Profitability

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 profitablility 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.

The earnings are greatly impacted by the cost of repairs made to your structures. Each structure's Upgrade level has its own repair cost. On avarage there is ~7,15% chance of the structure to require a repair after you collected the structure's accumulated cash (inspect your repairs stat vs. income collection stat in your achievements). The rightmost six table columns display the hourly earnings influenced by the cost of repair. The income per hour after repair is calculated as:

income_per_hour = (14 * income - repaircosts) / (14 * income_hours + repair_hours)

Table of income per hour (NOT per maximum accumulation) (more data will be added when available)



Income per hour, repair costs included
The average probability that a structure must be repaired is 1:14. 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.

The graph shows that you will lose money with a villa. A villa generates an income of $ 7,000 (without upgrades), but a repair costs $ 130,000. (Can someone confirm that the repair costs of the villa are indeed that high, the villa is available in level 31, I am still in level 17. Or perhaps there is a different repair chance for a villa).

The graph also shows that it is not profitable to upgrade a Burger restaurant. Its highest hourly income is in its initial state. 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 to max upgrade 3, after this the income per hour is a little lower.

The blue bar shows the profit in the initial state, the other colors show the delta after each upgrade (the increase, or decrease in case of the Villa and Burger Restaurant).



NOTE: The first 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 first 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).

However - 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 $634.48/hour. But collect on the yellow $ as soon as it appears, you actually lose $-248.54 per hour.

The relative position of each building does not change, but just 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 $1836 per collection. That means you need to wait for 400 x green $s for the upgrade to pay for itself. No wait, that doesn't include the 20% dearer repair cost vs the 15% income increase, so that is actually 500 x 7hour green collection before it pays for the upgrade. Or 800 yellow collections.ie. After 9 months 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) = 7.15% = 0.0715 Repair Not Required Percentage (NR) = 92.85% = 0.9285 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 = (NR*Income*TB - RR*RepairCosts*OB) / (NR*IncomeHours + RR*RepairHours*OB) Income Per Hour = (0.9285 * Income * 1.3 - 0.0715 * RepairCosts * 0.7) / (0.9285 * IncomeHours + 0.0715 * RepairHours * 0.7)

For example the Luxury Cottage at upgrade level 5 will produce an after repairs income of $641/hr with no Totems, $1193/hr with 3 Totems of Prosperity, $1012/hr with 3 Oracles of Fortification, and $1570/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 $-117/hr with no Totems, $1508/hr with 3 Totems of Prosperity, $1561/hr with 3 Oracles of Fortification, and $3205/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: $-41/none, $522/Totems3, $536/Oracles3, $1101/Totems3+Oracles3]

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

First, I'll throw some huge, pretty charts at you. {Charts Updated July 4,2011} Details, for those that care, are below the charts.

With NO bonus buildings, and subtracting repair costs, the top 40 profit/hour/tile buildings are:



With 3 Totems of Prosperity and 3 Oracles of Fortification, and subtracting repair costs, the top 40 profit/hour/tile buildings are:



Additional information:

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

I do not have repair data for the new European Country House or the Bavarian Inn. If you have repair values for either of these buildings at any improvement level, please post the values or send them to me.

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 and if you prefer many $70 collections or few higher $ collections.

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 based on a fully upgraded solar power plant. Use of windmills, generators, 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 was gathered from a statistical analysis of the game, and various data sources online. You can view my spreadsheets HERE {This is my first time sharing a spreadsheet like this, hopefully it works as I expect and anyone can play with the values as they see fit.}

Spreadsheet directions! Read on or you probably won't get a usable graph out of the spreadsheet!


 * On the Bonuses Sheet, input the number of bonus buildings you have of each type. You can also adjust the weighting electricity adds to building sizes in the calculations. You can also add minutes to all collection times to help weight against short collection time buildings. (There are notes on the label cells that also explain these values)


 * On the Profit sheet, you must SORT the sheet so that the top 40 rows contain the data you want graphed. If you just want the buildings ranked in order of profit, choose "Data", "Sort sheet by column A, A -> Z" from the menu. (Be sure to wait a minute for the sheet to fully sort, it's a big sheet with lots of calculated values and references to the Bonuses sheet and is sometimes slow depending on Internet connections and Goggle's servers.) My favorite sort here is actually to select the entire sheet (click the square above the 1 and lef tof the A row/column) and use "Data", "Sort range...", check "Data has header row", select sort by "Improvement", select "Z _> A", hit "+ Add another sort option" which will add a rank sort by default, then hit the "Sort" button. This gives the top 39 buildings when fully improved on the chart.


 * Check out your custom Profitability Chart on it's own sheet!

Strategy

As a strategy, I suggest doing these 7 Awards all at the same time in the beginning of the game:

Build 15 hot dog stands simultaneously

Build 15 cabins simultaneously

Build 15 gift shops simultaneously

Collect Income 250k times

Repair 14k facilities

Hit the Yellow Buck 3000 times straight after it appeared

Hit the Green buck 2000 times straight after it appeared

Also, building 15 Ice Cream Shops and 20 Cottages can help move this along. Once you have gotten these awards, you can switch over to longer duration buildings that don't require so much babysiting, like Magnate Hotels and/or Perfume Shops.

'I do not have repair data for the new European Country House or the Bavarian Inn. If you have repair values for either of these buildings at any improvement level, please post the values or send them to me.'