Very Hard / Legendary Difficulty Tips
Сrеdit gоеs to Kyouko Tsukino !
Don’t choose starting options you don’t need to choose. “Tough” competition can kick the asses of people with hundreds – or thousands – of hours playing the game, and “realistic” development time will just make everything take longer to be done, which will completely wreck you if you don’t know your way around the game mechanics yet. Also, random options are usually going to make your game easier overall, but some of the events they bring can really knock the air out of you. Also, normal game speed is fine, but choosing slow or marathon (without adjusted work speed) to get used to the game is not shameful. I used Marathon to figure out the game, and continued using it for a while. And when Legendary was made harder (yes, it used to be easier) I used Marathon to figure out the mechanic changes, until I was comfortable trying normal speed.
For contract games, do the absolute minimum you need to do. The first two stars for each game element can still be gained from a 30% contract game.
Contract work may sound like it pays more, but it usually takes more time than it takes for a contract game with the same payout. Since contract games also help you make better games, contract work is a “last resort” thing IMO.
Don’t overspend. Build small rooms (five people per room is my usual) and try to find the sweet spots to using as little furniture as possible. Also, use the cheapest versions of furniture. A water fountain and a coffee dispenser do the exact same thing, but the coffee dispenser costs $ 250 less, and you don’t need to have both (I know “realistically” you would have both, but doing things for the sake of realism is a liability in Legendary, and still a silly idea in Very Hard.)
Don’t research more topics than you need. Try to find the synergy between topics for genres that are suitable to each other, for example, Skill and Puzzle have “animals” and “building blocks” as suitable topics.
Don’t research genres you don’t need. You can survive through the whole game using just Skill, Puzzle and Adventure. Using ten genres is for rich people, and you’re not going to be one for a while.
Don’t overhire, but also don’t try to play this like it’s Game Dev Tycoon. You need “enough” people around (To me that’s at least ten persons in 1976, twenty for 1977, and then “as many as I can handle” with varies with what I’m trying to do.) The more people you have, the faster you’ll do thing, meaning you can do contract work a lot faster (as in, “one contract game per week” fast.)
Try to use the same publisher for your games every time. If any of them already has a few hearts, you can give them your games. You want to have an exclusive contract as soon as possible, to get more money out of your games. A caveat on that: It’s better to get an exclusive contract with one of the “big” companies (the ones with five stars) because while they pay less initial money, pay less money per copy, and their contracts are longer, they also have a much larger share than even the 4-stars publishers, so you’ll be selling more copies, which means making more money.
You’ll want to research sub-genre and sub-topic as soon as possible. Having those will make your reviews slightly higher, and you can “train” genres you aren’t getting contracts for, as well as being able to train two topics at once. The meager $80k you pay for both of those pays itself really, really fast IMO.
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