Campaign Difficulty

[Bronzite]

So I'm about 2 hours deep in the campaign right now, and I made it through the first mission by the skin of my teeth, and I've taken two swings at the second mission and gotten taken to the cleaners both times (the first time I actually bankrupted.)

I get the 20-second day thing, and the lack of pausing. This is pretty clearly a multiplayer game that has a campaign as something of an extended tutorial to teach core mechanics and get you used to playing. That's an aggressive choice for the follow-up to TO1, but I'm not going to argue that.

The bigger problem is that if there's a dozen or more contracts, each of which has a couple of data points (unit count, hauling price, destination, due date), that's about 50 or 60 bits of data for me to crunch in 20 seconds just to not do something cataclysmically dumb, let alone do any kind of optimization. Add in tracking shipments that have already been loaded, fuel state, prices, and repair condition of the ship, and that's just an information processing load that's not reasonable for people with less than a few hundred hours on an activity. At the end of 20 seconds (at most), the numbers update, some contracts drop, some are added, and I'm recalculating.

Against other humans, I can see this working. I haven't logged any multiplayer time yet, but I guess I'll have to in order to have the experience this game is clearly trying to give me. What I really want to know is if I'm being really dense here, and if there's something I'm missing that makes these campaign missions even vaguely reasonable.

[Andrea]

As for chapter 2 in particular, I can recommend you to buy a tank ship first. In the tutorial (and in the wharf screen itself) it is explained that tank ships make the most money, so in my opinion you should go for this first to have one (or maybe two) "money maker" ships.
From there on, you have to decide what goal from chapter 2 you want to focus on: only bulk ships, or container ships? Or a whole different strategy.

[Oddible]

The problem with this advice is that the Tutorial locks you into buying a Bulk ship first. In fact, all of the tankers are too expensive to buy as a first ship.

[Dragonsblade]

Originally posted by Oddible:

The problem with this advice is that the Tutorial locks you into buying a Bulk ship first. In fact, all of the tankers are too expensive to buy as a first ship.

Then start over and cancel the tutorial, as I did.

Not finished it yet, but having the tugboats set too always on strike (In the game options), means you save all the tugboat charges (As well as a +10% premium on sales for a perfect dock), and also delays the AI by 1 day per docking.
Could be a huge help, unless you hate the manual docking minigame.

Update: just finished it with 50 million on the bank, and 5 tankers, 2 container, and 3 bulk.
Noticed that on a couple of docks I got a +50 increase to profits at that port.
I did however change back to the recommended level on tug strikes due to a bug i got.
If you want too check it out, this is my post about it.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/350110/discussions/1/2860219962102305027/