One of the best features about Farmville (by Zynga) that I quickly noticed was the math that could be applied to the game. From a strategic standpoint, I discovered not all crops that I was planting yielded the same amount of ROI. In Farmville terms, this would be coins (and XP points, but I haven’t really figured out XP points yet). So I started a spreadsheet for myself on Google Docs. The more I continued to play, the more items I was able to unlock. And in doing so, I found myself wanting to throw every unlocked item onto my spreadsheet so I could see if the new crop, animal, or tree was a better return than the current options that I had available.
I also noticed it came in handy when I talked to some of my Farmville buddies:
“My artichokes are choking my profits ” – Farmville buddy
“Yeah, I know. That’s the third worse ROI crop!” – Me
I’m only on level 11 right now so wanted to develop the spreadsheet a little more before putting it out for my friends to use it. But, I promised that I’d get it out, so here it is (Farmville ROI Analysis — Google Spreadsheet)! (It’s in its very rough stages as you can see, but it gets the job done for me.) Some more analysis that I have not done, but would like to add to the spreadsheet are:
- Trees & Animals have one fixed cost whereas plots of land is linear.
- Trees take up less space than plots of land.
- Space taken up by animals vary. Must be factored in to value the true ROI.
Hopefully, it’ll be helpful to all you Farmville fans! And if you find new discoveries or have any comments, feel free to share!
Update: Per the comment below, a much more comprehensive and complete Farmville spreadsheet is located here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rrFQP5AOGa4yUZCL-1VLUyg&gid=9
