I wrote my experiences on steam discussions I assume it would be more appropriate to post it here though since it is more so meant for the devs or people extremely interested in the game. Needless to say below is my feedback and overview of my time with the experimental branch.
I had time to slam out the last 160 days in short order spamming the boat. I managed to buy out every business of every rival (barely) in 300 days. I was pretty much hovering 3.5-4.5mil per day income so that limited my spending power. I had to use a combo of buying their businesses and the buildings (if they or another rival owned the bldg) The worst was Midtown since the rival owned a 134mil dollar building with his flower shop in it. The other hurdle was taking out the Murray Hill rival to free up his 1.1billion dollar building housing a rival business as well. Once I kicked him out though I could free up the last 2 stores to clear out all the unique rivals. It was a decent challenge, most businesses were able to be snagged up for a few million each. It gave me something to do, again it would be nice to have an achievement to kick out rivals or something, the unique dialog that played though was a nice touch though and felt good. Below I will go into a few observations in the last 160 days.
While spamming sleep with close to 800 employees the game was lagging with all the notifications. The game would hang up but eventually figure out how to put 200 employees in a 24/7 50 man office building. If I was not actively making cash-flow positive businesses in districts no rival events were triggering at all, i’m not sure if only building businesses triggers events. Day 120 my IRS taxes never came in; It could a been from the negative value bug. I didn’t notice till my day 180 notice came that day 120’s was missing. Balance-wise the game feels much easier than 0.3 but it could just be a knowledge thing. I don’t have a huge amount of experience in .4 but offices now are always maxed no matter what, idk if this is intended, I have 3 bldgs running 24/7 lawyers, graphic designers, and programmers. Lawyers just because of how much more they make naturally blow the other options out of the water 60k a day for GD’s; 100k for programmers; and 170k for lawyers base values in HK. Demand does not have an effect on traffic enough to matter it seems. In general traffic for offices is broken or tuned to always have 100% traffic so the only consideration is price. In contrast my midtown 75cap electronics store almost never gets above 36 traffic but generates 300k to 700k depending on many factors. Jewlry stores and Clothing stores I think are fairly well balanced around 200k. They also have very wide selections of items which is nice. Gift shops I like the addition of smart watches since it gives you the option to beef up security and invest a little more time into the shop for more profit. I only have 1 hairdresser, but it was very respectable and makes great money for small 15 cap store spaces. Liquor stores, Supermarkets/fruit/veg stores I have not tried yet, I normally don’t go for them since the profit margin is so thin for so many items you need to micro into warehouses, I lost interest since everything will be wiped, but in .3 when I had 2 or 3 they were horrible. I always make a floral shop, I ran it as a flower/gift shop in a large Midtown store while I was saving money to convert it to a clothing store. It was constantly max traffic, but profit was around 80k and it was always running out of stock due to the low quantities at the wholesaler. (I was hand delivering for awhile). Nightclubs I don’t understand, they have special jobs you need to fill, a ton of items you need customer service people at, and generate almost no money. I normally make one as a meme named after a Yakuza cabaret club but outside that. It feels like a fluff business; maybe i just don’t understand it though. Id prefer a sports bar/bar restaurant option to fill the role. Bookstore is ok, it’s like a worse gift-shop since it takes a lot more items to setup, in the full game though I will make sure to make 1 in each district fairly early since it shares a ton of the same infrastructure with gift shops. The shining stars I think are the coffee shops, and fast food, I think how they operate around 5k per 7 people is fairly decent. They require no security, low overhead, and feel good to setup, before they were not worth the hassle., Hopefully this isn’t a bug and they are actually tuned to be higher revenue like this. 7 employees for 5k revenue in a 15 cap cafe/fast food vs 14 employees in a 15 cap hairdresser making 18k revenue. Perfect.
That’s most of the shop balance I gathered, UI wise there is some good changes, though. Persona is there…is there a reason it says no reward for every goal I have in life? lol. Contacts is A LOT better thats all that’s there to say. Rivals page is good; the employee page is alright, it would be nice if they displayed a symbol showing when an employee doesn’t have all wants/demands met within the menu or alert you when they arn’t. Right now you just sort by satisfaction and peck at them 1 by one which is annoying with 800+ employees. Bizman…I would like a way to mark/favorite a store I am working on so it hops to the top of the page. When you have 80+ businesses it gets annoying…I end up naming the new build 11111thename, then change it before I setup the logistics, but i’d like to see it changed maybe in .6. Also maybe make a tab for business and real estate you can toggle, not make a never-ending scroll bar for end-game. Econoview, I would like a way to separate income by district, business type, and have employee wages included under ongoing expenses. Investments need to allow you to take money out in parts not just order payout, I also feel you should have 100% access to the bank and input invests from this menu. Only make us go to the bank initially and to take out loans and make the time constraints in person only. Specially with negative interest being a thing. Market insider I like, I would like a filter for the event types so I can see every business that closed at a quick glance or current ongoing shortages vs scrolling and looking at the days from the notification on multiple districts, but this isn’t a huge deal if your not relaxing on your boat for weeks on end.
-Some stuff id like to see in the future, though more of just spitball of ideas-
The Yacht should give a buff worth 90mil vs the 2.5mil dingy. 75% happiness is nice, but, can I at least fill my hunger in the yacht for free vs the small boat? lol. More goals from Fred outside living to 65. More personal goals involving rivals, A pallet jack or flatbed; something you can load in a van/suv to help offload items in stores faster (maybe provide them in large stores only) Maybe class certain vehicles to carry the flatbeds to incentivize the more expensive/capacity vehicles. More business classes or maybe licenses required to sell/make certain advanced businesses. Automated marketing/sales or store/district managers to auto set item prices per district or store HQ job. That and being able to get all marketing choices with 1 option vs doing 3 per marketing agency and having to call each damn time.
Everything said I am very happy with the game and I can’t wait for when factories add a whole layer to the game. I hope you enjoyed the read as much as I enjoyed testing the build for the past 60 hours or so. Thanks again and I will make sure to check out .5 after it releases. Cheers