So I´m Tycoon, what now....

[job]

Ok, I eventually made it, and now I´m a tycoon. I purchased some ULCVs, just to sell them immediately as they are more or less useless. A good New Panamax ship holds almost the same weight and container number but can go through the Panama canal and is way more responsive when steering manually.

Besides that, there is no real reason to keep on playing. The economy simulation is at best shallow, there is no way to lose money, if you just grab the best contract a city has to offer and don´t even look if there are other contracts that would complement nicely, but just sort contracts by rate, take the first and go, you will earn money. There is really no way to lose money, you don´t have to pay wages, you don´t have to pay harbour fees except for the tugs, but even those are way too cheap, as even with New Panamax ships, 800k per tug, you just cannot lose money. I´ve got a fleet of 30 ships now, mostly post/new panamax but I also kept 4 panamax vessels, nad I earn more than 1 billion every month, even though I buy any Super Scale D I can get my hands on.

So after reaching the highest possible level, there actually is no reason to keep on playing, but getting richer and richer, even tough i admit that would be a reason in real life, it´s not enough to keep me playing in a game.

Don´t want to complain though, I got almost 60 hours on the clock, that´s not too bad for a 22 bucks game.

[Zaggeh]

What do you feel could make the game more interesting for you and encourage you to keep playing after you max out your career and start making money so crazy fast that nothing really matters anymore?

It's a hard issue to address. The only thing I could possibly think of would be some sort of leaderboard system, but there's a whole slew of issues with that, mostly being the fact that it would be too easy to cheat and they'd have to look out for offensive company names and stuff, overall it'd be nice but it's probably more headache and hassle than it's worth.

[Bole]

You can manually tug your 10 ship fleet all day long. Now you tell me this isnt fun.

Seriously this could lead to a good game. Drop the manual tugging. Impement some conceptual depth instead of fillers like tugging, manual refilling, and manual assigning every single contract.

[Señor Kerman]

As it is now, I'm not sure there is much more to do once making Tycoon. I agree thought that nearly 60 hours on $22 is a pretty good deal.

[job]

Well I only have 60 hours on the clock because I manually steered a lot, really a lot, ingame stats say I made more than 500 arrivals/departures manually, I just stopped doing it when I got to the last rank before tycoon as my fleet was already more than 20 ships and one ingame month took me almost 8 hours, and I was really interested in those ULCVs, so I went over to automatic tugs, to get the requirements done as fast as possible. Now I do regret it, as those ships aren´t worth the effort, New Panamax ships are way better.

What would add playability in my opinion would be other companies, companies you actually have to compete against for the best contracts, having an online version is maybe asked to much, but they could add an economic simulation, in the moment this game is a harbour-simulator with a little background added. They did not even add some standard statistics, namely excel-style profit and loss at the very least. There is not even a list of all your ships, you have to click through all of them, one at a time, if you are looking for info. There is a lack of nearly all information you would want to have at hand if you really led a company, no matter what kind of company.

But of course it is true, you don´t need this information, no matter what you do, you will earn money. It doesn´t matter if you constantly refuel for 730+, it doesn´t matter if you select the route by money / distance to get the most profitable route and not only the one that gives you the highest sum, but takes you once across the whole planet. It doesn´t matter if you manually steer and save tug-costs or not. All of these only makes you earn money a little bit slower, but you really cannot lose money.

I know of gamers who enter the information of the arrival information screen into an excel table to build a pivot table out of it, to then be able to look at the information the game should give you, but that makes them even earn money faster. So if you want to win the big game as defined by Danny de Vito in other peoples money virtually in a game, this could be the way to do it, but the second there is no target to reach anymore it gets old in a matter of minutes.

[charnode]

I haven't reached Tycoon yet and probably never will. The special missions are just too boring and dull and unfortunately mandatory to get to that rank (who came up with such game design should be insta-fired, just saying).

I figured that there might be no more game worth playing once getting to be a Tycoon, which is sad as there are plenty of trade sims out there that show what you could do by bringing in auto trade routes, and actual money sinks so you would have to figure out how to be profitable. The investor was a minor annoyance in financial terms already , and a very stupid choice, I'd rather have the possibility of getting a loan for the first ship, but hey then nobody would take away money and you would have a 5 hour game at hand until you're Tycoon and then what?

Overall it's sad, they game has a lot of potential but ultimately just boils down to the same old boring clickfest of accepting and fullfilling contracts.

[moosc]

I think we all forget that the point of a game is to finish it and hopefully win.

There are few that you can play forever and that is as it ought to be.

Perhaps the addition of a degree of difficulty is what the game needs. Then you could restart the game on a higher level which would make the profits less or increase the costs to add the complexity?

Neil W