How to Bankrupt the Competition while getting richer and Managing Salaries

[jamie.santavy]

Hey everyone, I know this discussion board is basically dead but I've picked up a couple tricks in my time playing so I wanted to leave them here since there's basically nothing you're going to find in a google search that's going to help you learn to play this game better. I had intended to be brief, but I tend to get carried away at times so I apologize for the long read.

There's several ways to get one or more of your opponents' casino floors shut down which will hurt opponent cash flows (and presumably boost yours if they come to your casino) as well as one clever way to cheat them out of all of their money.

The two most common ways casino floors get shut down and the police get called and those are attacks by hitmen, and too many hookers. Hookers are a great way to harrass your competition without triggering a violent response if you can afford it because it closes down the whole casino and comes with a whopping $10,000 fine but typically you're not going to be able to afford to really bankrupt anyone with them.

Hitmen are great but if you're planning to use them to take out your opponent you have to be ready to go to war and expect that your own casino is also going to take some losses along the way. I prefer to use them as more of a finishing blow against my opponents. Using a hitman usually results in police coming to that specific floor of the casino. I've found that on half speed sometimes I can kill all of the staff on a floor before police arrive on half speed and I can go to other floors and take out the staff on other floors as well. Your opponent will be fined separately for each floor you can commit a shooting or plant a bomb on.

Other ways you can get your opponent temporarily shut down or fined are too much trash, or too many fights, the former will likely never come into play for harrassing your competition, but the latter can be extremely useful for harrassing the AI.

More importantly there's a MUCH faster and more effective way of bankrupting your opponents without using any of these methods, and here's how it works.

First get at least 2 high roller cheats (against a highly profitable opponent this may not be enough) but preferably all 5 of your cheats should be high rollers of any level. You also want to get a full complement of troublemakers, but social class is much less important for them.

While you're waiting to get your high roller cheats I'd recommend micro managing your trouble makers to spike drinks on the gambling floor of the casino you intend to bankrupt. They rarely get caught and hurt your opponent multiple ways. Customers who have been spiked don't gamble and they also harrass employees and visitors.

Another thing you can do with your trouble makers to make them more useful is offend floormen and dealers, but this will likely get your trouble maker disciplined. Keep an eye on how many bouncers your opponent has though. If they only have 1 or two you can actually send another trouble maker to fight the bouncer and give you a chance to send the other one home before he gets disciplined.

If the opponents dealers suck they will make less money, if their floormen suck cheating will be easier so these are the two most important employee types to harrass. There's no way of telling what caliber their employees are, but we do know the majority of the time there isn't an abundance of high level dealers or floormen available for hire.

After you have your high roller cheats, send them all to act innocently at the same casino and do the same with all of your trouble makers. When everyone is in position manually send your cheats to cheat at the same table and keep a trouble maker nearby. Whenever you think a floorman is about to start watching the table your cheats are playing at, move to half speed and send a trouble maker to fight that floorman. If you do it in half speed you can often trigger the fight and get the floorman away from that table while still saving the troublemaker by hitting the send home button and ending the fight before getting bouncer attention. The floorman should continue his rounds at whichever table he was going to after your cheat table. If one of your cheats get caught you can fight the bouncer with your trouble maker to get your cheat out of there.

5 high roller cheats uninterrupted generate $3500 per hand they play combined. After they wipe out your opponent's cash reserve you'll notice they start selling attractions, usually starting with entertainment.

Eventually they will shut down all of their tables or you will tire of waiting for them to go out of business. At this point you can send a hitman to finish the job. Bankrupting opponents this way also tends to net between 60-80k profit when your cheats finally return

When it comes to general casino profitability it's all about managing how much you pay in salaries. You need high level dealers to run roulette, blackjack, poker games, and the money wheel because those are the attractions that only have one dealer. However with games like Baccarat and Roulette there's no issue using level 1 dealers. If you only have low level dealers available those are the table games you should stick to offering, level 1 and 2 dealers are usually pretty awful running a table alone.

Don't hire too many floormen. This was the big mistake I made for a very long time. Floormen are expensive, especially high level ones (higher level means less false cheat identification) but you really only need 1 for about every 3 or 4 tables you want to run. I try not to hire floormen less than 3 stars, and preferably 5 stars. As long as you don't over hire you can afford the extra cost

Don't hire too much security. On a casino floor I usually use 2 bouncers and 2 security from the beginning, and add a third once the casino starts getting more visitors. I'll hire a 4th security if an opponent swears revenge on me. From my experience the fine from hitmen attacks are pretty random. I've had 10 security guards on a floor and gotten fined 12k, and I've had half that on a floor and only gotten fined 6k. I don't hate paying up for 2 star employees here because it helps you identify trouble makers and reduces the chance your bouncers kill people.

Always hire level 1 janitors, hosts, cashiers, bartenders, servers, maintenence, etc.

There may be situations where you want to hire higher level janitors, and that's if you have a crowded casino floor and you're finding that janitors are taking up a lot of space. Most of the time though it's not a problem. For the most part the most useful thing about having high level employees for hosts, cashiers, bartenders, and servers is they notify you of disturbances, but I already pay up a little on security for that.

Lastly, never give raises, always give bonuses.

Eventually you may want to give the entire staff an extra $1 or 2 after the city average raises, but that's it. Usually if staff are unhappy its because somebody is harrassing them and that's the problem you need to correct.

I realized salaries were my biggest problem when I had over 60% market share of gambling one game and was barely making any money becuase I was paying almost $10k in salaries per day.

Since then I've found it incredibly easy to get my first casino off the ground in almost every scenario. If you're still on the first scenario specifically you always start with 5 and 4 star dealers available so you can easily make $20k profit per day with 6 tables, 2 floormen, 3 bouncers, 0 security (no hitmen on the first map), and a handful of level 1 janitors, once the advertising opens up you should be sitting on plenty of cash.

[LAURELINAD]

Congratulation, it's a good useful guide. I have a question; you wrote about using hookers on a competition if I understood well, I play this game since years probably hundreds of hours I've spent, but I've never heard about sending hookers or something, is it possible can you explain?

In addition, in cheap locations too many hookers coming to your casinos, better moving to a good location.

Yesterday I achieved 70 high roller visit in a day, in dolarrington, it was extremely hard and took my hours, I needed buying all buildings on map, finally I had 30 casinos. That's the only way to achieve that objective.

[jamie.santavy]

I think the objective for high rollers in dollarington is one of those very annoying objectives where its based off your previous performance. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure the objective would actually be something like "increase high rollers visiting your casinos by 20" or "get twice as many high rollers to visit your casino"

In order to complete these maps a very significant portion of doing it in a timely or reasonable fashion is too make sure your casinos aren't too successful. So many objectives involve increasing your daily takings or market share by a fixed % that they become incredibly difficult to complete if you are already highly successful. I can definitely say I never came anywhere near 30 casinos in any given game.

As far as hookers are concerned on any map where they are present there is an icon on the left hand side of the screen under your build options which shows how many hookers will visit any particular establishment in the city. In that menu there are + / - buttons which allow you to send more hookers to a particular establishment, or reduce the hookers going to a certain establishment for a fee. It's $5000 to add one, and $2000 to subtract one, and that number resets to 0 every time an establihsment gets raided for too many hookers.

Id say they are the least effective harrassment of the AI as you can send a dozen to a rival casino and they may still kick out enough to avoid being shut down and can pay down the number of hookers visiting cheaper than you can hire them. When I had more money than I needed it was a very nice way to bring the hammer down on rivals when used in combination with hitmen, cheats, and troublemakers.

If nothing else protecting cheats with your trouble makers is an easy way to hit any seemingly unaittainable daily takings objectives if you already have the market fairly saturated.

[SutterCane]

When ever I see a rival has opened a new location I immediately send all my cheats there. It always takes a little while for the AI to build up a floor and it seems they always build the table games before hiring a floorman. This leaves a bit of a grace period where you can have all your cheats constantly cheating and making money with zero threat of being caught. Once they bring security on board I'll just shuffle them around the tables to avoid the floorman or just send them home if there is too much security.

This works for trouble makers as well although not as well because it seems the AI will usually hire bouncers before floormen.