Thursday, June 28, 2012

Collecting Gold: Are you Crazy or Lazy?

When you first start using the Striiv, and you see the gold coin on the lemur, you will probably jump into Myland and collect the gold right away.  After playing a few weeks, however, you may not want to be collecting gold every 8 minutes.

So when deciding what to plant, keep in mind how often you will check your Striiv and collect gold.  A Flowering Bush, for example, generates 120 gold every 30 minutes.  So in theory, if you checked every 30 minutes and never slept, you could get 5,760 gold in a day.  Impossible.  But if you are a Crazy gold collector you might catch it on average every 40 minutes for 14 hours in a day, for around 2,500 a day.  If you're a Lazy gold collector, and you check on average every 80 minutes for 12 hours a day, you're getting 1,080 gold a day.  Obviously a lazy gold collector should not be planting flowering bushes when there are better options.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Planting MyLand: Consider Lot Size


Is a plant that pays $2,000 every 10 hours better or worse than a plant that pays $10,000 every 12 hours?  The answer is:  it depends.   Why isn't as simple as "bigger is better?"  It's because plants and buildings are different sizes.  There are a limited number of spots where you can plant things;  I call them lots.  The things you can build in MyLand come in four different sizes:

1:  the smallest plants require only one lot.  Therefore can grow many of them.
4:  the next smallest require four lots, in a diamond shape.
7:  the larger plants take up seven lots, a hexagon around a center lot.
19:  the two largest things you can build (acropolis and fairy forest) require 19 lots.

So... given limited land... a 1-lot plant that pays $2,000 every 10 hours is much better than a 19-lot plant that pays $10,000 every 12 hours, because you can put 19 1-lot plants on the same land.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Which are the Best Striiv Challenges?

There are three categories of challenges: Easy (bronze), Medium (silver), and Hard (gold).  You can do a challenge either by waiting until they pop up, or spinning for them.  If you wait until they pop up, their payoff is triple the payoff if you spin.  Each day you can do 8 easy, 4 medium, and 4 hard challenges.

So which ones pay off the most energy points?   It's not necessarily the most difficult ones; the payoffs seem somewhat arbitrary.   Let's take a look at each category.

Easy:  The highest payoffs you can get are from the pop-up challenges:  Climb 25 Stairs for 12,000 energy, or Climb 15 Stairs for 7,200 energy.  You could keep turning off the Striiv and turning it back on hoping one of these will pop up.  If you spin for easy the top payoffs are Run 250 Steps for 5,000 energy or Climb 25 Stairs for 4,000.  So I ignore any pop-up easy challenge that is less than 3,000 points, knowing that I can spin for something better.

Medium:  The highest medium payoffs from spinning are all running challenges.  By the way, running challenges never pop-up so don't expect them.  You can do the Hit (+650) Running in 10 for 7,500 energy or Run 500 Steps for 6,000 energy.  If you are not a runner, you can spin for Do 7 min of activity for 3,000 energy, or Reach (+60) Stairs for 3,000 energy.  These two challenges will pop up at triple value, so you can get up to 9,000 energy for a medium challenge.

Hard:  If you spin, the best hard challenge is Run 5000 steps for 13,200.  However, unless you run more than 10 miles a day it's not really worth it.  Instead, be happy with either Reach (+1800) Steps in 15 for 12,000 or Do 15 min of activity for 12,000.  The theoritical high for a pop-up hard challenge is 36,000, but I've never seen it.  I have seen 18,000 for Reach (+180) Stairs.... that's a lot of stairs!

Want a simple rule?  Accept any pop-up that offers more than 5000 energy.  Towards the end of the day you may have to lower that minimum, or spin, to get them all done.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

What's New in Striiv Release 1.2.2

If you synched your Striiv this week you may have noticed that it "learned new things."  I didn't see release notes anywhere on the Striiv site, but this is what I've noticed:

1.  Longer races:  the number of step races has increased from 3 to 5, with the longest race now 2000 steps.  The number of stair races has increased from 3 to 6, with the highest race now 500 stairs.  The Lady Liberty race payoff has increased from 19,200 to 25,500, so now it is better than the Hotel race in terms of payoff per stair.

2.  Harder to earn donations:  the amount of energy required to earn a donation has increased.  I believe that for the most part it returned to the values that were in version 1.1.  (The values were lowered in 1.2.)  Most notably the "bonus" energy does not pay off as well.

The downside of the longer races is that less bonus is applied to donations.... I'll explain why in a future post.

Keep Striiving!