I wanted to discuss this topic since I really love this game but I managed to get rich on my first run.
Even starting without tutorial or any money to begin with. Means sleeping on benches and eating only what you earned in the supermarked next door.
Therefore I would like to suggest a general concept re-think of some mechanics, because currently the play time is about 30 to 50 hours before you did it all in the game and it because a sleep and eat cycle in your apartment without anything else to do except your bank account balance going up.
Start of the game
Beginning the game is certainly the most fun about this game. You learn a lot and check out market prices and business models while working you shift as cashier. However, it still could be extended to enjoy this phase as a longer ongoing challenge.
Add more challenges (sickness, depression, dirtiness and more) and work opportunities at the beginning to extend the early game
Prohibit loans for hobos (I get all the money I want with pay back set to 0)
Make living on the street harder (e.g. hygiene, crime, laundering clothes in the laundry)
Making the food for your first store spoil (currently food is stored unrefrigered in boxes somewhere)
Cheap first stores you open are affected by crime and extremely disgusting (full of garbage, not pleasing to enter, etc.)
Middle game
Starting out the first business and then adding more seems currently just repetitive until you have a huge working fast food chain earning hudreds of thousands
Add more challenges to establishing one business
Finding good employees could be more challenging when you hire people cheaply and they just dont show up at work or steal stuff
Currently buying wholesale goods is quiet easy if the warehouses would be more spread out and not selling all goods practically in one place (Jewelry and Pizza together?)
-Delivery seems to be not affected by the distance between warehouse and shop and also other factors like driver skill or the vehicel itself dont really make it very hard to start out a warehouse (you can operate 3 stores with one guy doing picking, sorting, loading, delivery all at once in seconds during the night)
End game
This is really the hardest because it currently feels like after everything is setup you just go home and eat and sleep several weeks to earn the cars and boats you want. Which also makes many other things obsolete like opening more shops.
What could be interesting would be like in Anno1800 where you fine tune everything more and more to get a completely new shop or warehouse out of what you started. This was always the challenge for endless sims is to have something interesting to do all the time. If you can just sleep all your problems away that kills the game.
This could be solved by having contious management challenges like
renegoating goods contracts with more profitables dealers that offer higher discount for largers amounts
having a financial crisis that causes the banks to close down or larger delivery issues (company ceize and relying on a good stockpile you accumulated)
Having the chance to do some money hiding in off-shore tax havens and moving your HQ there
Building your own building with long going construction procedures (maybe an idea for construction business?)
The point is that the game currently offers just early game fun and the rest is just eat and sleep for you yacht of muscle car and I hope this shifts some focus on adding more depth rather than new shop types for the early game. Yet I love this game and I would even consider funding it if I could because you guys made something significant! This could be the game of the year depending on the depth that could be added.
One thing to maybe make this work with your ressources could be really implementing the steam workshop and modding NOW. I honestly think the modders will make this game blow up completely and you would be swimming in money without having to implement all these things on your own. And later you can then implement these mods officially + giving the modders credit.
I don’t have any more votes at the moment sadly (how do you get more than the two you started out with? Edit: Just kidding, I got to trust level 1 right after I posted this just by reading, basically ) but I just want to say I love everything you wrote down here! I agree with you and I think you brought some great ideas to the table.
I’m currently about 30 hours in and had probably the most fun in the early game but now I’m like ehhh, what now? A friend of mine has echoed the same sentiments. Regardless, I love this game and hope to see it develop nicely with added challenge and depth.
Mods I don’t know if it will be possible, I imagine there would be bugs or maybe even difficulty for modders to update the mod if they add or change something big in the game or just instability of the mod.
Even though I’m not that far in the game due to my insistence of progressing at my pace, I agree with you already. I can already see that there is not a lot of challenge to the game but part of that is due to its early access nature. Honestly, for a game this early in development, it is quite feature rich and it is not lacking in depth in regards to its mechanics. That said, I do think that the employee and customer satisfaction is where the true meat of the challenge can really come from as that seems to be a breeze currently. Customers are pretty much the same regardless of district, and it doesn’t take much to appease their demands other than spending a set amount on walls and flooring. The same goes for employees. As long as you give them the hours requested and meet a simple request or two, they are forever satisfied for the rest of time. These two factors are the two things no business owner can ever escape, and they are the two things they also need the most. In my eyes, it makes sense to make dealing with them a much bigger factor rather than something to forget after your first business or two.
I do like your idea of a financial crisis as that is, unfortunately, too very true to life. No idea how that would be implemented other than a random chance card giving a player low sales for a set time regardless of marketing and traffic. Harder difficulties would increase the chances of that occurring more often perhaps punishing players who take too many risks?
As for the off-shore tax havens and other somewhat legally nebulous activities, I’d hope they’d opt to make those optional for players if they do implement things like that. Personally, I don’t like partaking in legally questionably practices even if it’s a game. I always prefer to play as if it were a real endeavour so I’d shy away as I would in real life. No judgement of course for anyone who wants to play that way. It’s just a personal preference, but I’m sure no one likes to be forced to play in a manner they’re not accustomed to is all.
I have more thoughts but don’t want to bore anyone with all of them. I’m excited for the next update in May though. This game is great already so I can’t wait to see what else will come in the future.
First of all thanks for your kind words guys!
Its awesome to see, that I am not the only one who sees this topic as important to keep the fun going with this beatiful game.
Honestly I think the problem would not be solved by just prolonging the game. If you make margins slimmer, the first jobs less profitable or give loans way later I think this would be just prolonging, but not true fun.
I was also thinking a bit how other games do tackle this issue.
In…
…Stellaris you have the end game crisis.
…Anno your highest societal group requires new needs to be filled out with new goods and services.
…Cities Skylines gets more complex with traffic, when you have suddenly to merge 6 roads together in a new way to avoid total traffic chaos.
Sometimes the end game is just a new milestone, in the next case its a sudden unexpected step in the ladder and the case of CS the new issue emerges out of increasing demands that cause you rethink your entire build you did before.
I love the idea of a steam workshop.
I would love to add content on my own and share it as this is a sandbox with unlimited possibilities, if the gates to modding are opened.
yea that the only problem i have in this game (aside of not having much to do in the city itself but certain events will come so im waiting for that) is there so need to open more stores if you already makin money and that constaint open more shop , make more money then open more shops etc. feels boring over time and repetitive , there should be more stuff involved in stores
Maybe if they focus on problems for different types of stores, as @SSIRK mentions in one of their examples, in the case of food for restaurants and supermarkets, expiration or keeping maintenance to freezers to preserve food to prevent people from getting sick and cause penalties such as:
*Your traffic of people is reduced to 20% because of the bad reputation of food in poor quality.
*Customers refuse to pay overprice for your products due to the bad reputation of expiration or poor quality.
I try to think of other examples for other stores or businesses, but I guess it would be to add new mechanics or very simple things, such as pirate gifts cost much cheaper but their quality is very despicable and would also generate bad reputation or even as the cases of dolls or toys that were dangerous for children and toxic.
These are simple examples that could be done so that each store has its challenges. I also hope you understand why I use a translator.
I imagine in the case of frozen food it would be engineers/mechanics to maintain the refrigeration. Maybe the HR or Logistics Director will be in charge of indicating their areas where they will be in charge of maintaining the equipment, like one or two engineers will take care of Garment District and another one of Midtown or even that the HR will then automatically hire temporary mechanics but costing more than the engineers hired by you (like temporary employees for sick leave) in case you don’t want to waste time in seeing who is qualified and training them. I am sure that someone else could complement this, I can only give ideas as far as my imagination will let me xd but surely it would not be as good a proposal as I say.
In the case of food expiration I imagine that also with the logistics manager could take care of changing the expired or bad quality food automatically without having to do it manually. Replacing it with the one that is in the warehouse.
I am at the moment just sleeping after my uncle told me to make lots of money, I am not sure how much money I will be able to make, but I am not sure if I will be able to make it.
Opening many stores doesn’t seem that efficient and it is quite time consuming and tedious to furnish and place a lot of furniture for a new store, stock up on merchandise and get employees.
For now, I’m going to make some money from my first gift store, ignore for a while the recommendation to open a fast food restaurant, and open one of the largest gift stores or jewelry stores or clothing stores in midtown to make a lot of money, and then just to keep my uncle happy, open a small Open a fast food restaurant and stand at the cash register yourself, only to close it as soon as your uncle is satisfied.
Additionally, you open a law firm, but compared to a very large retail store, the income from a law firm is not that great.
(We hire the maximum number of attorneys, fill their schedules, market them properly, and raise their fees.)
It would be quite a hassle to run some sort of retail store/office any more and I don’t think it would be worth the hassle.
I think there needs to be more “to do”.
) but I just want to say I love everything you wrote down here! I agree with you and I think you brought some great ideas to the table.
