What to buy: Golden Cauldron Room vs. Golden Treasure Room

With the sale this weekend on gold rooms (half price on all rooms you buy with gold), you really are spoiled for choice on where to spend your hard-earned gold.

There are SO many choices, and you're going to want the best bang for your buck. Which, of course, depends on how much gold you have saved up.

One thing, though: there are two types of rooms you buy with gold. One that pays rent in M$ (the vast majority of rooms) and then the other kind, those that pay rent in gold.

The gold-producing rooms are still relatively new, introduced just over 2 weeks ago by Electronic Arts, and, truth to tell, I've been ignoring these rooms because I'm in a snit at having bought the Golden Goose room at full price when it first came out - and really, really, REALLY not liking the yield of 1 gold bar every six hours.

But this week, with the sale on, I'm ready to consider the other gold producing rooms.

If I had just enough gold to get started, my first purchase would probably the Golden Mine Cart room ... currently available for a very affordable 26 gold bars (you DO click on every Community Chest card, and you HAVE activated all your sticker collections, right? so you probably have at least that much gold - and if not, you have a couple of days to quickly collect that much gold!)

But assuming that you have more gold, that you've been assiduously saving up for that special room you've been lusting after (Flute room? Rescue Buoy room? Piano room?) ... you now have choices.

If you had been planning to splurge on a Flute Room, you may now be tempted to spend that gold instead on a gold-producing room, instead. But which one? 

There are two that tempt me: the Golden Cauldron room (any hotel) and the Golden Treasure room (only available in the Vermont Aquarium).

But they are fairly different in both yield and size, not to mention a hefty price difference.

The Golden Treasure Room currently costs 391 gold bars on sale, and the Golden Cauldron Room is discounted to 1,000 gold bars. So you could buy just about two and a half Golden Treasure rooms for the price of a single Golden Cauldron room ... is it worth doing that?

The Golden Treasure Room takes up two squares and pays out rent of 4 gold bars and 100,000 experience points every 10 hours.

The Golden Cauldron Room takes up 6 squares and pays rent of 10 gold bars and 250,000 experience points every 7 hours.

And again, my brain can't exactly figure out which is better unless I compare apples to apples. 

So here goes. I'll just do what I usually do ... compare the per square yield per hour so that I have them side by side.

Golden Treasure Room:

• Gold: 4 / 2 /10 = 0.20 gold bars per square per hour
• Experience points: 100,000 / 2 / 10 = 5,000 XP per square per hour

Golden Cauldron Room:

• Gold: 10 / 6 / 7 = 0.24 gold bars (approx.) per square per hour
• Experience points: 250,000 / 6 / 7 = 5,952.38 XP per square per hour

So really, not all that much difference between the two rooms.

Your guess is as good as mine as to which one(s) to pick up. I am still tempted more by the Golden Cauldron room, simply for the minor increase in both gold and XP per hour.

I must point out that it depends also on how frequently you collect rent ... if you can collect multiple times a day, you want rooms that pay out more frequently.

With a day job (and a terribly busy one, at that), I tend to be hit-and-miss in my rent collecting, so I've tended to do slightly-lower-value-similar-yield rooms (Top Hat rooms instead of Thimble rooms, for example - there is NO way I am checking for rent every 45 minutes!).

Bottom line? It depends. 

Sorry, but that is the reality. 

It depends on how much gold you have saved up, and what your collection frequency is.

You can get 2 Golden Treasure rooms right now for less than you'd pay for a single Golden Cauldron room, which means you'll be collecting rent 2 times a day, and will wind up, on average, with 16 gold bars each day and 200,000 XP from those two rooms.

Or you could pick up one Golden Treasure (sacrificing 6 squares of your hotel), and collect rent 3 times a day, to pick up 30 gold bars and 750,000 XP ...

Keep in mind, too, that Golden Cauldron rooms can be built in any hotel, but Golden Treasure can only be built in the Vermont Aquarium - and seriously, I'd fill the Aquarium with these Golden Treasure rooms ASAP just because the other Aquarium rooms are SO lack-lustre in comparison! (It's just a question of time - my Aquarium is going to be tiled with these Golden Treasure rooms, just maybe not this week!)

I *was* going to spend the gold on the Flute room, but I just realised that would mean a one-time purchase, whereas a gold-producing room will mean the ability to buy *more* gold rooms as time goes by ... colour me enlightened!

Happy gold-gathering! I'm off to collect more Community Chest gold in hopes of getting to my first Golden Cauldron room this weekend. If I don't get to 1,000 gold bars, then I will definitely splurge on one or two of the Golden Treasure rooms.