Tycoon Zone

Time to invest?

Once you reach a certain point in the game, you will get a message from your secretary with the subject line “Time to invest?”  This means the “Investment” feature in the game has been unlocked and made available to you.

When you invest, every 20 iKr in savings that you invest turns into 1 iKr in Company Value (”CV”).  Since Company Value is the way companies are ranked, investing can increase your ranks.  For example, if you invest 200 iKr, your CV will increase by 10 iKr.

The term “Investment” is a little misleading, because it is not like real-life investment.  Typically you invest money in the stock market or a bank with the hopes that it will grow into more money over time. In the game, your Investment turns into CV immediately, and the transaction is over. You are really just buying CV.

So when is a good time to invest? It comes down to evaluating what your options are.  Let’s say you have 10,000 iKr to spend.  In Tycoon Online, there are really lots of ways to spend your money, but let’s compare just two options: Investing and building a factory.

• If you invest the 10,000 iKr, you will increase you CV immediately by 500 iKr.
• If you use the 10,000 iKr to buy some zones and build a factory, your factory is likely to generate 300 to 500 CV per day for the remainder of the round.

In this example, it is pretty obvious that the factory is the better choice, unless it is the last day of the round. In fact, building more buildings is nearly always a better choice, so you should keep building until you reach your limit of 25 buildings. Even then, it may make more sense to replace a less profitable building with a more profitable one.

You do need to factor in the cost of zones, since they can get very expensive. If there are only 10 days left in the round, for example, it is probably not worth the cost to buy zones to build a 25th forest, since those zones will be very expensive and 10 days is not enough time to recover the cost.

In general, you should probably think of investing as a way to spend your money when you have nothing better to do with it.