Schedule 1's endgame is unreasonable

[「AMOEBA」]

As I finally achieve my first million in this game, I think I've reached a valid point in this game where I can say from experience that Schedule 1's endgame is atrocious. I get that Tyler probably wasn't expecting this game to get nearly as big as it has, but considering the achievements he willingly put into the game, he clearly expected his players to play this game for some amount of time which is why I feel somewhat justified in making this post.

Now this isn't a "waah I can't get my achievement" post, but I think the fact that a 10 million net worth achievement exists shines a big light on how poorly thought out this game's endgame is and I'd like to highlight some of the biggest issues I've faced and hopefully offer some solutions on how they can be resolved. In my opinion these are in order of importance so if Tyler graces this thread, he can have some idea on what to improve upon or put in his development cycle. I'd like to offer both an easy to implement solution as well as a harder, more long term solution to each problem so this doesn't seem like a long rant and again produce some direction to Tyler who I'm sure has ideas on how to move forward already.

Overall we all want the same things, we want this game to be better and I don't want Tyler to feel like he did a bad job, he didn't. I would just like this game to have a fulfilling progression from beginning to end and here are my suggestions on how to do so. The following suggestions in my opinion are in order of importance:

1. Schedule 1's endgame is a delivery simulator - Once you're able to justify building and producing enough product to support 3-6 dealers as well as your own personal clients, you quickly start to realize that maintaining this level of production is not fun in the slightest. Rather than exploring and making deals, you're constantly ordering deliveries or doing them yourself and driving them to where they need to go. This is extremely time-consuming, monotonous, and overall a stark contrast to the enjoyment Schedule 1's early game offers.

Solution: Improve the delivery app - this is one of the easiest things to do and it's so essential I would recommend anybody who hates this portion of the game to download any of the delivery mods available. I promise it is gamechanging. I'm talking about saving favorite deliveries so you don't have to reenter the same order, over and over again, setting up recurring deliveries. Another change I'd recommend is:

Add an unloader/delivery worker - Even though the delivery system is now improved, you still have to be physically be there to unload the product and organize it for your employees to use. Hire someone to do it for you! That's what I'm paying them for after all. Heck you can ever tack it onto the cleaner worker's duties, hardly anybody uses them anyway so now they'll have more of a use in the game.


2. Schedule 1's endgame has next to no scaling - What do I mean by this? Let's say you're at coke, you're making good money but you realize there's nothing left to go for. You say okay, and experiment or look up to eventually find the most optimal $735 mixture to maximize your profits. Now what? Well... nothing. There's nothing left. You've unlocked all the dealers, you've maximized all of your locations productions. There's nothing left. You want to keep playing the game, so you look up the achievements and you see 2 standouts. Achieve $1 million networth and Achieve $10 million networth. How the hell are you supposed to do that in any reasonable amount of time?

Solution, there's a few: Give customers more money to spend - It's dumb, but realistically this is the easiest thing to do. You can even add a condition so that for example once you unlock the last couple of areas, everybody starts getting more money to spend so it doesn't ruin earlier portions of the game.

Let the player list products for more than $999 - Same as the previous, it's dumb, but come on I know these guys have more money, let me get it.

Add a better money-sink than the Casino - The Casino's purpose, outside of giving fun minigames, is to be a money-sink. The problem is it does a bad job of it once you're at even a medium networth. You can only bet $500 which will hardly make any sort of a dent in your cashflow when you're selling coke for upwards of $1500 a pop to your highspending customers. Adding a higher limit to the casino, adding new games like horse racing, or even adding a stock market option could alleviate some of the woes players are feeling at this stage of the game

Add another product beyond coke - It sounds simple, I get it though, this one is hard. I'm not expecting it any time soon tbh.

3. Schedule 1's endgame doesn't have anything to do - It seems like Tyler already has plans for this like Police Raids being the most up to date example which is why this problem is at the bottom of the list. Even if the endgame is fixed, you're still doing the same thing over and over again, it gets boring ya know?

Solution: Make the police stronger - Right now the police have checkpoints setup but nothing feels like it's justifying it. Maybe make it so the more outrageous your products' effects are, the more police walk around? Maybe the more you get caught out of curfew, more checkpoints pop up or police are on patrol making deals harder? Maybe even your suppliers refuse to show up if there's too much heat?

Add cartel/gang wars - There's the mysterious cartel that we hear about in the beginning of the game that never once comes up again. Maybe in the future Tyler can take some time to expand on this? Maybe make a territory system where some customers won't buy from you if the cartel have control over a certain area?

Just some thoughts, I really enjoy this game and honestly Tyler don't let the pressure get to you, if you need help from other developers or have to take a break, by all means do it. It's just a game after all and you've made your well deserved bag.

[COVID-19]

He hasn't released an endgame yet. It's early access.

[This PC]

too long didn't read
you got 40 hours out of the first release of the game, you got value, and you're gonna get more when dude adds content at this extreme end. Them achievements aren't tuned for current version of the game, cause then they'll be invalid once dude adds additional stuff on top.

[veek]

If you have million, would truly play coop. friend me.

[Mr. Rubber Ducky]

Yeah there's not much to do in end-game, there's no content for it simply. With time it'll improve, hopefully.

[Sistermatic™]

Given it's not finished, 'endgame' is a premature call. What you meant to say is you have met the end of current content and that is why $10 million seems so far away once you have $1 million.

Also at coke, also at 1 mil.
Money are pointless. In early / mid game, you spend money on upgrading your production so you can get more money. But at the end game, there is no goal, so its just pointless.
Most hated part about this whole thing for me is having to deal with... dealers. They sell for about 5-9k each day, but as soon as you make enough product in time, you end up having those running around with full inventory of coke / meth blocks. I'd say it would be cool if we could have some sort of "export". Like a new type of distribution where you have to place a huge chunk of your product somewhere on the map for a massive price.
Property / cars are also useless. Like we have 40k mustang as the most expensive vehicle, yet why do I buy it in the first place if the Golden Skateboard is just better for any task?
I also hate the fact that botanists cannot use water / soil thingies and do that stuff manually.
It would be also cool to have some sort of rivalry. When we first arrive at the city, our RV is blown up with a message that implies we have to stay low and expect danger. But there is no dagnder, besider a few coppers here and there that could be easely avoided.

Overall, I hope Tyler does the same thing he expects players to do, but IRL. Invest money from selling the game to expand the studio and have multiple people assigned for different tasks, so the game could catch up with its playerbase.

[perverb]

The game is presently a framework. It's a fun gameplay loop. If you look at the roadmap you'll see some of the missing pieces. Things like heat will make you balance your max efficiency operation against raid risk. Raids will act as a moneysink and temporary setbacks to overcome.

I enjoy games like factorio and the ilk where you're fiddling to get exact ratios and perfect efficiency, so I got a lot of time out of what already exists. I enjoy giving myself superpowers with weed and bouncing across the map to do deliveries. There's a lot there already for what is essentially an alpha product. Tyler seems a relatively new dev, he makes some (no offence) amateur mistakes. He also is quick to fix the issues that he can fix quickly and is clearly putting a lot of hours into trying to give us the best product that he can. A product that we paid very little for. I've certainly gotten my money's worth five times over even if it never progressed beyond this.

I'm also the sort of person who can get fun out of self-imposed limitations, like a weed-only run I did for a while, or playing around with pretending I can't just smack every cop with a machete twice and take them out, or stop them from shooting me by crossing into and out of their arrest radius. I dunno, man, play it like a D&D campaign where minmaxing yourself into a god isn't maybe the best approach.

I'm not nolifing this like I was at the start, but I still fire it up for a little bit most days and mess around. I'm interested to see what it turns into.

[「AMOEBA」]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Kitty uwu:

Diposting pertama kali oleh 「AMOEBA」:

~You didn't need to copy paste my whole thing my guy~

Your post was sort of invalidated after you said one single thing. You looked up the most effective mix. You did this to yourself, you don't have to sell a mix of 8 different ingredients per product, you're quite literally shooting yourself in the foot by A.) ruining the discovery of new effects and worthwhile ones by simply googling the best one and B.) actually trying to mix it

Alright bud.

First of all, that's not what I said. This is what I said:

Diposting pertama kali oleh 「AMOEBA」:

Let's say you're at coke, you're making good money but you realize there's nothing left to go for. You say okay, and experiment or look up to eventually find the most optimal $735 mixture to maximize your profits. Now what?

It is what the cool kids would call, a hypothetical. I'm putting you in the position of endgame Schedule 1 that I am describing. That regardless of how you got to this position, whether through grinding and experimentation or by looking up the best mixes, you will end up at the same place. This is such an inconsequential line in my post yet it's the one you decided to focus on for some reason instead of my genuine criticisms with the game.

Second of all, even if that is what I did, or what anybody did, who are you the judge them? This is a game about selling illegal substances to people, maxing out their addictions so you can price gouge them. There are people who have gotten to a million net worth purely off of gambling without interacting with the core mechanics of the game at all. It's a silly single player simulator game. What does it matter how someone chooses to play it?

Third of all, to reiterate on my first post, even if you didn't use the optimal mix to get to the endgame, you will still end up at this point in the game. You will still be running around making sure your workers are well-stocked to continue your operations, you will still be running around collecting product to distribute to your dealers and then you gotta either figure out when to sell your product throughout the day or wait until 4AM and drag out the night to get it done.

Come on bruh

[Seeker]

What drugs would be beyond cocaine? Is'nt that already the most expensive drugs for the rich? The onyl ways I can see getting the profits beyond locally automatically selling coke like this, would be to take it global, or expand into those different profit like passive income such as stocks, buying more businesses that would actually make you significant money instead of just laundering. But of course, then it wouldn't really be about drugs anymore, so i guess international bulk smuggling might be the only way forward.

[AStonyYoshi]

its a waaaa post when they say this isnt a waa post its a waaaa post

[ZoidFlanders]

Diposting pertama kali oleh AStonyYoshi:

its a waaaa post when they say this isnt a waa post its a waaaa post

Exactly

>claims it's not a waaah post
>Proceeds to cry for 14 paragraphs about how an unfinished early access game released less than a month ago is *shockingly* unfinished

Must be a child making this post...

[Ykario]

I mean, it's a sandbox game. All these games have a boring "end game" (even if it's not the end game yet, just unfinished) because, well, it's a sandbox. Once you have everything, and did everything, there's nothing much to do anymore.

They could add any number of new things to do that you'll still end up at some point or another with "nothing more to do".

And we already have a lot of things coming in the future to expand on the game, like shrooms, probably a map expansion, gang wars etc.

[Kitty uwu]

Diposting pertama kali oleh 「AMOEBA」:

Diposting pertama kali oleh Kitty uwu:

Your post was sort of invalidated after you said one single thing. You looked up the most effective mix. You did this to yourself, you don't have to sell a mix of 8 different ingredients per product, you're quite literally shooting yourself in the foot by A.) ruining the discovery of new effects and worthwhile ones by simply googling the best one and B.) actually trying to mix it

Alright bud.

First of all, that's not what I said. This is what I said:

Diposting pertama kali oleh 「AMOEBA」:

Let's say you're at coke, you're making good money but you realize there's nothing left to go for. You say okay, and experiment or look up to eventually find the most optimal $735 mixture to maximize your profits. Now what?

It is what the cool kids would call, a hypothetical. I'm putting you in the position of endgame Schedule 1 that I am describing. That regardless of how you got to this position, whether through grinding and experimentation or by looking up the best mixes, you will end up at the same place. This is such an inconsequential line in my post yet it's the one you decided to focus on for some reason instead of my genuine criticisms with the game.

Second of all, even if that is what I did, or what anybody did, who are you the judge them? This is a game about selling illegal substances to people, maxing out their addictions so you can price gouge them. There are people who have gotten to a million net worth purely off of gambling without interacting with the core mechanics of the game at all. It's a silly single player simulator game. What does it matter how someone chooses to play it?

Third of all, to reiterate on my first post, even if you didn't use the optimal mix to get to the endgame, you will still end up at this point in the game. You will still be running around making sure your workers are well-stocked to continue your operations, you will still be running around collecting product to distribute to your dealers and then you gotta either figure out when to sell your product throughout the day or wait until 4AM and drag out the night to get it done.

Come on bruh

I'm not the one crying about there being nothing to do. You're playing a game similar to games like trading card game simulator, and gas station simulator. Managing your drug empire IS the game. It just sounds to me like you dislike simulator games which is perfectly fine, its just kinda wild that you expect some kind of end game like this is WoW or something

[Des]

Agreed that the late game needs work. I'm pretty sure the dev knows this and is working on it, but I am not sure how much of a priority it has, given his roadmap. I don't think raids / gang wars will necessarily solve this problem, it only solves part of it. Making an exciting end game that is scaleable is actually really hard, I think. I recently played a game called A Game About Digging A Hole (I found this and Schedule I both from jackcepticeye) and I finished the game in 2 hours. Game devs often don't know how to do this properly.

Your solution to this problem doesn't really solve it though. Customers being able to buy more product from you actually accelerates the issue. You'll be able to reach $10M faster, but you're still doing the same thing over and over. The learning curve is steep in the early game, especially when moving from weed to meth and the amount of freedom that it gives you. An additional learning curve in the mid to late game would be necessary, something to keep it challenging and mix in a bit of that chaos that we all experienced in the first 20 or so hours of the game.

Also, the stuff you buy in the mid-late game should be more expensive. Barn and Docks should be obtained much further into the game, Docks especially. I also think the area difference between Bungalow and Barn is huge, and the difference between Barn and Docks is not. Once you have the Barn you can scale your production to the extent as to make anything in the game obtainable in a short amount of time, with very little reason to buy the Docks. Add another property between Bungalow and Barn. Existing properties, businesses, equipment and items should be more expensive, and there should be more items we can buy, with more upgrades for each.