additional expansion, and recently the coin cost began to increase as well. For example, the second expansion costs 22,000 coins and two Zoning Permits to complete.

CityVille Expansions Menu

Once you purchase your expansion, you can choose where to place it. You’ll see a blue square on your screen, which represents where the expansion can go. It must be adjacent to an area that’s currently part of your city and you’re limited to certain spots on the grid. Once you’ve decided upon your spot, you’re all set to go. Now you can begin clearing trees to make way for the new buildings!

Here’s a helpful table that shows the different costs (both coins and zoning permits needed) for each expansion you add to your city.

Expansion Number Zoning Permits Needed Cost
1 1 20,000
2 2 21,000
3 3 22,000
4 4 23,000
5 5 25,000
6 6 28,000
7 7 32,000
8 8 37,000
9 9 43,000
10 10 50,000
11 12 60,000
12 14 75,000
13 16 95,000
14 18 120,000
15 20 150,000
16 20 185,000
17 20 225,000
18 20 270,000
19 20 320,000
20 20 375,000
21 20 435,000
22+ 20 500,000
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CityVille Tower Eats – Is it Worth It?

By | Published February 7, 2011

As you start gaining levels and earning coins in CityVille, you’ll begin to explore some of the more expensive businesses available. One of them has probably been staring at you for a long time, way off on the far right side of that scrolling menu. It’s the Tower Eats business, and with a cost of 1 million coins, it’s one of the most expensive in the game. But is it worth all that expense? In a word, yes. But only if you fully maximize the building with lots of decoration bonuses. First, however, let’s look at the quick stats for the building:

  Business Cost Earnings Supply Earnings per Good
Tower Eats 1,000,000 900 165 5.4

As you can see, it may be an expensive building to purchase, but the return is impressive at 900 coins per collection. It consumes 165 goods each time you supply it, so the earnings per good invested is 5.4, which is one of the best in the game. But where the Tower Eats also shines is in Earnings per Energy. Remember that each business costs you one energy point per collection, and the 900 coins earned per energy point invested is very high.

But where the Tower Eats shows its full potential is with the possibility to fully maximize its earnings through decorations. Because it’s a 4×4 building, it’s possible to surround it with decorations and enhance its earning potential through bonuses. In fact, it’s possible to achieve a 322% bonus, leading to a potential earnings of 3,795 per collection or an earnings per good invested of 23. Depending on the population size of your city and your flow of goods, it would be possible to earn back your initial investment reasonably quickly with a properly decorated Tower Eats business.

CityVille Tower Eats with Bonus

A Tower Eats with a 284% bonus through decorations.

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