As Mr. Plot aka Azircon is on the roll again with new terms and beautiful statistics (Post 1 here ; Post 2 here), I thought it might be a good idea to put that into perspective for smaller players like me. While I beat my "mentor" on efficiency (easy, I only have 5 plots and he has like a million), I'm lost in the low field on total earnings.
I will never achieve the same LPE and LCE as a whale - as long as I don't become one. One part is what I produce - even when producing only Stone, which has the best ROI at the moment, it's not as good as SPS and/or Aura (or so it seems, pretty sure that the tool beaker is working on will shed more light on that).
The other factor are cards. Especially the LPE is massively influenced by what cards you have working on your land, as Alpha GF Legendary give you quite the advantage in DEC production, which raises the LPE.
If you don't like math (which is the following part), here's my conclusion:
Don't fall into desperation just because your LPE is very low.
It's influenced by many things that small land owners do not have access to. Kind of reminds me of the current state of the world, land-grabbing, tendency to mega-farms... Let's hope that in Praetoria the effects of said monopolization does not lead to the same effects as it does in the real world.
Here's the comparison of my simulation with my actual plots. More detail below in the math part.
LPE : 0,79 vs. 3.501
LCE: 8169 vs. 7831
ROI per year: 8,9% vs 12.1%
Okay, this is not 100% comparable. The simulation is a best case, producing only stone, while I'm producing a little of everything plus focus on stone.
Since I got my plots at way cheaper prices, my ROI is higher when considering the huge difference in LPE. I will slowly go towards a higher usage of my plots, buy cards here and there, and try to get to at least two maxed plots by the end of the year (1 grain, 1 stone). With that, I should get above the 10% yROI (if stone prices stay similar).
As mentioned, LPE and LCE focus only on PP and production, while I focus on $$$ as well. The best way to get a higher LPE is to use Alpha Legendary Gold foil cards - that will boost things up quite significantly. But the cheapest is at $3150 for 33,333 PP (around 10 cents per PP), so...
The best ratio is still Beta Rare cards with $7,05 cost per 1000 PP (including staked DEC). Next in line are Untamed Rare with $7,69/1000 PP.
That means that you gain 25 DEC per hour per plot. In Stone, that would be 166 Stone/h. But you need grain, too, so that's 332 Stone/h. Gotta pay tax, so it's 369 Stone/h. That's 185.000 PP on that plot, 37.000 PP per working card. That's more or less a Alpha GF Legendary with the 10% Splinter-Bonus.
Other ways are to boost the production with totems and titles, but those are a bit expensive, too. At least for beginners.
Don't compare with the ones up there. Do your math, have a strategy for your own possibilities and stick to it. That will allow you to grow slowly, but steadily.
Also, keep the ROI in mind. LPE doesn't include that, and it's an important part. In 10 years, when we all are legacy players, that won't matter so much anymore. But for now, it does.
It is indeed a great idea to calculate that, but I miss one part - the original cost. I know, that's kind of hard to calculate, and we should not look at this as an investment, but I just can't not do it. So, let's put it to the test on my land. First, my regular LPE (based on calculations coming later in this post). This is according to the formulas that 
3.89 DEC/h / 5 plots = 0,79 DEC per hour per plot - The higher this one is, the better. There is no gold standard, but I'll calculate the optimal case for small fish below.
Land Card Efficiency
31,777 PP / 3.89 DEC/h = 8169 - The lower this one, the better. Let's see in the simulation how far we can get it!
I have 5 plots. Peakmonsters luckily saves all the data, so here's my asset history:
The one for 23 I later sold immediately for the same price, hence, only 5 plots left.
21 + 9 + 10 + 10 + 16 + 18.50 = $84,50
Yes, I got very, very lucky here, those prices are long gone. I swapped a couple with 
Again, Peakmonsters gives it all, I filtered for "On Land" and got this:
I'll use List Prices on this one. Most of those cards have gone up in value, so did the plots, so later I'll run a simulation as well to show a best case that you could follow, if you were to get into land.
With this, I'm sitting on $84.50 + $203.50 + $25 (Energy Crystals) = $313
That is not bad for 5 plots - of which none is running at 100% capacity. But I'm slowly building my workforce, one BCX after the other.
So, let's say DEC is at peg, that brings my investment (besides the hours of figuring things out) to 313,000 DEC.
As you can see here, I also threw in 66,384 DEC for Dark Energy, so I'm totaled at 379,500 DEC, roughly.
The per hour production in the picture is already without the choking and totally unfair taxes from the fat kings in the country.
Workers consume 0,01 grain per PP per hour. So, as I have a total of 31,777 PP, that makes 317.77 Grain/Hour. I have a slight surplus of 32.967 Grain/h, which equals 0,266 DEC/h at current prices.
To keep things short, let me group them together:
14.191 Wood/h = 0.414 DEC/h
19.671 Stone/h = 2.967 DEC/h
0.838 Iron/h = 0.243 DEC/h
Total DEC per hour: 3.89
Per day: 93.36
Per 30 day month: 2800.8
Per 365 day year: 34,076.4
ROI: 34,076.4 / 379,500 = 8,9%
Let's use my favorite case of starting to buy right now. You can read all about my latest calculations here: Just click and be redirected!
The prices for land have fallen a tiny bit, but let's say they're still the same, as are the card prices - it's always better to prepare for the worse case.
So, total investment: 1 grain plot, 1 stone plot, 9 max cards from beta, 2 energy crystals, 90,000 DEC staked = 465,000 DEC
Production: 39,6 Stone / hour = 5.973 DEC / hour
As explained in my first post, we can bump that up by buying 55 grain/h for 0.443 DEC/h. It is more efficient, so let's go for that instead.
49.5 Stone/h = 7.466 DEC/h - 0.443 DEC/h = 7.023 DEC/h
Production points: 55,000 PP
LPE: 7.023 DEC/h / 2 Plots = 3.501 DEC/h/Plot
LCE: 55,000 / 7.023 DEC/h = 7831 PP for 1 DEC/h
ROI per year: 7.023 x 24 x 395 / 510,000 = 12,1%
Thank you very much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it at least as much as I enjoyed writing :-D If you have any comments or feedback - please let me know! And don't forget to leave your own posts for me to curate. Thank you very much!
If you don't play the game yet, you can use my referral: Click here for referral :-)
