Baby tower

I've been playing quite a bit of 'Tiny Tower' recently, and wanted to talk a little bit about strategy.

I talked a little bit, before, about the uses of Towerbux. Hurry construction, hurry stocking, hurry buying, moving floors, expanding stores, moving people in to an apartment not fully occupied, and getting coins is, I believe, the complete list. Moving people in is a total waste (I'll come back to why), hurrying those things is mostly a waste as well (I'll come back, in a minute, to when it isn't). Moving floors is key; by the time you get to 40 or so floors, you'll find that a necessity, so that you can group types of floors (all retail together, all service together, all apartments together, etc). It'll save huge amounts of time when you're trying to find people later.

That leaves expanding stores and getting coins. This is pretty much an either-or proposition. You'll want to do one of these heavily, and the other a little bit. It depends on how much time you have to play, which is better. Basically, the more time you have to play (and the more often you can restock your stores), the less sense expanding stores makes. Expanding a store adds 75 to its capacity for each of the three types of merchandise (so using this monkeys with the ratios of types of goods, for better or for worse) for three bux. It means a total profit of 315 more coins for each full restock (of all three items), so if you frequently leave the game to itself, it will pay for itself in 19 or so restocks. If you have all dream-job people, double that amount to cut the number of restocks down to about nine.

So it seems to pay for itself, eventually.

Do you buy coins? Well, you can, and certainly will for quite a while. Once you get one of the huge-quantity floors (doctor, auto dealer, architect, etc), you might want to stop doing it, and just use that floor to get coins. How? Let me explain.

I have 138 workers in my shops. 137 of them are doing their dream job. That takes some effort, but it totally worthwhile.

I have the architect floor, obviously filled with dream job people, so I get a stocked capacity of 24000 for the 3-coin item. My people give me a 25% time savings, so it takes 13h20m to restock that item. I just let that item stock, and whenever I get a big spender (generally 2-4 times a day), I hurry the re-stock and send the big spender in. Counting the coins for the initial stock, that's about 66k profit each time. I never stock the 1- or 2-coin items on that floor (only on that floor). Worst case, I get 66k coins for 13 bux (if he appears in the first 20 minutes, I'll leave the iPad alone until the counter gets below 13 hours; it's only happened once); a much better rate than buying coins. Best case, he appears right after I finish stocking, and I get all that for no bux.

I can see an argument for doing that with two floors, but I certainly wouldn't do it with more than two. Well, maybe if you can play for ten hours a day.

Once you do start doing that, though, putting bux into expanding floors starts making a lot more sense.

So, how did I get so many people doing their dream job? Easy, instead of building the minimum number of apartments, I build almost half my levels as apartments. That way I always have a lot of free space for people from the elevator, and can house them. If they fit in with a floor I have, I employ them. Maybe momentarily, maybe permanently. If they replace a non-dream job person, I employ them permanently. If they allow me to evict a dream jobber in a full apartment, I keep them permanently (even if they have a lower skill level; the empty apartment space is more important than the skill bonus). If neither of those is the case, I employ them momentarily so that I can get the 2 bux bonus for them. If they might see the floor I'm currently building as a dream job, then I keep them until that floor is built. Otherwise, I throw them out immediately.

In this way, it's been more than ten days, I think, since I had more than six non-dream job people in my building.

When a floor is being built, that is another time I will sometimes hurry it up with bux. If my apartments are all getting full with potential employees, I'll hurry building a store (you need to weigh the opportunity cost here of not having room for more people. I once paid 30 bux to hurry a floor, and I'm not sure that was a bad deal. But that should be a rare situation). If a realtor shows up when an apartment is almost finished, I'll also hurry things.

I'll sometimes hurry restocking when I have people waiting to be employed (even if only temporarily). I actually doubt that's the correct play, but I sometimes do it.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Maybe I'll talk about it some more, later. It's a fun little game.