There are three good reasons to buy properties.
- Income. Cash helps with many facets of the game. I like to buy properties that have a payback within 60 days as income properties.
- Skills. Some properties will increase the skills of your toon or your LT's.
- Class coins. I'm a big fan of the dojo, because I love the boost in CC's.
There is a property that doesn't impact any of the above - the safe house. Still you gotta buy 'em. I try to plan to get a safehouse when the amount of money it holds is 10 times my hourly property income. This is just the first example of a class of properties that you will need to buy, but the reasons for it aren't as easy to justify as the others. I get those when I have to, as late as possible.
Like everything else in the game, I use a spreadsheet to plan property acquisition, and to track my progress on my plan. Here are some suggestions that you might use in your plan.
THE FIRST 30 PROPERTIES
- Tier 1: the "less than three days paybacks." These are the first 8 restaurants. They cost $10,000, plus an additional $1,000 for each level after the first one. They each produce $250 per hour of income, and only take half an hour to build. So you spend 10k, 11k, 12k, etc up to 17k, a total outlay of $108,000, to achieve a return of $2,000 per hour in income.
- The layer of icing between Tiers 1 and 2 is the first safehouse upgrade. I wanna say it's free, and will protect up to $40,000 in undeposited funds. It will cost you an hour of waiting. So, until your hourly income exceeds $4,000, you're okay with this level.
- Tier 2: "safehouse 1." In this tier, you will buy Restaurants 9-10, and Condo's 1-3. That will take your income to $4,000.
- Then you need to save a bit, and sped $120k on Safehouse 2, which will protect your income up to $80,000 an hour.
- The next tier is Hospital 1, Condo 4, Hospital 2, Condo 5-6.
- Safehouse 3, costs $240,000, protects $150,000.
- Acquire properties with the biggest cash return for the money you put in. If it looks like we're just randomly jumping around from Hospital to Condo to Clubs, that's the reason. Condo 7, Hospital 4, Condo 8, Hospital 5, Night Club 1, Condo 9, Hospital 6, and Condo 10. By this point, you'll be making almost $15,000 per hour in income.
THE NEXT 30 PROPERTIES
The next 30 properties are a mix of Night Clubs, Hospitals, Construction Companies, Mansions, and a Casino. I promote the construction companies ahead of where their calculated return puts them, becuase they build faster. Mansions take 24 hours and Casinos take 48. Construction companies take 1. Getting a $1,000 hourly income on $1.5 million isn't a great return, but since it shortens the build times for the longer properties, and since it is $1,000 an hour after all, I push them up a little bit. Note: you must have the
Downtown district open to build a Casino. The first casino puts you over $100,000 per hour, a fine milestone for your first 60 properties.
You have a choice for the next 30 properties. I play to maximize property income, but some players might prefer to strengthen their LT's sooner. That means you are going to want to build the Personal Armory and the Boxing Gym. They start at $10 million, and go up a mil per level, for ten of them. Each one adds one attack or defense to each of your LT's. That's a big boost in boss fights, and it's a nice boost in EvE, especially if you are a leveling build. Adding 10 attack and 10 defense to each of your seated LT's give you a nice boost in empire fights. You must have the Westside District open before you can build Armories and Gyms.
One cool thing is that these additions to LT powers are factored into the seat bonuses. So, if you add 5 attack to your LT's, and you put an LT in the assassin seat to double their attack, the LT bonus is doubled too. For example, if you have a 1* Epic with 60 attack in the assassin seat, and add 5 personal armories, they will have 60+5 attack, and their bonus will be 65 more points for being in the Assassin seat. It will display on the LT page as Attack 60 bonus +70. I do these after finishing the first level of Fortress jobs, but some players will want to do them sooner, like ... here.
Another possibility for the 60-90 property approach is to start on Fortresses. I like to wait on this until I get the property income above $200,000 per hour. These properties cost a lot, and I'm a patient man.
The 90-120 properties include all ten of the real estate agencies, which take an hour, yield $1,000, and lower the cost of other properties by 10%; the rest of the casinos and construction companies, and the last three begin a new era: The first Fortress, Dojo, and the 11th restaurant. Note: You must have the Meat Packing district open to build Real Estate offices.
THE FORTRESS PROPERTIES
You can approach the fortress properties two ways.
- Rush the Dojos. In this approach, you build the fortresses and the dojos as fast as you can. The game doesn't allow you to build them one after the other. The requirements for each Fortress are a different property from the previous level. You can skip about a third of these if you want to rush to dojo 10.
- A balanced approach, between Fortress job development and more property development. In this approach, I do all of the Level 1 Fortress properties (Fortress, Dojo, Bio Lab, Airport, Space Program, Steel Factory, War Factory, Defense Facility, Stock Market), then do the Level 2 Fortress and Dojo. That gets me a 10% boost in Cc's, and a 1% boost in Attack, Defense, Energy, Stamina, Health, and property income.
Some notes about fortress properties. These come after your first 60 (or 90) properties, so I'll be brief about them until I can devote a full post to them.
- Fortress 1 requires a Level 6 safehouse. That's the one that costs $7 mil and protects 1.25 mil.
- Building a Fortress allows you to build another Restaurant, Condo, Night Club, Casino, and Caribbean Island. The first four are terrific sources of cash, and at this point I do 11th and 12th properties from Restaurant to Casino, and build the first four Caribbean Islands. That gets me up over 200,000 income per hour.
- The first fortress takes 24 hours. After that they take another 24 hours for each level. So, the second one is 48 hours, the third one is 72, and so on. Dojos are the same way. This isn't all bad. Since they cost an arm and a leg, it takes a while to save up for them.
- Then I build the Armories and Gyms. That boosts my LT's, gets me another 20,000 in hourly income, and they only take an hour each. After waiting several days on a fortress and Dojob, a one-hour property is like a vacation.
- After that, I alternate building a level of Fortress properties with a level or income properties, but I don't build the Islands after level 7. The cost and return are so bad that I just push them out until all of the fortress properties are done.
- Building the fortress properties through level 10 will add 10% to your energy and Stamina. Some LSI players look at the 2000 energy refill limit, and the 1000 stamina refill limit, and only build these skills to 1818 and 909 respectively, before turning to Attack and defense. Those players are dying to get stronger, and the fortress properties give them a chance to get a max refill and perhaps get their toon stronger than Mia at the same time.
The sequence for building the fortress properties, and the requirements for each level, are complicated enough to justify a post devoted to the topic some other time. Beginners won't be building Fortresses very early.
