How to Beat very hard or legendary

[Leafar]

I can't leave the place. I try to make money by contract, but most of it doesn't pay for itself. Does anyone have a strategy?

[Kyouko Tsukino]

- Don't choose starting options you don't need to choose. "Tough" competition can kick the asses of people with hundreds - or thousands - of hours playing the game, and "realistic" development time will just make everything take longer to be done, which will completely wreck you if you don't know your way around the game mechanics yet. Also, random options are usually going to make your game easier overall, but some of the events they bring can really knock the air out of you. Also, normal game speed is fine, but choosing slow or marathon (without adjusted work speed) to get used to the game is not shameful. I used Marathon to figure out the game, and continued using it for a while. And when Legendary was made harder (yes, it used to be easier) I used Marathon to figure out the mechanic changes, until I was comfortable trying normal speed.

- For contract games, do the absolute minimum you need to do. The first two stars for each game element can still be gained from a 30% contract game.

- Contract work may sound like it pays more, but it usually takes more time than it takes for a contract game with the same payout. Since contract games also help you make better games, contract work is a "last resort" thing IMO.

- Don't overspend. Build small rooms (five people per room is my usual) and try to find the sweet spots to using as little furniture as possible. Also, use the cheapest versions of furniture. A water fountain and a coffee dispenser do the exact same thing, but the coffee dispenser costs $ 250 less, and you don't need to have both (I know "realistically" you would have both, but doing things for the sake of realism is a liability in Legendary, and still a silly idea in Very Hard.)

- Don't research more topics than you need. Try to find the synergy between topics for genres that are suitable to each other, for example, Skill and Puzzle have "animals" and "building blocks" as suitable topics.

- Don't research genres you don't need. You can survive through the whole game using just Skill, Puzzle and Adventure. Using ten genres is for rich people, and you're not going to be one for a while.

- Don't overhire, but also don't try to play this like it's Game Dev Tycoon. You need "enough" people around (To me that's at least ten persons in 1976, twenty for 1977, and then "as many as I can handle" with varies with what I'm trying to do.) The more people you have, the faster you'll do thing, meaning you can do contract work a lot faster (as in, "one contract game per week" fast.)

- Try to use the same publisher for your games every time. If any of them already has a few hearts, you can give them your games. You want to have an exclusive contract as soon as possible, to get more money out of your games. A caveat on that: It's better to get an exclusive contract with one of the "big" companies (the ones with five stars) because while they pay less initial money, pay less money per copy, and their contracts are longer, they also have a much larger share than even the 4-stars publishers, so you'll be selling more copies, which means making more money.

- You'll want to research sub-genre and sub-topic as soon as possible. Having those will make your reviews slightly higher, and you can "train" genres you aren't getting contracts for, as well as being able to train two topics at once. The meager $80k you pay for both of those pays itself really, really fast IMO.

[cannedcream]

All the advice above is great, so lemme just tack on a handful more as I can think of them:

1) Max out your created character's Game Design skill. Give the perks like Bugfree, and ones that ensure they don't need breaks or bathroom visits. You'll likely also want to choose ones that give a bonus if they're the lead dev.
1a) If you see any employees for hire also with the bugfree skill early on, don't be afraid to hire them. Being able to pump out games and short contract work faster is usually worth the cost.
1b) NEVER higher Legendary employees, their cost is not worth it. You can maaaaybe hire one super late game when you're rolling in cash and just want the achievement, but there's no other reason to ever buy one that I've found.

2) Pick the Warehouse as your starting location. Not having to buy new rooms to expand is a godsend.

3) Pick something like Skill games or RPGs as your fanbase. Avoid Racing games; you'll rarely be able to make a good one early on.

4) Contracts can be good for grinding experience for topics, consoles, or genres. Ideally, you want to release games with a minimum of 3 stars on everything, as anything lower can bump down the final score.

5) Don't be afraid to get the worst game award early on when you don't have any fans to lose. The 1% boost to game sales isn't much, but it can still be a boon without having to worry about the repercussions.

6) After getting Subtopics and Subgeneres unlocked, go after QA next; the bug fixing, game reports, and Improve Gameplay bonuses will really help early on. The faster you can pump games out into the market, the better.

7) Begin unlocking Graphic Studio, Music Studio, and Motion Capture when you can; always have every improvement for your game when you can afford it.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Good advice, specially on Legendaries. My nickname for them is "Newbie traps" because they're pretty much like the "OOOOH SHINY!" weapons in some RPGs or action games that are actually trash, but a new player will think it awesome and try to use the useless thing, because they don't know better (we've all been newbies, I tried Legendary for my very first run of this game and it thoroughly kicked my ass, a good two years ago.)

For number 3, I've recently figured that going against the slider guides and setting both graphics and sound to 50% for most of development will* get your game to 90% in one or two months. This also works to make adventure games easier to use earlier on.

I mean, on a general rule, avoiding Racing before the eighties is good advice it simply because it has no suitable sub-genre until Action shows up - but you can still get a 90% racing game earlier on. It just takes much more work than the other genres.

For number 6 and 7, as far as the game goes, and once you learn the ropes, you don't need QA until 1980 (as long as you memorize the sliders for the few genre combos worth doing earlier on,) and graphics until at least 1982... Sound can be unlocked even after that. This might be due to the number of employees I use, though, and if using less employees, you may need the bonuses earlier.

QA is the only one I go for earlier (by 1978, usually) because of the faster bugfixing. That lets me make sure I can pop a game out within one month, bug free and with more gameplay points than it will ever need.

I said it elsewhere, but I treat improvements as red flags - if a game doesn't get to at least 90% without improvements, I either need more people, or I need to use a larger game size for that genre.

* Assuming at least four stars to all elements of the game, and at least ten (preferably twenty or more) employees in development.

[Leafar]

Thanks! I will try these tips

[Leafar]

how many programmers, designers, etc are recommended for the initial dev room?

[Kyouko Tsukino]

If you mean how to balance them, that's a thing I never figured out completely. I used to go for 50/50 devs/programmers (and yes, no sound or graphics employees) but nowadays, specially in Legendary, I tend to just hire whoever I can, unless they have the buggy, the "moneybags" or the tree perk, three perks that make employees undesirable, for different reasons.

I also don't build rooms of more than ten people - It's easier to place your lounges and toilets around your studio if your rooms aren't taking a whole building.

[Leafar]

That's what I wanted to know. Thanks!

[Averagedog]

thanks for the good pieces of advice, the mid 80s has been the Great Filter for me and each time I've failed even when I cheated by looking up sliders in desperation. I will eschew legendaries for now on in the early game. The last time I failed, my team of over 20 developers had SIX legendaries in it. My Devcosts per month was over 100,000 and the devcost for a B+ game with about 20 features were anywhere between 700 to 950K before advertisements.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Yeah, that's exactly why I nickname Legendary employees "Newbie Traps." I also fell for how they sounded, at first, but afterwards I noticed that my development costs went down to a tenth of what it was once I tried a run without them, and I still got the same review score by adding more manpower, so I only ever "hire" one Legendary to then kick them out of the building and grabbing the small bonus from the 'achievement.'

Hiring them for their slow hype-building bonus is even sillier nowadays - NPC publishers will do advertisement campaigns for you, and if it's a 5-star publisher, your game will go up to anywhere between 80 to 100 hype, rising your sales a lot. I don't even give my CEO the "star" perk anymore, because it's become obsolete IMO.

[BLACKDIAMONDGTV]

WHAT ABOUT BEST CEO PERKS FOLKS?

[Kyouko Tsukino]

It depends on what you consider to be needed. To me, 90% of the perks are useless - because they require a full room of people with that perk to even work, or require an extra piece of furniture, or just inflate salaries for an unneeded boost.

However, here's my five most used:

- Error-Free. The faster you can get rid of bugs, the faster your team will start polishing the game, the faster you'll get to 80%-100% predicted review rating.
- Talented. Learning skills faster is specially important for who is always the lead of the development team in my playthroughs. Your head developer determines a lot of the speed of your team, and having to waste space and money in training rooms to train your CEO (or anyone else, really) is inefficient.
- Leadership. The tooltip is bad at explaining it, but what it gives your team is bonus speed. I've tested running with and without this perk, and the difference in development speed is noticeable.
- Efficient. The end result is less than the "Luck" perk, but since "Luck" is an RNG-based perk, the average stats gain from Efficient will always be better than once-in-a-while lucky "critical" stats gain. I do this in almost every game, "critical hit" is usually a dump stat for me, I believe in pushing through things through skill, not luck.

Also, I believe your caps lock key is broken. Maybe it's time to replace your keyboard.

[Shateiken]

i set everything on hard and legendary, as hard as it can be and im sitting on like 500m in 2016. I failed a few runs but its possible

[KRT™Red Baron]

Soon as you get ANY legendary person, hire and imidietly dissmis. It costs you nothing, but you get the achievement (for free). On legendary, every 1% counts a tonne.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Originally posted by KRT™Red Baron:

It costs you nothing

It has a non-zero chance to trigger the "bad mood" debuff, lowering the motivation of everyone else and causing all your employees to suddenly feel like they want to play arcade games instead of working. Depending on how well you've built up your offices and your employee settings, you could end up with employees quitting.

So in short, it costs you "nothing" but it's better to save before firing anyone, be it a Legendary or not.