Tiny Towers Strategy

I recently started playing Tiny Towers (a couple weeks ago) and although I’m not an expert at the game, I found it intriguing because of the amount of planning you can use, or not use, while playing the game. Here are some things I picked up on while playing to help you scale your tower.

Floor Layout

There are three important factors when choosing a floor layout.

1. Your floor pattern needs to scale from 10 floors to 100 floors
2. You need to have enough residential floors to house Bitizens
3. You need to be able to quickly find Bitizens when asked

Some strategies choose to group different types of floors together (creative, food, recreational, retail, service) so that bitizens can be easily managed in apartments and at their jobs. The problem with this strategy is you will have to keep spending money (bux) to move your floors so they can be grouped properly. Here’s an alternative to keep your floors in order and save you money.
If you want to keep your stores staffed, you will need to have roughly 40% of your tower residential (see bitizen management for why). In order to do this in a way that scales, I put an apartment on every prime number (25 floors every 100 levels) and every floor ending with zero (10 floors every 100 levels). This gives me 35% residential floors but that is OK because the larger your tower gets, the lower you residential ratio gets (see below).
The other 5 types of floors cycle in alphabetical order (creative, food, recreational, retail, service). This keeps them evenly distributed on non-prime/non-multiples of ten floors. This layout will help you figure out what type of floor any arbitrary floor is with the following equation.
(Floor number — (prime numbers+multiples of ten)) / 5
Whatever the remainder of that equation is will tell you what the floor type is. (1=creative,2=food,…0=service)
For example, if we want to know what type of floor level 42 is the equation would be
(42 — (14 + 4)) / 5 = 4 with a remainder of 4 which means floor 42 is a retail floor. You can easily tell what type of floor it is by the color the floor name is written in.
In order to quickly find Bitizens there are two things I found helpful. First of all, you should rename every floor to something memorable. Instead of “Donut Shop” name it “Cop Hangout.” This will not only aid in finding bitizens, but it will help when placing bitizens into their dream jobs. When your tower starts to get big, you’ll inevitably forget what floors you have. So instead of a dream job being “Pizza Place” it will say “Little Cesar’s” which will be much easier for you to remember that you have the “Little Cesar’s” floor instead of the generic floor naming.

The second thing to find bitizens quickly is to dress up Bitizens based on floor themes. For example, you can see in this screenshot that my bakery is named “Loaf Monsters” and all the Bitizens are wearing the Monster costume (which also happen to look like loafs of bread). The costumes can also help in naming the floor something memorable. My video rental floor is called “overnight movies” and the employees wear overalls.

Bitizen Management

There are two special things about each Bitizen

1. Their ability to perform at a job type (expressed as numbers 1–9)
2. Their dream job

Having a high performing Bitizen in a position (9 is the highest) will mean your inventory costs less than with a less qualified worker.
A Bitizen working in their dream job will give you 2 bux when they are hired, and will give you double the inventory for the same price as before. The more dream job workers you have on a floor, the more items you will have with double inventory.
The ideal Bitizen will be working in their dream job and rated 9 for that same position. For me, if the Bitizen is at least a 7 I’ll keep them on the position because I’d rather the extra inventory over the cheaper coin price.
If you have a store with 3 dream job Bitizens and have another move in, it is worth it to make one of the existing employees jobless so you can hire the new one and collect the 2 bux. Once you get the money you can keep him there or evict him depending on his performance rating.
Residential floors should be kept with 4 Bitizens per floor until you fill the floor with dream job employees. This will allow you to keep new Bitizens moving in and not miss an opportunity to hire the right Bitizen for a job. Once all 5 spots are filled with dream job employees you can keep the floor fully rented. Because it will take you a little bit of time to fill a residential floor you need to keep your residential/store ratio high until you start filling dream jobs. For me, I was able to keep residential floors partially filled and still fill all my available jobs without problems. Once I hit ~floor 25 I started getting residential floors with 5 residents which allowed me to keep filling positions.

Bux Spending

The only way to get bux is to actively play Tiny Towers. So the only things you should spend bux on is other things that will help you get bux faster. For me this came down to two things.

1. Bitizens costumes
2. Elevator upgrades

Delivering Bitizens to floors and finding requested Bitizens are the two easiest ways to get more bux. Investing your money here will make sure you get you money worth in the long run vs. spending bux to fill inventory.
Another worthwhile place to spend your bux is on store upgrades but that won’t help you get more bux. It will however let you go for longer periods of time without playing the game and still getting coins.

Conclusion

There are other ways to do play and even a few ways to cheat at the game, but I just wanted to share what I found and how it works for me.
Here is some extra links to let you dig deeper in your strategy. Most of all, have fun and don’t waste your money on bux, just have some patience and planning.
List if VIPs and what they look like
Google doc spreadsheet of every store and inventory cost
A link to my tower after casual play for a couple weeks

Originally published at 1n73r.net on January 10, 2012.