Profitability

Income per hour without repair costs
This page covers the profitability of the structures in Paradise Island HD. All structures have different income in varying time spans, making it difficult to see their relative profitability at a glance.

Also, even when your Island's borders are extended all the way, you will not be able to fit all structures on it at their maximum number. So at some point you will need to decide which structure to build in your remaining available land. In the beginning of your game you might opt for quick money makers, whereas later you might want to build some slower cash cows.

Take a look at the table below for help with this decision. All income figures at their respective Upgrade level are converted to Income per Hour. The last column shows the Income per Hour per Tile, which are the best figures for comparison. If you have built one or more Totems of Prosperity, add 10% to these figures for every Totem you have. More of that in the next chapters.

Table of income per hour without repair costs



NOTE: The graph shows income per hour collecting income continuously. Once the green $ appears the building stops accumulating income, so if you leave the green $ sitting there, income per hour will drop. Note also that the graph holds true for collecting income at any time during the yellow $. ie. If you hit the Hot Dog yellow $ every 84seconds (1:24) which is the fastest you can hit it, you will collect $24to$25 x 43 times (give or take rounding) = $1050. Waiting for the green $ to appear but not linger, you'd collect $35 x 30 = $1050. (Ignoring repair costs and times, see next chapter).

Income per hour, repair costs included
The earnings are greatly impacted by the cost of repairs made to your structures. Each structure's Upgrade level has its own repair cost. With the repair costs and time taken into account, the profit figures dramaticly change, a structures with an apparently high income per hour can turn out to be one of the worst performers.

The user ParadiseAdi found, via reverse-engineering, the code used for the repair chance: function isBroken(Building b) { b.repair_counter++; var r = randomInt(randomInt(7,14),23); if (b.repair_counter > r) { b.needsRepair; b.repair_counter = 0; } }


 * isBroken is invoked after every collection (click on yellow/green buck) of the money
 * repair_counter counts collections until the building is broken which resets the counter
 * randomInt(a,b) returns an integer x: a <= x < b

This means the following:


 * In the first 7 collections after a build, repair or upgrade, you will never get a repair.


 * after that, the chance on a repair increases with each collection


 * if you survived 22 collection, you will get a repair at collection 23.

The long term chance to get a repair is 7.236%

The income per hour after repair is calculated as:

income_per_hour = (income - (p * repaircosts)) / (income_hours + (p * repair_hours))

with p = 0.07236

The repair costs differ per structure, but all repair costs increase with 20% for each Upgrade level. During the time a structure is being repaired, it does not generate any income.

Table of income per hour inclusive repair costs and time

The next graph shows that it is not profitable to upgrade a Burger restaurant. Its highest hourly income is in its initial state ($ 607, after upgrade 5 it is $ 217.). However, XP does increase at levels 2 and 4, which is important to note for such a low cooldown building (for most of the game XP is more important than money). Update a Firework store and a Villa to max upgrade 3, and a European Country house and Bavarian Inn to max upgrade 4, after this the income per hour is lower.



Take into account Repair costs and Repair rates, which are fixed regardless of collecting on the yellow or green dollar, and you find that collecting on the yellow dollar massively reduces your profit per hour. That is, your repair cost overhead is a much larger percentage of your taken income.

eg: The Burger Restaurant at Level 0 - collect on the green $ as soon as it changes green, you get $ 607 / hour. But collect on the yellow $ as soon as it appears, you actually lose $ -286 per hour.

So be aware that collecting income on the yellow will slide every bar graph down.

Other interesting graphs would be income per hour per cell space. Hot Dog stands, gift shops would shoot up higher, Golf Courses drop way down, and all the casinos, pyramids, etc drop several places.

The cost of building, staffing cost, generator cost and upgrade cost all need to be taken into account before earning a net profit. eg: A Bavarian Inn takes 150 power units and 65 employees to get off the ground, which costs about $1.5m in overhead costs before spending the $700,000 building cost.

And to get a pizza place from Level 4 to Level 5 costs $730,808 to upgrade for an extra $ 79 per collection. That means you need to wait for 9251 x green $s for the upgrade to pay for itself. After almost 11 years you have one upgrade level paid for. Then start paying off the admin staffing costs and generator costs. Then you can start earning an hourly profit.

Impact of Totems and Oracles on profitability
Totems and Oracles greatly impact the profitability of each structure by both increasing the profit per collection and reducing repair costs and duration. In general it is more of an advantage to purchase Totems of Prosperity as opposed to Oracles of Fortification; though some structures are exceptions to this rule.

The modified calculation for profitability is: Repair Required Percentage (RR) = 7.236% = 0.07236 Totem Bonus (TB) = 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 [zero, 1, 2, or 3 Totems] Oracle Bonus (OB) = 1.0, 0.9, 0.8, 0.7 [zero, 1, 2, or 3 Oracles] Income Per Hour = (Income*TB - RR*RepairCosts*OB) / (IncomeHours + RR*RepairHours*OB) Income Per Hour = (Income * 1.3 - 0.07236 * RepairCosts * 0.7) / (IncomeHours + 0.07236 * RepairHours * 0.7)

For example the Luxury Cottage at upgrade level 5 will produce an after repairs income of $1364/hr with no Totems, $1917/hr with 3 Totems of Prosperity, $1524/hr with 3 Oracles of Fortification, and $2083/hr with 3 of each Totems and Oracles.

A second example is the Burger Restaurant at upgrade level 5 will produce an after repairs income of $217/hr with no Totems, $1846/hr with 3 Totems of Prosperity, $1800/hr with 3 Oracles of Fortification, and $3446/hr with 3 of each Totems and Oracles.

It is important to keep in mind on the short duration collection structures such as the Burger Restaurant this assumes perfect collections on the green $, which is an unlikely 160 collections per day. A more conservative estimate of 54 collections per day (3 times per hour for 18 hours) would change the IncomeHours value from 0.15 to 0.44 and radically alter the profitability numbers [Burger Restaurant: $75/none, $638/Totems3, $618/Oracles3, $1183/Totems3+Oracles3]

Profit per Hour per Tile Minus Repairs
{Some comments that were here have been appropriately moved to the comments section below}

{Charts Updated July 26th, 2011 to include the Jewelry Store}

Details, for those that care, are below the charts.

With NO bonus buildings, and subtracting repair costs, the top profit/hour/tile buildings, including space for roads and power are:



'With 3 Totems of Prosperity and 3 Oracles of Fortification', and subtracting repair costs, the top profit/hour/tile buildings, including space for roads and power are:



'''New Chart! Top Profit/Hour/Tile (Including Road & Electric) Minus Repairs with 3 Totems and 3 Oracles Weighted bias for collection times! '''



Additional information:

Some values are ESTIMATES or were obtained from unverified online sources. Some values may change in newer game versions. PLEASE let me know if something needs corrections.

These assume you are collecting income as soon as the $ turns green. Obviously this is an unrealistic scenario, especially for buildings that have short collection times. It is impossible to properly weight for this in a spreadsheet, as it is an individual preference how often you check the game.

The numbers after the building name are the improvement level.

This assumes you have intelligently laid out your roads to use the least road possible, and are not "cheating" by deleting your roads after the buildings are placed.

The space used for power is estimated based on game experience. Differing combinations of windmills, generators, and/or the nano-generator will slightly change these values, however, even changing them by 50% has little effect on the rankings.

Without any of the bonus buildings, EVERY building makes a profit over the long term. If you don't believe it, write down how much money you have and stop collecting from all but the building you suspect to be unprofitable. After a few 100 collections, notice that you now have MORE money than you started with. {The Villa was unprofitable at some improvement levels when first added to the game, but this was corrected in a later game version.}

I have an extensive interactive Google Spreadsheet which calculates a huge amount of information about Paradise Island. This information is currently maintained by ezcry4t3d and Sir Awesome III. This information was gathered from a statistical analysis of the game, and various data sources online. You can view my spreadsheets HERE {Unfortunately, it appears you have to download the spreadsheet before you can adjust the variables to match your island, and there's no easy way that I see to just open your own copy in Google Docs to play with the values... But, at least you can see how we are calculating things if you are interested in the details.}