How do i get a 90-100 rating?

[ThatOneCookie]

Ive trained all my programmers/game designers to max what am i missing? is experience apart of reaching that?

[Kyouko Tsukino]

It's only based on luck. There's a very small chance for any game that hits 98% review score to get 99% instead, and an even smaller chance for it to get 100%. However, other than the achievement, and a small difference in sales you don't need (even in Legendary,) there's no real value in 100% games over 98% games.

And training is just a money sink. You can get by 1990 with employees at 40 skill, if you have enough employees, and by endgame (2030-2040) you won't need anyone above 70 skill. You can replace employees, and they'll naturally reach those skill thresholds unless you're just letting them sit on their thumbs for weeks.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by ThatOneCookie:

Ive trained all my programmers/game designers to max what am i missing? is experience apart of reaching that?

If the question is about getting a review score in the 90% - 100% bracket rather than about getting a 'perfect' review score, either you're not scoring enough 'points' in each category or your slider settings are too far away from the 'ideal' values for the amount of 'points' that you're generating. Look at the review's category breakdown, see what areas are low, put more emphasis on them next time around, maybe spend a bit more time polishing or a bit more money on the 'improvements' offered by whichever supporting rooms affect the lowest scores.

The thing most likely holding your scores down is "Controls," which are the "Technical" (green) points primarily generated by Programmer-type employees, as the support room that boosts this score (the Motion Capture Studio) is a late unlock in the unmodded game, only becoming available in November '93. Filling most of the seats in your Development Room with Programmers until the Motion Capture Studio becomes available can help with this; other options include skewing the design priorities towards "Technical" at the start of development (e.g. by taking five points off the 'ideal' setting in each category other than Technical, for example using 20-20-20-40 instead of 25-25-25-25 for a Platformer) or spending a week or two after the end of primary development in "Polishing" with the design priorities set to heavily emphasize "Technical."

Also, yes, experience - both the 'stars' in genre/topic/features and employee skill level - does play a role in achieving high review scores, though unless your employees' skills are abysmally low for the period this shouldn't be a serious constraint on achievable review scores past the early '80s at the latest (assuming a 1976 start).

[Kyouko Tsukino]

I misunderstood that question. Should not browse anything without coffee in my system. Anyhow, 90-100% review prediction happens when your actual review score is 95 or more, and it can still happen if your control is down in the 80%-89% range, but it's unlikely if it's falling way lower than that.

The only time period where the tanking of control points is almost unavoidable is in the 1988-1993 period, you need to have a lot of programmers to make up for the sudden extreme need for control points all genres get. For some reason the game punishes you for not having something you can't have yet. "Smart design choices 101."

I usually don't fall below 90% because I'm always over-staffed... And I discovered you only ever need one game designer, unless for some "roleplaying" reason you want to cripple your efficiency by splitting your workforce. So I have one Game Designer, my CEO. Once MoCap shows up I move some of my programmers there (you don't need that many MoCap employees, comparatively, to let it do its job fast enough.)