Stategies for Residential Improvements

Since the problem many players had last month with accessing their cities last month some interesting and new issues hava arisen. For me being out of contact with my city for three and half weeks caused all of my Residential Improvements to expire. No big deal as I had the funds and the time to replace all of them. But now I have a recurring issue: I have to replace or renew several hundred RI at the same time every few days. This is getting tiresome.

Has anyone come up with a practical strategy to handle this situation yet? How are you handling this yourself? Share your ideas.

 

I can't be bothered with the classic improvements at all - although now I look, it may sometimes be worth it.
I have 2800 unused classic just now, so they should last a while.

The best strategy I can think is to put them only on specific houses, or in a specific areas, so they are easy to find; and don't mix them up with longer lasting improvements. Going through every building trying to find them would be extremely tiresome.

 

Doing them by groups is definitely the most manageable way to do it as it rotates and distributes the load. It can definitely be annoying though, and a better way to manage RIs would be nice.

It's definitely worth using classic rent, revenue, and XP on short timer buildings with high rent and revenue where you can take advantage of the short duration. The better timer RIs are good for getting closer to upgrades and mastery faster on longer ones. I definitely wouldn't bother renewing them though; you could put that MM toward randomly getting epic ones.

 

@billyjim I assume you use the improvement tool to renew your RIs. As for strategies, I don't have one as I only deal in epics or use the rent timer reduction classics in order to maximise the drops in the remaining time

 

From the Crafty ol' Bird Book of Trix: I focus my RI use in a couple different ways, beginning with my special or high revenue buildings; these get the Epic RI's and Luxury RI's in order to maximize revenues (especially the EP and PP producers). Then I assign Fancy/Luxury as needed to the mid-range producers. Sure, I spend a lot of CCs when I renew these, but the return revenues are worth it. As for all the lower buildings I do not even bother putting any Classic RI's in them until I have accumulated a massive amount of them incidentally, and then I do it just to get rid of them; the exception being strategic use of such Classic RI's on EP producers or where I need to cut the rent timers, or for a Mastery Challenge. By focusing on the higher output buildings I save time and CCs (tending Classic would be a pain in the tailfeathers). Eventually I hope to get Epics in everything so I won't have to mess with it as much.

 

As above I use the classics in the 5 and 15 minute buildings easy to keep the tomatoes up to them.
I do use emergency buildings and all of my short time buildings have students. What I have noticed If I have a lot of RI's in storage When I cash in the medals from emergencies I tend to get more RI's So I place them all as I get them and I tend to get more resources mm crap decos etc. When I first cash in medals I tend to get 2 or 3 RI's but once place and next few cash ins I tend to maybe get 10-20% when I have RI's in storage I seem to get 35-50% RI's
Can only remember getting only 1 epic from medals. And can only recall 2 or 3 epics from the 7500cc purchase.

Just my observations may not work on all servers.

 

Nice idea but I refuse to believe that it has any effect (in a well balanced game the opposite might be the case but ...).

You're just not spending enough . I blew through >500k CCs last night, the epics do not arrive as often as they used to but still 1 in 20 maybe.

Good tips ITT, I am only just finding my way through the RI minefield.

 

Like billyjim, I too lost a bunch of RI's during the three weeks we were not able to play. Luckily, I bought the Hydropower Dam in the mountains before the server problems and had plenty of power and never dropped below the very high energy rating. I also had all of my decorations out and that kept my mood loss so that it never dropped below the excellent level. Because I am in this "excellent" position, I don't need the RI's, I use them as boosters. The mood loss and power loss ones are pretty useless to me right now (I am sure in the future I may need them because I am only on Level 30, but not for quite awhile). I put them in the bigger and medium sized buildings just because it drops the amount I use and then they don't go to waste. I suggest anyone would really benefit by buying into the mountains and getting that Hydropower Dam. Put out every decoration you have in all your empty spots (if you have empty spots, I have plenty). I have a lot of empty land that I bought in every neighborhood. I am sure I do what most people do and buy my way to something that I want; i.e., I bought a path of land at the beach to the Fishery so I could supply fish to my Floating Market. I bought a strip of land to get to the Hydropower Dam, etc. When I bought the Hydropower Dam I did not remove any of my power plants, windmills, etc. I like to play without worrying and calculating if I need to up my mood or power. It is more relaxing for me and more fun. I also utilize the RI's a lot like Geflin does. All my Epic ones go into my high rises or high producers. Sometimes a smaller house can be just as good a producer as a high rise because it is a specialty house that I won somehow. When using Epic RI's, you have to be a careful planner because once they are in, they are in for good. I am not big into the events, I have done most of them in the past and they are now just boring. I don't need 5 Lover's Arches for example. I like having a few of the really great decorations like the Dilapidated Chapel and the Skate Park. Yes, they take up four spaces each, but boy they are worth 100 and 96 happiness, respectively. Also, I am a sucker for pretty flowers. I hate those really bushy shrubs lol. I lined them up in front of some of my manufacturing facilities. The pine trees are good for hiding ugly power plants. Well, I digress... I just wish there were different prizes for the old events. I am sure they could come up with something like a cool a Paul Bunyan type statue for the lumber event, or a really cool tree with a heart carved into it for the Valentine's event.