Any tips on how to start up

[CJB]

i have played many times and my company allways goes bankrupt or fails when i try to develope something of my own. any tips

[Czikenos.]

I do contracts/deals until my character is well rounded. Develop my own stuff while doing contracts/deals when he's decent in a few feilds and then start hiring when I can afford to.

[Faithwins]

a 2d editor is the key for the start, don't hire anyone and spend the less that you can in construction, do some contracts while you are developing

[BaskB]

Contracts plus work on own 2d editor, no need for staff until after your first release.

If you want to cheese your first millions, add in a reception desk asap and take hosting or printing deals and profit

[Faithwins]

Originally posted by BaskB:

Contracts plus work on own 2d editor, no need for staff until after your first release.

If you want to cheese your first millions, add in a reception desk asap and take hosting or printing deals and profit

I never tried that kind of business, to have a lot of servers and printers and rent them, does it give good money?

[trevorhater2004]

if your a begginer, just start with 500,000. that will make it easy to get a piece of software out before you go bankruped.

[Johann]

I played Alpha 9 a few times and every time my company would go bankrupt. I couldn't support it with contract work either. Like "sammy" said, I found it the most effective to start with $500,000. I hired an employee right away and made a small office. My first piece of software, a Financial CMS, was okay and made me $237,794. My second piece of software, a 2D Editor, made me $8,953,370. I also found it the most affective to hire someone for about $2,500 a month, and then train them to have almost perfect stats. Then they will be good in everything, and you can set their role to "Any Role", and they will always work. This will also make it so that you won't have to pay as much monthly for salaries, but you will have to pay for their education, and wait for them to finish being educated.

[CJB]

thanks all for your tips

[BaskB]

Originally posted by Faithwins:

Originally posted by BaskB:

Contracts plus work on own 2d editor, no need for staff until after your first release.

If you want to cheese your first millions, add in a reception desk asap and take hosting or printing deals and profit

I never tried that kind of business, to have a lot of servers and printers and rent them, does it give good money?

Easiest way to make money by far, (hench my cheese comment) hosting you usually get offered one deal that takes up over 1Gbps of server space in the early 80's paying $300 approx per mb EVERY month, usually a millionaire in just a few months, printing is just as easy but beware of penalties if you can't print them all in time. Got offered one the other day in 1983 to print 17 million copies at 0.48p each!

[CondorDrake]

Just do contract work, buy stocks of a newly founded company, wait until they release a product, then sell their stock and you're set with several million $$

[ploppo]

In truth though, this game is now hard with Alpha 9 to actually just start-up and make it as a SOFTWARE company - ie excluding other forms of making money within the game.

Starting as a one-man-band and building up to something like Microsoft is really hard with Alpha 9.

Alpha 9 is more rinse and repeat than Alpha 8 to get recognition (reputation) - it is a slower path to glory.

So, in a nutshell, I think we have to simply play at a slower pace than in Alpha 8 and not run before we can walk.


Contract work is fine; HOWEVER, it takes a long time to build up your money and reputation. Reputation is vital for success - technically, I think it can take several years to push reputation up with contract work.

Deals from the reception desk are hit and miss - some deals are bugged and just expire into the wind within the deadline date - which makes them a waste of time when you get hit with one that is bugged. The game doesn't seem to store a record of Deals in the same way that it stores Contracts, so working out what went wrong is not easy and you need to make use of saving the game with regard to deals - just in case you get a duff one.

The new marketing and after-sales support in Alpha 9 now puts bigger pressures on you which makes growing your company at the same rate as in Alpha 8 to be pretty much suicidal. Development is more brutal and would appear to be longer to achieve Outstanding quality over Alpha 8 development times.

Alpha 9 really tips the balance of staff levels to heavily rely on Programmers. The design phase is pretty quick (even for an O/S) and designers are obsolete fast in a development cycle - whereas the Programmers are working right through to release and onwards into after-sales support.


Playing it purely as a Software development Sim - with limited starting funds and no cheats - is kind of really hard now and, potentially, not really that enjoyable if going bust is the end result each time.

So, it appears that we have to spend longer as a small-time company, to build up bigger funds, than in Alpha 8 to be able to survive the cost of developing products in Alpha 9.

Having to play at a slower rate is going to lead people into thinking they can go into product development sooner than the Alpha 9 will realistically allow them to.


I think we have to keep our eye on our company's reputation - ie the 6 stars at the top of the screen. I think reputation plays a big part in success and failure in Alpha 9 (considering the cheat option to increase reputation was removed by the developer). Developing software with low reputation is potentially a suicidal option - taking into account how prohibitive marketing is in Alpha 9.

Grinding reputation up and up is potentially the way forward - if you have the patience to do it.

[ploppo]

Another factor being training your way to global domination.

Doing contracts, etc should also be balanced into funding training - prior to some path of global domination.

The game will probably secretly punish you for releasing a really great O/S with a bunch of noobs - regardless of how long it took and how much you cheated your funds to stay afloat.

You can't technically develop quality beyond what you have available.

[CJB]

Thanks so much Ploppo