Talk:Profitability/@comment-74.68.140.130-20120306052503/@comment-4102115-20120310065519

About 2-inches above your post. Or create your own chart / table - it is plain simple mathematics. User:Ezcry4t3d has even tabulated all the data you need into a spreadsheet so you don't even need to bother with any effort yourself.

But, bear in mind there will be an infinite raised to the power of infinity number of graphs depending on when during the yellow you collect the income. Just like there are an infininite possible number of profitability graphs for the green $ depending on many factors, and many of them are given on this page: whether you collect income on the green $ every time it turns green on the very instant it turns green, or whether you collect income once every 8 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, or 10mins, 30mins, 60 mins, or once every week or month. And every single one of those graphs will vary depending on whether you have no totems or oracles, or one of 16 different combinations of having 0, 1, 2 or 3 of either, and whether it has had 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 upgrades. And these infinite variations do not take into account the number of cell spaces needed for each structure or for the roads or energy sources...

Calculating income Profitability collecting on the yellow $ can be done taking into account all of the above infinite combinations, and raising that infinite number to the power of infinity. Since at least with the green dollar, once the green $ is indicated, the $ amount is fixed. About the only non-variable number. eg: When a Hot Dog Stand with 0 upgrades, 0 Totems and 0 Oracles hits green after 2:00mins, the $ collected is $35. That amount is constant. But the yellow $ is not constant. Take a Magnate Hotel or Health Center for example, after 16hrs48min of collecting, you get a yellow $ sign. But that $ amount is constantly changing second by second and never stops changing during the yellow $. It changes every second for the next 7hrs12mins, at which point it then turns green. That is 25,920 seconds of a changing $ amount. So with 16 different oracle/totem affects and 6 different upgrade leves, depending which second you hit the yellow $, that is 2.5Million different profitability amounts - for one structure, before you take into account your road efficiency, dead-space corner efficiency, and how many windmills, generators, solar plants, and nanos you have and what upgrade level each is at.

Of course, whilst we do have a graph of the maximum theoretical possibile returns per structure assuming 100% efficiency with 0 roads and 0 energy and collecting every second of every day, and also the maximum theoretical with 3 oracles and 3 totems, (and also various real-life scenarios), we could have I suppose a graph with the theoretical-minimum profitability of every structure of the assumption of hitting every structure at the instant of the yellow $ appearing at 70% of its collection time - with 0 upgrades, 0 totems and 0 oracles. But why? This would be a meaningless number. When maximum profitability is desired, what is the interest in finding a theoretical minimum based on hitting a yellow $? If you want to minimise profit, just let the $ sit there, change green and leave it sitting there, never collecting income from it ever, and have 0 income, 0 profit. If you want a structure to be even less profitable, build a road right around every one, surrounded by 30 plants and bushes and arrange them haphazardly.

The only times hitting the yellow $ is desirable are to: attain the yellow $ target Awards, achieve XP faster, or if you're about to go to sleep / work / school and not return for 8 hours, then it is generally more profitable to hit that yellow $ and quit than to have that yellow $ change to green and stay uncollected for up to 8 hours earning no more income during that time. But even given those only 3 circumstances where it is desirable to hit the yellow $, you are always trying to maximise something - maximise return by achieving Awards, maximise return by Levelling up quicker, or maximising profit by having a building collect income longer and sit on green less.