What is up with difficulty in unlock the world mode?

[Elondre]

Litteraly can't spend more than 15mns before game over. Tried the old strat of doing the cheapest links everywhere possible (before that I was doing shortest path to "big" city in every country i unlocked and linking those big cities when possible), even with that, time runs out before enough money arrives in to get the third country. When I played last year the beginning was very easy. What is up right now? Wanted to chill and play, am now angry and won't. Lmao.

Main reason I think is that most short travel litteraly don't give any money anymore, when starting in germany, passengers are worth under 1$ per trip, its crazy.

[Resident007]

Hello. You can ask other players for advice and discuss various strategies on our Discord server: https://discord.gg/9eHyYap

[Boaty McBoatface]

The balance is definitively off. To me it becomes unbeatable after a certain time, new connections prices go way up but not earnings so you just run out of money. Its unfortunate it used to be a rather relaxing mode.

[Elondre]

I knew "skill issue" was gonna come up. But no, for real, I already did two unlock the world playthroughs before, going like 2/3rds in on first shot, then 3/4th in on second shot.
Trying now litteraly does not work, any strategy I used to use does not work. ANY. The short trips just give 0 most of the time, making the game unplayable at the beginning. THAT IS, if you are not just game-over'd by RNG events that -600 you when you are at 100 money, lol.

[poomanchu]

Same boat. I've tried several attempts at Discover the World recently and money generation seems to stall out around 65%. From there it feels like a losing battle. Investing in long-connect areas like China/USA/Indonesia feels impossible -- money is spent faster than it can be generated. You start making compromises to your routes, making them less efficient in order to make cash in the short term. (but then that can have a cascading effect as well) Also, the RNG is terrible. Air shows have never been worth it -- I think I've only ever won 2 in all of my playthroughs. The charity event used to at least break-even, but this last game I went negative -23,000 and only got 1400 out of the lifetime ticket. Ad campaigns, etc. seem to also have the same chance as the air show. At this point, it feels like Discover the World is only fun if you just want to play to around 50/60%. I have enjoyed part of the game, so I won't give it a thumbs down, but I also think I'm done playing it.

[Late555]

Would it be churlish to suggest the devs try playing the game? They'd see the difficulty level is definitely amiss. I consider myself good at the game and I struggle with DTW even when save-scumming every tick.

The difficulty definitely needed to be ranked up - the game used to be laughable easy - but this is madness.

I stopped playing a few months back because the game was so buggy and unbalanced, and returned this week to find it's still buggy and unbalanced but they've added stamps. Stamps FFS. Yep, that's what we wanted... 🙄

[Resident007]

We'll check the difficulty of Discover the World and update you once we do that.

[Mendo]

Originally posted by Resident007:

We'll check the difficulty of Discover the World and update you once we do that.

+1 on the to difficult part. I was on 250.000 Money on 53% and this is when it just kept trickling down. At 69% unlocking america and crossing the Atlantic killed me.


This stops one from making the network more efficent and makes the game frustrating (to close to home in todays economy ^^)

[Neo LeDragon]

Like for example, I couldn't start generate income in Daily #28 challenge today with public test.

[MalPikkewyn]

Noticed the same. Came back to the game after a while and in the last two weeks could not last longer than 15-20 minutes in three separate attempts.......

[Cent]

I managed to beat DtW quite recently and in my second attempt last week I successfully got the "Large Territories" Achievement and continued until 64% countries unlocked, with 135 min to unlock the next one, and about 566.000 in cash, which seems pretty unlosable to me (have not finished that playthrough yet, though).

But this thread made me wonder if a recent update has rendered DtW impossible to complete. It made me curious because I think that way about the "Volatile Passenger Flow" scenario (I complained about that here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1372530/discussions/0/4347743930587199849/#c6989114975921875717 ).
So, yesterday I started a completely new DtW run (to really be sure I play the current game version). And what shall I say... I just completed it without reloads. It required tedious micromanaging at times; and bad luck (maybe a bit of cockiness on my part as well, but definitely also the game throwing a lot of crap at me) got me really close to losing about 75% in, but even more tedious micromanaging and good luck with random events got me out of that.

My overall opinion on this matter is that, while certainly not easy, in principle DtW is definitely completable.
HOWEVER, as things are it also is not much fun (I wrote "tedious micromanaging" earlier; among other things that included enduring overflow timers constantly beeping, my god they are so annoying...) and a little too dependent on luck (a bit more of bad luck with random events or which new countries to unlock next would've definitely made me lose).

The necessity of tedious micromanaging could easily be resolved by lowering passenger spawn rates (raising ticket prices / lowering costs accordingly) or allowing more than five planes per route (or bigger planes). But with the way routes, money generation and passenger flow work at the moment the thing I'd like the most to change about DtW is the following:
One of the main problems that got me on the brink of losing was the random selection of the next country I had to unlock. Here, the main culprits were
1) USA right after Iceland, without Greenland or Canada
2) Venezuela (!) while having nothing unlocked south of the USA.
This both should not happen in my opinion. It requires very expensive routes that are too long to handle passenger flow in the medium and long run (to illustrate: at one point in my current playthrough the route Ankara-Baghdad (!) proved to be too long to handle the passenger flow even with five level 6 planes).
Therefore I suggest that both Iceland AND Greenland (and maybe even Canada) should be a necessary unlock before USA. And regarding Venezuela, either make something like Cuba a prerequisite or start South America with Barbados or maybe Suriname and Guyana (establishing an Africa-South America route and leaving more time to properly upgrade it before big South American cities flood it with passengers).

PS: The long-distance pathfinding of passengers is ridiculous. But I understand that this is addressed in the new beta. Otherwise I would definitely have mentioned this as another thing that I want to see changed, since it also made the playthrough unnecessarily (and frustratingly) harder.

Originally posted by Xuthus:

Like for example, I couldn't start generate income in Daily #28 challenge today with public test.

@Xuthus: I agree with you on that challenge you mentioned. I had tried it on that day. After several tries I managed to survive the 30min, but still was 40K short of the goal, so I wonder how one was supposed to beat that challenge without some incredible luck (like getting several money gifts from random events).

[Elondre]

A non-negligible factor i found out after a while, is how disruptive the RNG events are when you begin, and how utterly useless most of them become as soon as mid-game starts.
The lawyer ones can DESTROY you early, but can be totally ignored late. The air shows are almost always a bad decision, same for charity, same for ticket prices fluctuations... Feels like their values don't scale properly, and the odds are not clear enough to understand.

[howard.liang]

Originally posted by Elondre:

A non-negligible factor i found out after a while, is how disruptive the RNG events are when you begin, and how utterly useless most of them become as soon as mid-game starts.
The lawyer ones can DESTROY you early, but can be totally ignored late. The air shows are almost always a bad decision, same for charity, same for ticket prices fluctuations... Feels like their values don't scale properly, and the odds are not clear enough to understand.

This is still a major, major problem in the current version. The events just feel completely stupid early game, like it makes zero sense being there and is absolutely absurd.

This is like trying to play football against Lionel Messi then getting trounced and then getting hit with the good ol' 'skill issue'.