Tips and Tricks

Easy money through awards that are easily collected in the beginning

Some awards can be very easily achieved in the beginning of the game. These awards will provide a newly starting Island with some valuable money, experience points and even piastres, and will only cost you some time in return. Easy awards include:

• 1-6: Build {number of} road sections. Roads are free to build and to demolish, so take your time to build and demolish as many as you like. Also, building roads can be done pretty fast by linking them together from one end of your Island to the other.
• 63-68: Spend in the game {number of} hours online. Just leave your game on at night to speed up this process.
• 94-100: Move {number of} facilities. Moving structures around is free. Trees and shrubs also count and are faster to move than structures.
• 113-118: Post photos on Facebook and Twitter. If you have Facebook and Twitter accounts, you can post your in-game snapshots to achieve these awards.
• 216-225: Post messages on Facebook and Twitter.  If you have Facebook and Twitter accounts, link the accounts to your island and each time you get an award the app will post another message toward receiving these awards.  You can also send messages from your sociality menu (the 3-people button) and then go to the Services tab and choose the "Invite friends" arrow to send 5 more messages per day.

Hit the Yellow/Green Buck awards

These awards are also fairly easy to achieve, but do require some investment other than time. The best way to get them is to build 15 Hot dog Stands (which you will get an award for doing anyway). You will need to wait and watch for the buck signs ($) to appear and click it as soon as it appears. If you are going for the Yellow Buck award, you only have to wait 1:24 to collect again, and it will take 2:00 for the Green Buck award. If you upgrade these Hot dog stands to level 5 early on, it will generate a nice amount of money while achieving these awards. Besides, it will also help a lot to get the repair awards and the tax collection awards.

You may also want to build 15 Cabins. This is an award in itself, but just like the Hot dog stand will speed up the achievement of other awards.

How to prevent unwanted in-app purchases

You may sometimes find it hard to come up with enough money of piastres to buy the structures you want. To acquire money and piastres faster there is an in-game possibility to buy game-money or piasters with real-life money. So be careful if you let children or other people play this game on your device. Here is an explanation of how to disable in-app purchases on your iPad.

Never miss the Pirate's Chest

This only works on the iOS version, since the application stays loaded and the game screen does not need to reload like on Android. When you are finished playing move the screen to see the dock and the location where the pirate chest should appear. Once you return to the game, start clicking where you know the Pirates Chest should be. It will activate it, even if your time limit has elapsed, and will restart the 5 hours until the next chest should appear.

Downgrading your game version

It is possible to downgrade your current game version. Search the web for 'paradise island <version number> .apk' to find the version you wish to install. But be careful; you should demolish structures that have been introduced after your desired version. If you fail to do that and still downgrade your game, it will not load anymore. You will need to upgrade your game again and demolish any newer structure.

Space saving strategy

Roads are only necessary for most structures to be placed, but once construction is underway they are no longer required. Demolish roads to pack in your buildings and maximize available space. Also, enjoy your island visitors try to find their way around without roads, sometimes walking all the way around along the fence like ants at a picnic just to get a cheeseburger!  Be careful using this technique during special events (i.e.- Easter, Christmas, Halloween, etc.).  If the roads are not connected from the dock to the administrative building during a special event, players have repeatedly reported not getting visitors with bubbles for the event.  Even on your friends' islands, not having roads connected has caused problems with pedestrians during these events.

Some structures do not even require roads to be placed. These include:

• Balloon Launch Platform
• Travel Tent
• Energy Unit generating structures
• Water structures (Springboard, 'Lightning' Catamaran, Water Slide, Pirate Ship)

If you click on the eye icon to change the view, you will see that these structures do not have the adjacent green squares (indicating where the structure can connect to a road) like other structures.

Demolishing

All structures can be demolished from within their pop up menu by pressing the 'Demolish' button and confirming. But it is also possible to demolish items by using the bulldozer. Some tips when using this last method:

• Zoom in when demolishing small things and roads to make life easier.
  
• Click the "eye" icon in the upper right of the screen to switch the viewing mode. This makes it so much easier to select the square you want. Useful when trying to demolish or move small items and items that are behind larger ones.
  
• Demolish multiple things at once. You can select multiple objects to delete instead of just one at a time, sometimes useful when going for certain awards. Click the bulldozer, start selecting whatever items you want to demolish, and when you go to hit the green check mark everything you had selected will be demolished at once.
• In case you accidentally selected something you did not wish to demolish, instead of hitting the red X to cancel everything, just hit the same thing you did not wish to demolish and it will unselect it. This is especially helpful when trying to demolish roads surrounding a structure where you accidentally fat fingered the structure as well.
• To instantly demolishing structures without using valuable piastres, proceed with demolishing it, open its menu and then hit the "Speed up on 50%" button twice. Note that this might be a costly procedure for high-end structures.
• A structure can be demolished when it is in need of repairs. If you were wanting to demolish a structure that happens to need repairing, just select the demolish buton in its menu instead of the repair button.
• Unfortunately there is no way to select an area of squares to be demolished. You will have to select each and every item separately, which can be a tedious task when demolishing long roads.
• Demolishing free gifts (such as hammocks) seems not to consume any money as of version 2.4.20. Since one person can gain a single free gift from each of his or her friends, you can save quite a lot of money when demolishing hammocks if you are trying to get demolishing rewards.

Known bugs & issues

The list of known bugs and issues is very long and different for every game version and operating system. But frequently heard bugs address the failure of registering certain awards. This means that the game does not notice your achieved award and as such you will not receive it. If you are certain that you have done everything needed to achieve an award but it has not registered, you know it is this bug. You can try upgrading or reinstalling your game, but this is no guarantee for success.

Also, many people experience the bug that the icon for the limited sales is not shown. The reason for this is not clear, but again the only advice is to upgrade or reinstall your game and hope for the best.

Winning strategy (all awards) without use of real money

First of all a short motiviation for this section: I played the game first time up to lvl 35 and got 140 awards, only to realize that without real money i could play another year to get "The great victory". "Oligarch" and "Restorer" were far out of reach and "Super Magnate" unreachable in acceptable time. So here follows a strategy which has in some points to be followed strictly, otherwise you will take real money or never (in acceptable time) reach "The great victory"

1. Do not spend a single piastre before you earned the "Super Magnate"-Award (400 piastres). Each piastre you spend earlier has to be earned a second time to achieve this award. As shown here you need 911 piastres to achieve the award. If you build a special facillity always when it is possible to do so, you spend 911 piastres but never reach a stock of 100. Which means you have to collect 1311 in total, which prolonges your game round about a half year.
2. Do not use the immediate execution function to anything which costs more than 1 piastre after having collected 400 (see 1). If you don't do so, you increase the total number of piastres needed. The "Meteor"-Award can be reached with 75 piastres at minimum, but only if you spend 1 piastre by piastre.
3. Follow strictly the above mentioned strategy for earning the green and yellow buck awards, not that it is impossible to reach them later without having 15 hot-dogs and 15 cabins, but if you don't have them from the beginning you have real difficulties to get the "Oligarch" and the "Restorer". Follow this behaviour: Always collect the cabins first, then the hot-dogs, now collect everything else. Normally when you finished collecting the rest, the hot-dogs and the cabins are ready for another collect. With each collection cycle, you get 30 more collections compared to not starting with cabins and hot-dogs. If you do that only 5 times a day, you have 150 more collections a day. On a year perspective this gets you 54750 additional collections and likewise the repairs needed.
4. Special tip for the helloween extra (which occured for me today! at lvl 13 in the second game). What you can easily reach is the Witch shop and the Guillotine, but only if you follow this advice: Only aim on the blue ghosts (which gives broom or candle) and that black devil (which gives broom or pumpkin). When no more of these two are left on the screen, visit an island of a friend and return. This makes a full group of undead reappear with new blue ghosts and black devils. Do so until you collect 66 brooms, which is time consuming, after that collect easily the missing "Bones" by targetting the undead. When you really have the time to play the 120 hours of this halloween event without a break, you might try to collect enough pumpkins for the Maya pyramide or the Haunted house by only targetting this devil using the above mentioned strategy. It might be possible to get the 132 pumkins for this two buildings and another 66 for the Devil's rollercoaster. For me with checking the game less than 10 times a day, it was impossible. I didn't reach the 66 pumpkins once.
5. If you don't have or don't want to spam your real facebook-account, create a dummy one, in order to collect each five days 2 instead of 1 piastres, same with twitter to collect 3 instead of 1. Look every day in the bottom right hand corner to see, if a green bubble anounces news on the blog. Often there a links to fb-pages, with a gift code which normally brings you 2 or more piastres.