User blog comment:Oioiaussie/Buy playgrounds? A common misconception!/@comment-5109847-20120601170235

I agree with the analysis set forth here, but it all depends on what level/size/production your village is currently at. Early on I bought a bunch of playgrounds and it most definitely helped me ramp up quicker than if I had slowly bought VFTs. After the playgrounds I switched over to sapphires, strictly because of the "time to recoup investment" factor (well, and the +1 house), not the return per pixel. As Baristan outlined, until you are paying a certain amount for land, and until you are actually out of space (one of the hardest things to learn is that putting things into inventory so you have more space for better items is the best strategy), time to recoup is the most important factor. To make an extreme example (and forgetting things like level requirements), spending your very first 10k coins on a VFT might be the best choice mathematically, but think how far behind on everything else you're going to be while scrimping and saving for it. Instead, buying a couple of playgrounds for much less will get you going financially a lot faster, freeing up extra coins for any number of options.

In the early to middle levels, the faster you hit the "time to recoup" the faster you are actually turning a profit, which means you can use that profit to buy whatever you need, be it expansions, stores for xp, or better decorations. If you start off immediately buying the "best" items like VFTs, you won't actually overtake someone using the other approach for so long that at that point does it really matter?

Of course, if you're higher level and already have a financial base, then of course something like a VFT is a better choice, particularly since you're concerned about every pixel producing the most it possibly can. But until you reach those levels (which varies depending on who you ask, and I'm only 32 so I'm not an expert), it isn't necessarily a bad thing to make the less efficient choices, because they'll give you returns much faster than the more efficient ones, which in turn will allow you to take advantage of the better ones in higher numbers later.