Showing posts with label Tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tips. Show all posts

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Rare Animal Breeding Secrets

Have you ever wondered how some of your high level Farmville friends get their farms filled with the rarest breeds? Why it seems like they have an advantage over you when it comes to collecting gifts? While they may consider this a trade secret all it takes is a little bit of work and a small change to the way you publish items you find on your farm.

The first thing you need to do is find some breeders, start by looking through your current friends to see if anyone has a good collection of rare animals. If not head over to the Zynga forums and post in the "Looking for Neighbors" thread. Make sure you include that you are looking for "High Level Breeders" or "Rare Animal Breeders" when posting there.  If your not sure how to do that take a look at this thread Getting more neighbors in Farmville for more information.

Once you have four or five breeders for friends it is time to do a little bit of work that will pay off greatly in the future. Send them each a personal message and explain that if you get any rare breeds out of your Nursery, Dairy or Stables you will send it out to just them. In exchange for them doing the same for you. Basically you are making some good connections with fellow breeders and setting up a common interest group. You can even take this a step farther and setup a private Facebook group so you can all communicate together. You may even want to refer them to this post so they can see how it works and what they will need to do to ensure you get their animals.

Now, you may be wondering how can you possibly guarantee them that they will be the ones who receive your rare breeds? After all, it is common for gifts to be gone the instant they hit the news feed right? Well hang on cause here is a super secret tip the rare animal breeders do not want the masses knowing.

It is possible to send any post to one specific person or group instead of to all of your friends! There are two ways to do this, either by sending the item to one specific person, or by creating a new friends list inside of Facebook and sending to just that list. And you may be surprised just how easy it is.

First let's look at how to send an item to a single person instead of to your entire friends list. Whenever you find a collectible on your farm, complete a ribbon or some animal wanders by you get a pop-up window alerting you about it and asking you to share. When you click the Share button a Facebook window appears where you can click Submit and send it out. Before you click on the submit button try the following;

Next to the Submit button there is a tiny Security Lock, click on it and you will see these options
  • Everyone
  • Friends of Friends
  • Friends only
  • Customize
Choose Customize from the list and another window will appear showing you the options available. Under the "Make this post visible to" section is a drop down menu, if you choose "Specific People" a small text box will appear allowing you to type in someones name. Fill in the desired reciepents name and then click Save. (You can choose to make this the default however it is recommended that you leave "Everyone" as the default)

Back to the Publish window you will find that it has changed and should now be showing just that friends name in the upper right hand corner. Click on the Publish button and viola! They are the only person capable of receiving the rare animal. You may want to send them a private message alerting them of the post so they do not miss it.

Believe it or not, this small tip is how the best breeders work. They setup a coalition with each other and just send the rare animals back and forth maximizing their ability to earn coins and experience.

Now, you can expand on this if you want. Lets say that you have a breeder coalition with 20 people in it. What you want to do is first create a sub list inside of Facebook and put each of them into it.

To create a new list click on Friends in the upper right hand corner while logged into Facebook. On the next screen you should see a button that says "+ Create a list" click on that and a smaller window will appear. In the upper right hand corner is a place for you to name your new list. Try to use something easy to remember like "Breeders" or "Coalition" something that you will be able to recall easily. Once you have named this list, go through your friends and highlight anyone who you want to be on it. Then click Save.

Sending to this list works the exact same way as sending to one person with a slight change. After selecting "Specific People" from the drop down, type in the name of your list instead of a persons name. This will publish your post to anyone on this list giving them all equal chances to receive the rare animal.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Maximizing Space in Farmville

When playing Farmville the first thing you notice is how little room you are actually given. While you can expand your farm later on it is important to start out on the right foot. While everyone always says to use most of your space to plot they tend to neglect a couple other tidbits.

Trees

Trees in Farmville can be a great source of income, however they can also lose you income if placed poorly. For instance, you do not want to place a line of trees in the middle of your farm. The tops of the trees will cover up valuable space that you could use to plant crops or place animals. One exception is if you plan on being a "Tree Farmer". One way of playing Farmville involves planting nothing but trees, no crops, no animals, just tree's. By filling the majority of your farm with only trees it is possible to pull in 100k a day.

Trees also offer a couple other benefits for you, first they never wither. This means you can easily walk away from your farm for as often as you like without worry about losing any money. The other noticeable bonus is that tree's have no animation* to them this will help your farm keep from lagging while playing.

For the Farmville player who wants it all, try to place a tree line along the top edges of your farm. This will keep them out of the middle, allowing you to maximize space while at the same time giving you all the bonuses of having tree's. Also worth mentioning, unless you are going for a specific look to your farm try to only use the highest grossing trees available. Here are the top 5 and bottom 5 trees, in terms of earnings potential.

HIGHEST GROSSING
  1. Gingko Tree - 130
  2. Mango - 130
  3. Olive - 112
  4. Passion Fruit - 93
  5. Lime - 75
LOWEST GROSSING
  1. Cherry - 18
  2. Yellow Maple - 25
  3. Apple - 28
  4. Plum - 30
  5. Tamarind - 35
Note about this list - Only permanent trees were included, limited time only items were not taken into consideration. This is also showing how much you earn from 1 tree and 1 harvest. If you take the time to harvest into consideration then an individual tree may go up or down. For instance the Olive tree has an hourly rate of approximately  19.48 while the Gingko tree has an hourly rate of 30.14, this assumes a 4x4 grid of trees (or 16).
 

*(for the most part, the Japanese Falling Blossom does have some animation but is ornamental with no harvest)


Animals



Animals can be a very lucrative way of earning gold and experience in Farmville, however they have a couple drawbacks that everyone should be aware of. Compared to trees, some animals are just not as rewarding. Most of the foals and stallions take up the same amount of space four tree's would. While some of the smaller animals take up the same amount of space, they produce half the amount of gold.

While you need to be careful about maximizing profit when placing animals another thing to keep in mind is lag. Each and every animal is animated in Farmville. This means the requirements to properly load and display your farm increase drastically when you add a lot of animals. For the most part each animation sequence has 4 individual pictures it needs to load. This means that while one tree uses one image, each type of animal uses 4.

If you are already starting to see some lag while playing Farmville you may want to keep this in mind while decorating your farm. Users with low end computer may choose to place one animal of each type to minimize the impact, while high end computer users may opt to build an entire horse ranch with thousands of animals on it.

One easy way to see how much of an impact a farm full of animals will cause is to simply look through your neighbors. Find a couple with tons of animals and try moving around, zooming in and out, going into full screen etc. This will give you a rough idea about how laggy your own farm will become as you add more animals.


Following the above format with tree's here are the lowest and highest grossing base animals available in the game.

HIGHEST PROFIT
  1. Belted Cow - 3,000
  2. Arapawa Goat - 1,200
  3. Saddle Back Pig - 1,000
  4. Dutch Rabbit -150
  5. Percheron Horse - 140
(The Snow Leapord sits at #4 with a harvest earning of 300, however it is iPhone only.)

LOWEST PROFIT
  1. Cow - 6
  2. Chicken - 8
  3. Long Horn/Brown/Groovy/Holstein Cows - 12
  4. Brown Chicken - 16
  5. Neapolitan/Pink/Simmental/Referee Cows - 18
Just like with the Trees list, this is only referencing how much gold is earned when harvesting a single animal. This is not showing a earnings per hour potential.

Buildings

Buildings in Farmville are some what of a tricky thing when talking about maximizing space, mostly because they are so big. For somethings like nurseries or stables they are a must. Once placed on the farm you can fill those types of buildings with animals that will greatly increase the earning potential available. On the other hand, some buildings like the Post Office or the School do nothing once placed, basically costing you gold in the long run. While they may look nice and help your farm look like the real deal, gameplay wise they do nothing for you.

It should be noted though that buildings often times offer the greatest experience gain in Farmville. For that reason you should place them on the farm, then sell them off.

Buildings that you want to keep around, such as the Nursery, Stables, Chicken Coupe and such need to be placed in such a way that they take up as little space as possible. This means either up against the top edges, or down just a little bit saving room for some trees behind them. One effective method is lining the top edges with a row or two of trees then placing your buildings up against them. Because a building can stick up farther than it sits it is possible to end up covering up valuable real estate if you place them anywhere but the edges.