About Car Tycoon:
Cartel Tycoon is a decent underworld resource management simulator. Here is what I feel the game does well: – The overall structure of the game is good. You build resource buildings that can produce the basic product for narcotics sales, you build different processing plants to turn those products into better products, and you have to build your distribution system. There’s a variety of ways to move your product so you have plenty of choices and ways to get around the law. – The Lieutenant system is good with its ranking system. When you start getting people in those upper-echelons you have to be very particular about who you promote. With limited spots at the top, you may find trying to keep someone’s loyalty in the long-run a challenge. Here is what I think the game does okay: – The financial system of “dirty money” and “clean money” is a little “meh” for me. Since you have to have storage for “dirty money” it’s kind of a limited resource, while “clean money” is infinite. The game says you should try to avoid spending “clean money”, but I found it was the other way around. “Clean money” was much easier to use. – The “battles” in the system are adequate, but kind of bland. You send a character who has a higher power score than the place you want to take over and the bar slowly moves. If you send more people there… it didn’t feel like it made much of a difference. I saw little difference, for example, of the bar moving in my direction if the power was 4 vs 3 or 6 vs 3… Maybe the differential has to be much more to make a difference, but I feel if you have twice the power, it should be over pretty quickly. Also the longer the battles go, the more heat you generate so having a way to finish battles quickly is kind of a necessity. Here is what I think the game can improve on: – Logistics is my #1 complaint. A lot of how the materials move around doesn’t make sense to me and there’s not a lot of customization for priority of resources. For example, if you have a warehouse, a transport company, and a workshop that all can hold your opium crops, there’s nowhere (at least that I’ve seen) where you can prioritize where items can go. Items all go to the warehouse first, and then are distributed to other places as the game sees fit. When I have a task to smuggle opium at a seaport, and you have to do that by hiding them in legitimate goods, but most of my opium is going to the transport company to be sold at the pier (something I don’t want to completely turn off since it’s a fairly quick source of “dirty money”), it’s kind of frustrating. It’s also not a small imbalance, either. I see trucks with 12 opium go to the transport company and then a truck with 2 go to the workshop, There’s no way to balance it out, or have more go to your workshop, even if for a limited time. The only thing I can really do is turn off the ability of a building to receive a certain type of cargo. – The Heat bar is something that can be improved. The mechanics are okay, where if you attract too much negative attention, various law enforcement groups will start to pursue you and try to disrupt your activities. The biggest things that I don’t like about it are the random events that pop up that can influence the bar (the journalist one is a particularly cumbersome) and how few events really make an impact. It kind of just builds and you either have to sit and do nothing but what you normally do, or hope you get a chance to lower that bar. I can understand that making it too easy to lower the Heat can make it too easy, but making it very difficult prevents aggressive expansion. It feels like it’s there to just drag out the game. Since it’s still in Early Access, there’s certainly a lot more work to do on the game. The revamped Tech Tree was really nice and if other mechanics get as much of an overhaul as the tech did, then I think this will definitely be an outstanding game.
