What is your early game strategy?

[mdoolitt]

So what order do you go in the early game? Try to buy a island as soon as possible? Transport letters and tourists? Explore around to find islands with low prices to sell to islands with high prices? Something else?

[lukalot]

Keep a decent safety margin of cash (not only on hand, but try and put about 1k in the bank early on and leave it to appreciate) and purchase new ships more or less as soon as you have enough to buy one while keeping that extra padding. Try and find one or two profitable trade routes that you can repeat to earn money, and upgrade their outposts with tickets as you can. Once you have a near mid-tier ship and enough money, you can start expanding to various islands and thinking about making production chains. That's how I played anyway.

[Aglet Green]

This is my early game strategy, and it works no matter what: take mail-delivery jobs. Just keep taking them. They cover the cost of your energy recharges, and they help fill in the map. I don't even worry about trading until after I've gotten enough places mapped out where I can see some decent buy-low-sell-high routes. Once I find a port that has lots of 'most expensives' (5 gold coins out of 5) I use the tickets I accumulated as a space-mailman to knock down the taxes so I can sell at a good profit.

Depending on whether you are going for achievements or not, then things change. If you're going for achievements, I personally find it best to accumulate 15,000 before doing anything else. This then allows me to buy several islands at once and build all my buildings right away.

Since you're talking strictly early game, the only islands you will need are: one sand, one wood forest, one stone and one iron. This is enough to both build the lighthouse and to easily finish the bottle-building quest.

I do buy the second boat very early one, the one with 3 crew and a cargo-hold of 6, and I find that sufficient to accumulate 15,000 gold and to get all the other early goals out of the way.

Tip to anyone reading this in the future: I also created a second save, and I used that to find the bank, land of the giants, annoy the carrot with bad music, run out of money, and experiment with buying various boats and islands so I could explore (and get various achievements) without messing up my main save.

[Gilmore]

Originally posted by Aglet Green:

Tip to anyone reading this in the future:

Hello, I am a time traveler from the future. I am possibly thinking about buying this game, is there a lot of playability if I just want a sandbox merchant/trading game?

[Alien_Halls]

Originally posted by Gilmore:

Originally posted by Aglet Green:

Tip to anyone reading this in the future:

Hello, I am a time traveler from the future. I am possibly thinking about buying this game, is there a lot of playability if I just want a sandbox merchant/trading game?

It is the same repetitive boring stuff, you won't play more than 3 days straight.