The Friends Tavern is a great way to get some cool boosts to help you with your city along the way, be it for attack power, defense power, or even shielding from attacks; among other great things. Visiting taverns means a chance at silver and sometimes FPs, which are definitely desirable. However, in order to have full access to this, you need a tavern that is fully upgraded. There are many ways to go about this, but once you break down the math there’s definitely a fastest way to do it, and this is the ticket.
Now, if you listen to most, they will say that the first thing you need to get is a tablecloth, because that way people are motivated to sit in your tavern because they might earn a FP. If anyone actually cares about your city growth and development being streamlined though, they will understand when you unlock the tray first, and then the floor, before you do the tablecloth. It’s simply more efficient to boost your silver income before anything else. Besides honestly, it won’t take that long to get a tablecloth so your friends can have a little patience with you while you do things the smart way.
There are four things you can upgrade in the tavern:
- Number of Chairs (and table size): The more chairs you have, the more silver you get. Also, as you upgrade table size to get more chairs, the amount of silver each chair produces goes up.
- Tray: The tray adds a percentage of extra silver to every collection, based on what level is unlocked.
- Floor: The floor always has the same percentage chance of what you might randomly collect in silver from visiting a tavern, but the higher you level it, the more silver you get in that random collection.
- Tablecloth: The tablecloth gives a chance at your visitors receiving 1FP when they sit at your tavern. The higher the level of the tablecloth, the higher that percentage chance is.
For this strategy to work most efficiently, your upgrade order (excluding chairs) will be tray first, then floor, and finally tablecloth. The tray gives you guaranteed extra silver, the floor offers a chance at extra silver, and the tablecloth is just a nice gesture to your guests. So it makes sense to increase your income, to maximize your potential to do more upgrades.
You’ll also want to make sure you add as many people to your friends list as you can, and visit as many taverns as you can, so that you can get a few full collections each day. A full collection is when you collect your tavern silver only after all the seats are filled.
Based on the math, it will take no more than 277 full collections to max out your tavern. Here are the steps:
- Unlock the fourth and fifth chairs. [Takes 5 full collections]
- Unlock level one of your Tray, Floor, and Tablecloth; each one costs 1,000 silver. [Takes 12 full collections]
- Unlock the sixth chair. [Takes 3 full collections]
- Unlock level two of your Tray, Floor, and Tablecloth; each one costs 2,000 silver. [Takes 18 full collections]
- Unlock the seventh and eighth chairs. [Takes 10 full collections]
- Unlock level three of your Tray, Floor, and Tablecloth; each one costs 4,000 silver [Takes 24 full collections]
- Unlock the ninth and tenth chairs. [Takes 13 full collections]
- Unlock level four of your Tray, Floor, and Tablecloth; each one costs 8,000 silver [Takes 36 full collections]
- Unlock level five of your Tray, Floor, and Tablecloth; each one costs 16,000 silver [Takes 69 full collections]
- Unlock chairs until you max out your table. [Takes 87 full collections]
Your number of actual collections needed is going to vary a bit depending on how lucky you are obtaining silver from visiting other taverns, and on if you chose to spend any tavern silver for boosts before you have maxed your tavern out. If you spend no silver on boosts, it will take you 277 full collections max. If you get lucky with silver from visiting and don’t use boosts, it will take less than 277. And if you use boosts, regardless of if you earn silver from visiting, it will take more than 277 collections.
The timing of it all will ultimately depend on how often you can pop in to kick out the drunks that have filled all your seats, and let in some fresh, sober folks to fill the chairs again. The more often you can do this, the faster it will go.
And thankfully, once you get that first tablecloth down (which doesn’t take long, I can honestly say I did it within three days of starting a city), no one will complain about visiting your tavern. 😉
The way that you have described this actually takes 285 full collections. That is even with making sure that the Tray is the first of the accessory upgrades in order to get the additional silver. If you fully upgrade your table/chairs and then max your tray, then max your tablecloth, finally the floor it will take only 213 full collections.
I can see some of the logic used here but as a friend, I expect a friend to be a friend. For this reason, I can see why I might want to be tolerant if my friend levels his tray first but a true friend will level his floor first, then tray showing that he expects to do his share of the work before expecting you to do yours. Then, for as long as a table or chair upgrade cost less than the next floor upgrade, he should provide more chances for his friends to visit. I personally don’t upgrade the tray until last because it’s just rude to demand that your friends do more than they already do. My pattern is floor, seating, tablecloth in that order so as to communicate what is important to me in my friendships.
Which is fine, it just takes longer. To each their own. The strategy here is to efficiently get your tavern from 0 to 100 as fast as possible. Tray is the only promise of increase in silver, since floor is random and not only does the probability not treat all players equally, but you also have to consider lifestyle. If you can’t be in more than 2x a day and most taverns are full by then, you aren’t likely to maximize your floor’s benefit.
The beauty of it is, you don’t have to add these people to your friend’s list if you don’t want to.
For the first set up upgrades, the tray gives 2% bonus on 50 silver, which is exactly 1 silver extra for the first chair. If you have a full table of 6 chairs, the bonus is 2% of 330 silver, or 6.6 silver. I don’t know how they handle the fractional silver, bu it doesn’t matter, because the floor is better even if you get 7 silver bonus from the tray for a full collection.
Because the floor gives you a 20% chance of an extra 10 silver per time you sit down, it is on average going to give you 2 silver per time you sit down. If you sit down in six different friend’s taverns, you’ll get an average of 12 bonus silver.
Assuming you sit in every friend’s tavern daily, and assuming every one of your friends sits in your tavern, you’re going to make more silver on average by upgrading the floor before the tray.
But the floor is even better than that, because you can guarantee that you will sit in every other tavern, and so collect the maximum bonus from the floor upgrade, while you can’t be sure, and it’s extremely unlikely that, all your friends will sit in your tavern daily.
That’s if the RNG of getting silver plays in your favor. I have gone many a time through 60 taverns and gotten 0 silver.
On the flip side I have an active FL, so I collect my tavern (which is maxed out) at least twice a day, if not three times a day. If you’re maintaining an active FL (usually based off if they’re aiding you), then you should also be able to collect full taverns multiple times a day.
Based on guaranteed income, the tray makes more sense. You can do it in whatever order you want, based off your own luck. There are players out there who hit gold with getting random events to happen after all. I am not one of them. Not to mention taverns have to be open for you to sit. Get an inactive FL that not emptying their tavern (and thus probably not sitting in yours, either), and you don’t have the opportunity to make the silver.
No, it’s based on the law of averages. You don’t appear to understand how statistics work. Your guide is provably incorrect, mathematically.
Based on the laws of statistics, the floor upgrade will give out more silver on average.
Yes, if the law of averages is perfect; which it likely is not in this instance because we do not know what the seed unit is for the random number integer (RNG) that is going to control the programming on Inno Game’s end for distributing said silver (which when you take a statistics class you have to review using a basic graphing calculator and learn to set the whole thing up). Since we cannot guarantee a perfect law of averages and we don’t know what the tolerance is, we cannot say for sure that it is or isn’t going to work. Plus, we don’t know if that randome integer is different per game account, to cause different scenarios as you go along (as in what goods you discover on the c-map, when you’ll spawn BPs, etc). We can say without any margin of error that the tray will always give out the same silver. Furthermore, it’s 20% in each tavern, not among all taverns. So at tavern 1 it is a 1 in 5 chance. It doesn’t become 2 in 5 when you go to the next tavern, it’s still 1 in 5. That’s going to affect it, too.
If you want to upgrade your floor first and think it will go faster for you, have at. It’s just swapping the floor for the tray in most instances. As far as my guide goes, I went with 100% guarantee income first, average income second (because there will always be above average and below average, and the person who ends up below average will get screwed). If you don’t like that, I can’t help you out. I’m certain I’m not the only guide available.