LotM

Farmville is amazing I love playing it! it’s a awesome timekiller! Solid blog btw!

Look at the number of comments from people who challenge why you’d plant Raspberries, which give zero experience. The reason is that you have a 2 hour crop that actually gives you 1XP per cycle, when you include plowing.

Adam

i think that information would help out alot.

So, if you plant a four-hour crop, they take 4 hours to grow, they stay fresh for 4 hours, and then they randomly wither until they are all dead in 4 more hours.

Adam

This is a great blog – thanks!

Completely correct,
I was looking at it the wrong way!

Thanks a lot, I’ll be planting sugar Cane from now on

Keep it up!
Great Work overall!

My previous posts deal with the time value of different crops – please check them out, you’ll like them.

Raspberries never gave any experience. However, to do a “cycle”, you have to harvest, plow, and plant. Plowing a square gives you 1 XP, so if you plant Raspberries all day, you’ll end up with 12 XP, just from the plowing every 2 hours.

Gifts are fine, but I ignore them, since they are just free money (or better, free ongoing income streams).

Adam

You are confusing Return on Investment with Profit. They aren’t the same thing.

You make 74 coins of profit with Sugar Cane over 8 hours. You make 73 coins of profit with Tomatoes over 8 hours. Thus, Sugar Cane is slightly more profitable.

Now, Tomatoes have a higher return on investment as you point out, because you invest far less in capital than in Sugar Cane. However, in Farmville, I was assuming you had enough money to plant anything. As a result, you aren’t capital-constrained, you are opportunity-constrained (there are only so many squares on your farm).

So, if you want to maximize the raw quantity of profit you make, Sugar Cane beats Tomatoes. If you are worried about risking your capital, or if you don’t have enough money to plant every square, then Tomatoes are better than Sugar Cane.

Tables based on ROI are interesting, but I don’t find them useful. For example, if Farmville rolled out a crop that cost 1 coin to plant and returned 5 coins, I still wouldn’t plant it, even though the ROI would be 400%. 4 coins of profit just wouldn’t be worth the time. I’m trying to get the most coins period, not the best return on my coins.

Hope this helps.
Adam

At the moment Tomatoes and Sugar cane both take 8hrs to grow and both give 1XP.
Tomatoes cost: 100 for 173 Profit
Sugar cane cost: 165 for 239 Profit

Using simple divide by cost method that leaves me:
Tomatoes cost: 1 for 1.73
Sugar Cane cost: 1 for 1.45 (rounded up)

So it seems to me, since they both take same amount of growth, tomatoes are the better choice…?

If we assume that the player consider what growing time that fits his IRL schedule best, he will consider to plant different crops depending on when to be able to harvest. I guess this will level out the risk a little but not too much.

One other consideration that will add risk for “short time” crops is the fact that it’s harder to keep up the work effort needed during night time or during working hours.

I think the most profitable way in Farmville is if you manage to get a lot of friends. The more friends you got the more gifts you get. You get trees for free and that will really put the profit/day table up-side-down.

I have one other question: How can I best spend my FV cash? Most of the stuff that I can buy is only for looks! But I haven’t got so far yet so there might be a good way to spend it later.