The Use Of Deadbeat Neighbors

I am going to share some insight here on what I do with all of my deadbeat neighbors. You know the ones, don’t play anymore, don’t share and don’t help with requests and so on. You all know who you are. LOL. I know a lot of players just cut them off clean because they think they are no good to you. I have news for you. That is wrong.  The max cap on neighbors is 300. I am right about at that mark. Only once in a while do I delete these neighbors and that is only to make room for new neighbors…

Keeping the ones that do not play make it easier for you to whip through certain goals and or quests. We all know how long it takes to visit your neighbors. It takes me around a week to do so. For the most part the ones that do not play are on the lower levels. What I do is go directly to those levels. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. I go straight there. The most recent goal was to visit 25 neighbors. I did so in about 15 minutes…

As soon as you log into the “deadbeats” city, collect your reward of energy and go directly to the next city. Since they do not play there is no sense in collecting, businesses, housing or crops, unless of course you need to for a goal or whatever. Just whip through each one until your goal is complete. Now when you get back to your city not only is your goal completed quickly but also you now have a bunch more energy…

So I say “keep some deadbeats around” it will make your CityVille life a bit easier in the long run, not to mention quite a few of these players will still help with requests even though they may not play in their own city…

As Always Thanks For Stopping By And Comments &Tips Are Always Welcome

John

The Governator of Highlands Beach
Remember Energy Rules!

Halloween Photo Submission

Here is a pic of a Halloween photo contest submission by one of my friends & neighbors, Lee Gitly.

He submitted this to CityVille for the contest. Below is one more bonus picture.

Click on the photo for larger viewing experience.

As Always Thanks For Stopping By

John

The Governator of Highlands Beach
Remember Energy Rules!

The Zoo Trick

Ok so many of you already know this trick. For those of you who do not, you are going to like it. Many of my friends and neighbors are always complaining about not having enough room to build in their cities. Rather than explain it to each and every one of them, I decided to do a post here instead. A lot of you do not realize there are more expansions that can be had. All of which are off screen and that is where the zoo trick comes in…

Take any one of your zoo enclosures and stick it next to the very end of one of your current expansions. Click on “see zoo”. Once you do that, the screen will get bigger and you can now see land that is off screen. This is one of CityVille’s little untold secrets. NOTE: be careful when you move your zoo enclosure by the end of the screen. You do not want the enclosure to get lost on the off screen expansion. Not that big of a deal as you can move another enclosure over to get it out but it can be more time consuming. You can now buy and place expansions all over the place for storage…

Now onto the fun stuff. Start looking around your city for all of the redundant and same items that you have rows and rows of. Examples: 10 capitals, 35 storage units, barns and the like. Ugly, ugly, ugly, do we really need that many capitals? One should do right? Personally I keep one of each of my storage units, silo’s barns for aesthetic purposes only. Do you really need all of your crop master signs taking up an expansion? Who you trying to impress? LOL. I am a crop master in almost all crops but not one is in my city. Players really don’t care and you are taking up valuable room which you could have a really nice park instead. How about all of those corporate buildings? Wasting space unless you are using them for bonus payouts (very little) by surrounding them with your businesses…

Take it however you want but with a bit more room you can let your creativity flow a bit more. I think that is one of the reasons CityVille came up with the neighborhood idea. You can get rid of all those rows and rows of the same housing. Since I have been upgrading my city I don’t really have a use for the neighborhoods myself since I have actually been deleting population and have been using high pop housing…

Hope this helps my peeps…

As Always Thanks For Stopping By

John

The "Governator" of Highlands Beach

Remember Energy Rules!

PS – Photo Complements of Lee Gitly
Click on photo for larger view...

Wanna Rock Your Mall?

Your mall can be very rewarding if used properly. Most of us have used it for storing junk businesses that are an eye-sore in our cities. I have started using it to my advantage. Personally I do not want rows and rows of the same businesses in my city just to rock coins. It looks like crap and isn’t how a real city is or should be...

I have been experimenting with it and here is what I have come up with. Instead of putting worthless items in the mall I started using high dollar payout businesses. The skate shop is what I used in my experiment. The skate shop pays out $928 with 175 goods needed. $928 x 20 (Level 5 mall) equals $18,560. Add the 25% payout for level 5 and you have $23,200. Not bad right?

Here is the bonus payouts per floor completed:

Level one: 5%
Level two: 10%
Level three: 15%
Level four:  20%
Level five: 25%

Of course these numbers are totals as you get to higher floors. You can also mix and match depending on how much goods you have in storage on a regular basis. Right now you can use limited time items for even bigger payouts. At the time of this writing there were two very nice ones. The Hades grill pays out $999 with 165 goods and the Greek Carpenter shop pays out a whopping $1670 with 310 goods. Currently I am building five of the carpenter shops to go in my mall. Think about that. If you did all carpenter shops you would get a total of $41,750 which includes the level 5 bonus payout of 25%. Not bad...

When they came out with the second mall I was like, “really” do I even have room for it? Not thrilled about it but I plan to keep it a level one mall since it does like kind of cool. Basically like a mini mall or strip mall. This is what we have here in the states all over the place…

Lastly, here is a tip from one of my neighbors, Rob Hood (How cool is that name). I haven’t tried this yet but might be worth the time. In a group post he talks about putting as many businesses around the hotels as possible since it will fill your hotels for fast collection. He has around 14 businesses around them. So what if we put a mall filled with high end businesses around one of the hotels. In my opinion you could collect mad coins by doing so. Something new to try…

As Always Thanks For Stopping By

John

The Governator of Highlands Beach

Remember Energy Rules!

Browsers, Your Computer, CityVille & Flash Gaming

Ok, first off I know I haven’t written anything for awhile so I apologize for that. A lot of you will not be pleased with some of what I have to say about this subject. Hopefully by the end of this article you will have a better understanding of what to expect, especially CityVille. Before I start getting bombed with emails stating it works fine for them. I am talking about the majority of players, not the minority. Everything stated in my blog is based on my personal game play…

Now that is out of the way, let’s move on. Below is the list of browsers I have tried over the past 6 months of game play.

Firefox
Internet Explorer

Google Chrome

Apple Safari

Opera

K-Meleon

Each one has their own issues from blank screens, freeze ups during game play, to not loading at all. The two that work the best are: Google Chrome & Apple Safari. Both are free downloads. The reason they work the best is because they are 100% “Flash” based. In fact the development team uses Chrome for all of their work. What does that mean to us? Maybe we should do the same? What is the old saying? When in Rome? Do as the Romans. We also have to keep in mind that flash gaming is still relatively new. Think about how difficult it is to keep live games in line. There is always going to be bugs from time to time…

Keep in mind that 75-80% of the time the issues lie within our computers. Is Zynga perfect? Absolutely not! We have been dealing with a couple specific bugs for a few months now. Mainly not being able to visit neighbors, accept gifts, or send for that matter. That was a big bug and still is affecting players but not on such a big scale. Smaller bugs were fixed within a few days, like the bridge building issue. There also can be other factors such as, slow internet speeds, which I have been dealing with lately…

I know how frustrating this game can be and I have cursed plenty of times at it but I also do the same for my stupid computer when it starts acting up. Also make sure you have the latest versions of Chrome or Safari. Chrome will update flash by itself when a new version comes out provided you have the latest version of Chrome…

Watch for errors that are common and will never, ever change in this environment. What I am talking about is server errors. You know the ones. The dreaded “oops” or “enhancing”. When you get those constantly the servers are either being worked on or have very heavy worldwide play going on at the same time. As of this writing there are approximately 19 million players of CityVille. Fridays seem to be Zynga’s favorite time to bring out new items and that will bog the servers down. At other times they could be working on fixes which will also shut down servers. I have played very late at night before and just flew thru the game playing it…

So which browser should I use? Chrome or Safari. I say, try Chrome first because that is what the team uses to build the game. Give it a couple weeks of game play and most likely a lot of your issues will go away. If you computer isn’t handling Chrome, make sure it is the latest version. If it still isn’t rocking by then, switch to Safari which is a bit slower but much more stable with older systems that can’t handle the speeds of Chrome. Also if your system is older, say 5 years or more, make sure your do not have a ton of programs running on it. That will ultimately make your gaming experience suck…

Make sure to try it out for at least one week so you can give yourself a good evaluation. Not just one or two times and say it doesn’t work. Remember this is what they use and when I say they, I mean the developers of the game, who by the way are all over the world...

 Well I sure hope this helps everyone. At least give you a better understanding of what to expect. Feel free to leave comments.

As Always Thanks For Stopping By

John

The Governator of Highlands Beach

Remember Energy Rules!

PS – you can download the latest versions for free at my favorite website
www.filehippo.com

Cruise Boulevard

Just thought everyone would get a kick out of seeing this. I know many of you have already seen ships cruising up and down the street but how about a cruise ship going down main street? Click on the photo for blown up version...

 

As Always Thanks For Stopping By

John

Mayor of Highlands Beach

Remember Energy Rules!

Energy & Permits Updated

 Since my last post on this subject I have now found out that there is now a cap on how long you can leave requests in limbo like we have. The time frame is now two weeks according to Zynga. So there it is City Villers. I personally have been having issues with accepting any gifts at all for that matter and now that I have cleared out the 200 that I had stored, hopefully this will now be fixed. If not then I have to get a hold of Zynga AGAIN to see if they can fix it.

Anyone need their customer service email, here it is:

support@zynga.com

As Always Thanks For Stopping By

John

Mayor of Highlands Beach

Remember Energy Rules!

Holding & Sending Energy & Permits

Since the energy change in our inventory, it seems like too many people are complaining about getting too many energies and permits sent to them. Neighbors these two items are the most needed things you will ever use in CityVille. As far as robotic arms, uniforms and other worthless items, DO NOT send them to your neighbors. They are worthless unless you need to handle a goal, in which case you simply ask your neighbors for help. Our neighbors are just as willing to help you as you are to them. Remember one of my posts “Love Thy Neighbor”….

Now onto energy and permit storage. We all know how it is when you log in to CV. The screen pops up with gifts given to you along with factory and crew invites. The items that have been sent to you give you 3 choices: 1 – accept the gift, 2 – ignore the gift or 3 – (The unknown type) DO NOT DO ANYTHING. You can leave it in limbo pretty much forever I am guessing at this point. In our groups we have it noted that it has been well over one month and the items are still sitting there. Basically that means you have extra storage just sitting there. Who knows when Zynga will screw us and change it, but for now…

Now, back to the items at hand. Good neighbors are always going to help you out. Mystery gifts every now and again are very cool as well. More times than not I receive something off of my wish list which is always helpful and then sometimes you get 2 pigs. (Not always gonna be great) I have also received many coins such as 1000 & 3000 counts. As Borat would say “Very nice”…

The following is my personal rule of thumb. I rotate the three, 3+ Energy, Permits & Mystery Gifts. But that is just me…

As Always Thanks For Reading... 

John

Mayor of Highlands Beach

Remember Energy Rules!

Sending Multiple Items From The Wishlist

Ok as we all know there are always game glitches in video games. mostly the online variety. Take advantage of this one while you can before it is fixed.

This is all about sending gifts from your neighbors wishlist. When you are looking at your neighbors wishlist it will have the icon of what they need. Under that icon it says "Send". Right click you mouse and choose "open in new tab". Do that as many times as needed and as fast as you can. You will notice each new tab takes you to the start page of the game. You will see it on each tab that the item was sent and your neighbor will have that many in their inventory.

Who knows how long this will last so take advantage, lord know they have done that to us...

John

Mayor of Highlands Beach

Remember Energy Rules!

Understanding "Beta"

When you first log into CityVille you will see the logo “CITYVILLE” in big letters and then in very tiny print next to it “Beta”.  This is what developers call new software before its official release. During this phase there can be many problems such as the ones we are facing. It frustrates everyone who plays but if you know it is going on, maybe we can understand and chill out a little.

During the beta phase developers are always changing things around to see what works best. This is the time to get rid of all the bugs in the game. Such as, game freezes, not getting in, visiting neighbors and my favorite of all, work for 30 minutes just so it can tell you “oops we cannot save, please refresh”. All of your work is gone.

Remember we are all test users of this game right now, so we are all the guinea pigs. Once the game is in official release, these issues will be resolved, they will have new servers to handle all of the play and we should have no more problems. Keyword is “should”.

I know some of you will still not be happy with this but at the very least you now have an understanding as to why we are having issues.

Hope this helps…

John

Mayor of Highlands Beach

Remember Energy Rules!

PS Don’t forget to send me your city pix and I will post them in the pix section!