This is quite simple really. It started with me realizing that I really like money… who doesn’t, right? This prompted my decision to start as a rogue in Heroes. As a rogue, you make your income ever 55 minutes instead of 60. This means roughly 2 extra payouts every 24 hours. I also realized that Heroes is very money based, you need money for properties, money for armies, and money for keeping armies going.
I didn’t know when I started the game, but I suspected that was a level cap, and perhaps a cap on the quests. Which, there is on quests… at least currently. This meant that for end game money production odds are the properties are going to have to flip the bill.

Once I made the decision to buff my properties list to the max, I rapidly started to find a way to determine which properties would be the best investment. As the cost of properties increase the more you buy, and the return stays the same, the highest income potential property would rapidly change. I then decided to make a simple spreadsheet that calculates the cost to income ratio. With this spreadsheet all I had to do was input the number of Heroes properties I owned and it would calculate the current price and determine the cost / income ratio. The number that is output from the equation is the amount of money you will have to spend to earn $1 of income per hour (or 55 min). This made it extremely simple, and took all of the guesswork out of where my investments should be made.

The next thing I learned is that if you purchase 10 properties at a time rather than 1, you get the 10 properties each at the rate stated at time of purchase. Meaning, if you bought a farm for $5,000, the next farm you bought would be $5,500. But, if you bought 10 farms at once, you would pay $5,000 each for all 10… which is a substantial savings. Obviously this is not always the best course of action. If your income is $100 per hour and you want to earn $50,000 to buy 10 of something, it would be in the better interest of time to buy them one at a time until your income increases to the point where waiting is worthwhile. You also need to realize that the best deal at any given time might be to buy 10 Cathedrals, which would total $400,000,000… which may be quite far out of reach.

How this can help you:
I’m writing a simple .php script that will allow you to input the number of properties you own and will then output all of the cost/income ratios real-time. This will allow everyone access to the same technique I used and should give you all a hand. I’m also thinking about making my spreadsheet available for purchase if anyone is interested. This would allow you to store the properties and armies you own and calculate upkeep, income, vaultable income and other factors for you. Leave some comments if you think you would be interested and I may put more effort into making the spreadsheet user friendly and offer it.