Talk:Gold Mine/@comment-24401501-20140109123449

Lots of talk here about whether it makes sense to upgrade collectors to the max or not. Well, I say "it depends"...it depends on whether you need additional gold/resource, and this in turn depends on 3 factors:

1. The number of builders you have

2. How much you raid for gold as opposed to depend on collectors

3. What level your are at and hence how much it costs to build/upgrade

For example...if you have only 2 builders and are at a low level, then you'll likely have more than enough gold for all your building needs and therefore don't need to upgrade your collectors. If you have more builders, are at a higher level and are getting lots of gold through attacks, then again you'll not need to upgrade your collectors. However, if you are like me (mid way through TH7) and don't do alot of attacking, then you will reach a point that you have insufficient gold to keep your builders busy. Its at this point you need your collectors upgraded. I am just now upgrading all collectors from lvl 10 to lvl 11, since most of the upgrades are costing close to 1 million or more and I need all the gold I can get.

BTW on the topic of "profitability", I agree the time for a 10->11 upgrade is 24 days, since its 20 days + the 4 days the collector is out of action. If you have 6 lvl 10 collectors and upgrade them one at a time (so one every 4 days), the time to profitability overall is 34 days. If you have 4 builders and upgrade 4 at one go, followed by the remaining 2 immedaitely afterwards, the time to profitability is 26 days. So if you are upgrading, it make sense to upgrade as quickly as possible.