I suppose it was inevitable.  There comes a point when you have reached a level of wealth in Farmville where you can buy anything (even the Villa).  A point when you have enough experience that you can plant any crop.

It’s natural at that point for the eye to wander, seeking out the next great Zynga game.  And for me, that happened a little over a week ago when I decided to take the plunge into Cafe World.

Cafe World has a number of elements that I had originally suggested for Farmville:  animated sims, shorter time spans, more functional enhancements.  It’s a much more complicated simulation, and as a result, it took me quite a bit longer to get the hang of it.

There are a few very interesting new aspects to the game that make modeling the economics difficult.  Expect future posts from me on how to model “The Buzz Factor”, which affects the velocity that your food is consumed over time, and how to model “Spoilage”, which is similar to Farmville but more absolute.

A couple quick tips, for the fans out there:

• Your Buzz Rating drops by 1.0 for every customer who comes in and leaves without food.  The minimum is 5.0, the maximum is 105.0.  There are two ways to preserve it, however.  First, when you run out of food, remove the doors on your restaurant.  This will close the cafe, and keep your Buzz rating flat.  Second, your buzz rating will not fall if you are not actually running the game.  That means it’s safe to run out of food, as long as you aren’t watching…
• If you block your waiter(s) in, then they will serve the food infinitely fast.  This is just like the Farmer trick from Farmville.  I highly recommend doing this with the three serving stations against a corner.  One warning – for this to work, you need to give the waiter/waitress *two* squares of freedom.  With just one, it doesn’t seem to work.

To get things started, however, I thought I’d just run the simple numbers on profitability and experience for each recipe.  I found elements of this information on various posts across the web.  (Here is one from Cafe World Strategy.  Here is another from Cyberanto.  This one was the best, from Simple Think.)  Unfortunately, no one seems to know the Café Points experience breakdown between preparing & serving the Impossible Quiche… I guess no one is at that level yet. (I had to guess in my table).

First, profitability.  Each dish below is normalized as follows:

• All values are normalized for a 24 hours day
• A “cycle” is based on cooking time, but includes the cost & cafe points for cleaning the oven once
• I assume an infinitely fast player for cleaning/preparing/serving

The next table shows the same information, but for Café Points instead of profit. This is more useful if your primary concern is “leveling up”.

Two things seem clear to me from these tables:

1. Overstuffed Peppers is the dish to beat.  12 hours cooking time means you don’t have to babysit the game endlessly.  One of the most profitable, and does a fair job of building experience.
2. Fast Food is King. If you have the patience and time, serving burgers can’t be beat.  All the numbers are incredibly weighted towards the foods with short cycles.  After all, when you can literally serve something 288 times in a single day, that’s a huge multiplier.

In future posts, I’ll try to rebalance these numbers across risk of spoilage and personal time value, to bring some sense to the madness.  I can tell already, however, that the Overstuffed Peppers is going to be the best balance of time & profit.  Of course, my cafe is still dawdling at Level 14…

Update:  New Café World Economics posts are available:

• Café World Economics: Updated Tables
• Café World Economics: Real World Hourly Wages
• Café World Economics: Profit & Café Points (2010 Edition)
• Café World Economics: Alien Invasion & Google Docs
• Café World Economics: Spiceonomics