The way I read this, you sort of contradict yourself. I'm saying that imbalanced businesses don't make a difference that bitizens just randomly shop wherever. At first you say "that's because they do" and then you say "Your sales rate, however, is considerably slower at your imbalanced businesses." Here's what I have: Food: 8 Service: 17 Recreation: 8 Retail: 12 Creative: 8 For a total of 53 businesses. My SPM usually hover 900-1050. What are others with 53 shops getting as an SPM ?
oi when ever I zoom out I'm always wishing that if I get enough floors I'll see a man sitting on the moon fishing (dream works anyone?)
I don't contradict myself, you just don't seem to understand the difference between customer bitizens and visitor bitizens. The bitizens that actually "shop" at your businesses spawn on the floor automatically independent of ANYTHING other than demand and if something is in stock for them to buy. Overall, at 100% demand, it works out to an *average* of around 1 sale every 7 seconds. The lower the demand, the lower the rate of sales. The visitor bitizens, those that show up and ask to be ferried (and what I presumed you to be referring to when you said they seem to be going wherever at random) have nothing at all to do with sales or demand.
I understand the difference, I'm just saying I don't think demand makes a difference. I gave you my list of businesses and my SPM. Prove me wrong by showing that balanced businesses yield a higher SPM.
Well, that's not going to happen*, I'd have to reset my tower, twice, to do proper controlled experiments and, for what? To demonstrate that demand does have an effect because somebody doesn't want to accept what common sense tells them? Like the majority of things in this game, I expect it doesn't have that big of an effect, but I also can't imagine Nimblebit included it as a statistic that they've even increased the visibility of with the latest update if it had no effect at all. But if that's the position you want to take, have it at it, I just assumed you were unclear on the sales model and was trying to help. *Although, as fast as you can build in the beginning, I might just try with the iPad. My son just keeps resetting the data for his tower anyhow, so he'd never notice if dad decided to test some stuff
Refer back to my numbers. I have 17 service floors with a demand of 67%. I have 8 food floors with a demand of 100%. I just counted the bitizens on the food floors and the bitizens on 8 of the service floors. I actually had 1 more on the service floor.
I'd guess that's about right as I have 36 businesses which yeild around 700 SPM. Sometimes going to 750. I can't say there's much of a difference though. Only 4-5 days ago I had 6-7 of everything except food where I had 0. Read that demand could improve sales so the last 7 floors I've built have been food so my demand is all equal and not sure if there was much difference. Ah well.
Are VIPs completely random, or are they weighted towards certain ones appearing? In my last ten VIPs, eight or nine have been Real Estate. I'm not sure if I'm being unlucky or whether the appearance of the Real Estate VIP is supposed to be more common.
Your numbers don't do me any good. There's a lot of variables that are going into SPM: spread of stock types, demand, the fact that there 5 business types and with different demand levels between the types, etc.. Never mind that counting the bitizens is about as useful as guessing since they don't have an even spread. Even though I know the average item number sales at a given business never changes, I can still go into my tower at any time and find floors with 5 or 6 shoppers and floors that have no shoppers for over 10 seconds, because the sales formula isn't a smooth stream. To *prove* (as you challenged ), what I need is an actual test where the only variable is demand. So I'm using the iPad, going to build a new tower with 5 businesses & 3 residential floors. The first time I'm going to build 5 food businesses. Once I have all 5 fully staffed I'll wait until I can just stock the tier 3 product and wait until they're all ready to stock but otherwise closed. Stock all 5, wait 30 seconds, and then record SPM at 20 second intervals for 2 minutes. After that, delete four of the businesses and rebuild as balanced, 1 of each type, repeat the testing process. Run a statistical analysis on whether the hypothesis that demand affects SPM is true or not and post the results here. It'll probably take a few days, but at least it will clear up any doubt.
If I could figure out how to do Tiny Tower on my iPad without munging up my iPhone one because of the Gamecenter sync (i.e. is there a way to keep the iPad one from logging in to Gamecenter, even though I'm in Gamecenter on other games on it?), I would do something similar. Not because I don't trust you, Channum (your statistical analyses are awesome, I must say), but because I want to see for myself
I get to avoid that since the iPad is set up to my son's GC account. I'm just looking to put the nail in this one - the game's tips even tell you demand affects sales rate but evidently we have skeptics out there It's a simple enough thing to test so why not?
Yeah, I might just gank my wife's iPhone 3G for this, though my skin always crawls when I think about just how slow the thing runs. Clearly, the test would work best (and easiest to do) when it's just 3 residences, 5 businesses. No dream jobbers. Thoughts on arrangements to gather data for: 5 x food, all stocked 1 of each, all stocked 4 x food, 1 x retail, all stocked 4 x food, 1 x retail, only retail stocked 4 x food, 1 x retail, only one food stocked And by "stocked", I mean "item 1 only". I'd think item 1 would be a better choice than item 3, just for the purpose of being faster to stock and set up the next experiment.
You have to only use one tier of items or you're introducing a variable you cannot control for (once shoppers can pick between different priced items, there goes your ability to know you're testing for demand). I'm going to go with the 3 coin tier. That's irrelevant to the test. It's one variable you can disregard in either direction. This is overkill, you only need 2 test conditions: all food vs 1 each. You are testing the null hypothesis: Demand doesn't make a difference. If you can show SPM statistically vary significantly between those two scenarios, then the null hypothesis is false and Demand does make a difference. Doing any other combination doesn't actually test for any additional information. Now, if you're masochistic, you can always, once you've shown Demand has an effect, do additional testing to see if you can establish the magnitude of its effect, but that's irrelevant to Captain Bob's claim.
With wiki sites, one cannot be certain of accuracy, but the Tiny Tower Wiki gives these approximations with regard to demand and customer traffic. A floor of a lower demand category will draw less customer traffic than one of a higher category. For this reason, it is beneficial for the player to keep demand on all floor types high by building from each category evenly. The following table illustrates the approximate impact of various demand levels. Business Demand Customers / Minute 100% 10 90% 9 80% 8 70% 7 60% 6 50% 5
When does the game save? I can't seem to stop it...it always seems to be running. Please enlighten me. Thanks in advance, Dave
It saves when you exit or minimise the app, I assume (or it saves after every action?). You stop it like you stop any other app, not sure I understand what you're asking?
You can exit out of the game itself, but it will always update the various game events according to how much real-world time has passed when you return to it. The game cannot be "paused" or "stopped" (just like almost all games of this genre). But, like all iOS apps, it pretty much "saves" continually, and there is no need (or way) to do so explicitly.
Thanks for the replies, HLW and Tulse! I am new to the iPad and I'm still getting used to how the different apps work. Some of my games have dedicated save functions, and I wanted to make sure that I didn't build my tower only to find out it hadn't saved and I had to start over. Dave
