Russ Tarleton

CityVille Maximum Decoration Payout Bonus Tables for 3×3 and 4×4 Plots – Free and Paid Versions

Posted in Software Development on January 10th, 2011 by Russ Tarleton

CityVille, Zynga’s latest casual social networking game on Facebook gained 80 million registered users in its first month; with over 10 million more users than FarmVille, that now makes CityVille the most popular game in the world… See: Top 25 Facebook Games – January 2011. I’m a fan of most 4x games (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) and I haven’t played anything sim’ish since Ikariam so when I saw an ad for CityVille a few weeks ago I decided to check it out.

One of the interesting parts of CityVille is that most decorations you put in your city also increase the amount of money you harvest from surrounding businesses and homes within a 3 grid radius of the edge of the decoration. Businesses and Homes come in two sizes: 3×3 and 4×4 grid sizes. Decorations come in all sorts of sizes and payoff amounts.

This pretty much begs the question, what is the maximum bonus you could possibly apply to a single 3×3 or 4×4 business or home from all of the given decorations? Furthermore, since there are items you can pay for with real-life money that also give bonuses, what would the maximum bonus be without using these “paid” decorations and only “free” decorations. The only constraint is that each business or home you wish to collect from must be connected by at least a single 3×3 road piece. However, to optimize the maximum amount of nearby decorations, that road piece may be placed further away if you connect it to smaller 1×1 sized sidewalk pieces that ultimately reach the business. Finally, for any road or sidewalk to be considered connected, one of its sides, not corners, must be touching the other. Fun logic puzzle!