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However, in terms of cost and space efficiency, it becomes apparent that higher level buildings such as Glass Condos and Atrium Lofts, which become unlocked in the highest levels and carry very expensive cost, are not very cost efficient.
To raise population by 1,, a player could build 6 Ranch Houses at 1. Colonial Chalets, for example, are a favourable choice as they only take up a 3x3 space thus meaning a player could place 2 Colonial Chalets in the same space used to build Hotel Suites.
However the spring bunglow is the best house available in respect to cost and population. Compared to Colonial Chalets, it costs less i. Optimizing land space is another factor to consider. Not only does this conserve land so that it can be used for other things, the closer housing is to a business, the less travel time there is for the inhabitants. To optimize space, consider destroying low-value housing that was constructed in the early days of city construction. Since housing units appreciate in value as they are used holding more population , units should be deleted as soon as they can be economically replaced: Then the appreciation will happen on permanent units.
If a player is very active in Cityville, housing may seem a very inefficient way to earn coins. Building up a population is largely useful for businesses - the higher the city's population, the more citizens are available to shop in the city's businesses. Therefore, an active and high level player may wish to focus on buildings which house a high number of citizens, such as Parkside Villas , Garden Cottages, Skyscraper Condos, Glass Condos and Atrium Lofts.
An active and high level player might also want to focus on space efficient housing; thus, Parkside Villa. Although these can't be collected from as often as houses with a lower population increase such as Upscale Condos and Colonial Chalets, they serve a greater purpose to players who focus on harvesting goods supplies and keeping their businesses turning over.
Players who are not active with their cities may find housing a lot more useful than active players. If a player can only play for short periods of time, they probably won't find businesses to be profitable enough to help them advance through the levels. However, housing provides a good way for these players to stay afloat and, though it only provides a small amount of coins per day, housing can essentially be one of their only sources of coins.
If a player knows generally what time they will play each day, they can benefit from building houses which are ready for rent collection at that same time each day - so, building a house with a 1 day "cooldown" such as Modern Chateau's or Sprawling Mansions. If a player determines exactly how many hours occur between each log in on a general basis, they can choose housing accordingly. Instead, the game chains them along, with completion of some tasks opening up other ones.
Task completion generates congratulation windows, rewards, and also the opportunity to share your achievement on Facebook. Lastly, you are largely free to lay out your city as you choose. Unlike many classic sim-strategy games or Restaurant City , arguably the grand-daddy of these types of games , optimal layout doesn't really matter.
You don't need to maintain equitable balances of components in certain areas, efficient road networks or anything like that. All of the people wandering around, as well as the plants and trees are purely decorative. This means players are free to create whatever layout they desire, and many do. And that's the basic game design. Most successful social games are much the same, but with variations of theme.
So why does this work so well for Zynga, if many of the games are the same? A lot of the talk around Facebook enthuses wildly about the social graph and virality as being great drivers of engagement , but I believe these effects are being wildly over-estimated. They exist, and are a factor, but actually only a small factor in how games spread.
How Facebook really works is visibility. The Facebook interface induces a high degree of user blindness. It does not do a great job of exposing new games and applications, and lacks a directory or a ' Featured in the App Store' style of editorial as Apple does for the iPhone , which means that for most developers there are huge problems in getting their games in front of users' eyeballs.
With all of the free advertising channels on the platform now constrained or dead, this has meant that the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape. Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default.
And to the winner very much go the spoils. The Facebook economy, like the television economy, is all about dominating and converting attention rather than meritocratic-ally acquiring it, and all of the big developers on the platform have realised this.
There are four basic ways that they do this. App Banners: App banners are immensely important to have on Facebook because they solve the user blindness problem. App banners are the core of cross-promotion , so each game from a developer becomes a marketing channel for every other game by that developer as well.
A recent trend in app banners has come in the form of Applifier , and some others, which offer a way for smaller developers to band together and cross-promote to each other. While useful, and in some cases very much so, third party app banners probably only have a limited shelf life before there are too many of them, or developers start making their own, such that Metcalfe's Law will start to work against rather than for them.
Decanting : The above image is captured from FarmVille , and it shows a form of cross-promotion that I call decanting. Decanting literally means pouring your users from one container into another, like wine. The idea is simple, but extremely powerful. If you are sitting on an ageing 53m monthly active users in FarmVille, as Zynga are, why not show them something else that they can play?
Why not offer them rewards or challenges from one game to the next? Each user that does this becomes a more invested customer, more likely not only to play your next game, but to still keep playing and maintaining their existing game. So you not only have their attention, you're keeping it, and the user is unlikely to venture outside your application's sphere to try something from a competitor instead.
Advertising: Often forgotten in the rush to praise social gaming as a new kind of business model is that most of the big players got funded very early, and used that money to develop and advertise their games. Zynga was very much at the forefront of this. When SGN and Playfish were their early competitors, and later Playdom and Crowdstar came along, all of them trusted in the then-viral aspects of their games.
Advertising was seen in some quarters as muddy, and Playfish in particular would boast that they had never had to tap much into their investment funds to acquire their users, but instead did it with great gameplay. Zynga took the other view: They advertised like crazy, on Facebook itself, and in other games. The example picture above is take from Soccer Stars Football , and shows that Zynga still advertise in other games to this day.
Advertising works for the same reason that app banners work: They show images against the otherwise bare Facebook interface. They are also eminently target-able along many lines, and very easy to experiment with to increase yield.
Publishing: Social games ask users to publish their game activity a lot. The basic form of publishing is the High Scores publish action, where the player brags that they scored more points, attained a new level or acquired an achievement in a game.
These kinds of publish action were very effective when they first came out 18 months ago, and some casual games like Chain RXN exploded in users overnight because of them, but they've become pretty ineffective these days.
Users instantly recognise them and ignore them, and recently Facebook has constrained the reach of game-published stories, limiting them only to players who have already installed a game. Games like CityVille have started using publishing as a way to offer gifts and incentives.
As you can see in the image above, my published story is bragging about my achievement, but also offering free experience points to other users who click through. A variety of such incentives encourage users to come back into the game to collect their prize, and the hope on the part of the publishing player me in this case is that those players will in turn show me reciprocity.
This strategy only really works if you have a critical mass of players though. It doesn't acquire fresh users, but rather re-interrupts the attention of cross-promoted, decanted and advertised customers. It also re-acquires lapsed customers. All of which is dependent, like most kinds of marketing, on repeated exposure. The more friends you have playing and publishing, the more you will notice that game, and the more likely you are to re-enter it. Most advertising works on that sort of constant-exposure basis, and social game publishing really is no exception.
All four parts of the promotion equation feed into each other and produce geometric results. In the early days of Facebook many developers practised seedy, spam-laden tactics to acquire users, and Zynga certainly was one of those. But what they've done with that attention along the way is figured out how to move it around, shift it from game to game, and keep using those opportunities to expand their reach further and further.
The result, as with all successful companies on the web, is that they're now tapping into Metcalfe-style effects. Zynga are able to add a tonne of users very quickly into a game because they have built the channels to do so. Success follows more success, allows exponential expansion if you manipulate it in the right way, and that's why they're now the company adding 12m users in a week to their new game.
The game was originally released in December A sequel CityVille 2 was released in November , however it was shut down in March Install the leethax. There is no way to directly cheat the amount of energy, coins, City Cash etc.
For example, if you get 1 energy every few minutes, and you have several houses that you can collect every 5 minutes, you can only collect from 1 house every time. If you collect from more than 1 house every 5 minutes, you will run out of energy quickly. If you have 12 houses that give you income every hour, you can collect from all of them without ever running out of energy. Houses that give you income every hour are better than those that give you income every minute, because the amount of money earned per collection is higher, and collections are limited by energy.
The same goes for businesses.
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