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Fun game, beat it on the second try. You need to stockpile tea over and above what's demanded at a fairly steady rate throughout the game; buy on demand and you'll pay over the odds, and in later years won't be able to get the required quantities fast enough due to only being allowed to buy 30 crates at a time. You also need to stockpile opium when the market crashes, I had about a year when prices for buying were 80, but for selling were mostly 30-50. I lost money that year but made it through as I had decent reserves of opium, tea and silver.
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I don't like the fact that I have to buy the tea to fulfill Britain's orders, and they just take it and leave at an enormous loss to my gloriously simple black market.
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Nice game you got there. Market trends are realistic and yes, trading is an harsh business, however, buying only 30 crates at a time makes it even more difficult. Found myself clicking like a maniac on the 30 opium when the price was in the 20s and less just so I could buy enough opium to last through the next high price times. But then again, I suppose that smuggling 500 crates would be a bit too much noticeable than 30 if this was in the real world...
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So wait - i spent all my money on tea which I gave to the Brits for free, all so that I can retire with 80,000,000 POINTS? Where can I spend these 'POINTS'?
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After a certain point you essentially need to be buying tea constantly, simply because you can only buy 30 at a time. If tea prices spike... sorry. You're screwed.
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1500 crates of tea shipped almost 1900 crates of opium. With a wealthy retirement. Still can't get the badge of 80 mil is it even possible. But overall a very fun game. Play it a few times to get the feel of it. Actually read the little dialogue boxes and stock up on tea early for breathing room. Hit opium and tea at low prices, avoid risky ports later in the game you will be depending on have several ships to hit good deals. The game already says this I'm just trying to give and extra hand good luck!!
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ATTENTION - "Plus" this comment to keep it alive. Here's how the scoring works: Multiply the # of Opium crates sold by ten. Then mulitply that by the # of Tea crates shipped; that will be the final score. So: (Opium crates X 10) X Tea crates = Final Score. Although, it doesn't do any good to keep track during the game as there's no total so far in-game. The obvious thing is to buy as much as possible. It works best when the prices get below 20; a disaster of some kind can drive it below 10. >:D When that happens buy the sh*t out of it nonstop, trust me. I have to admit I got 2 or 3 disasters that drove prices down below 20 a couple times and below 10 once. Here's a screenshot (cropped to make my red text bigger) of my final score for those who might want a visual aid. I even lost by not being able to make my last shipment. Can you blame me? It was 720 crates of tea; you'd have to click buy x30 nonstop the whole time and that's almost impossible. http://imgur.com/h2aFgNZ
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If you think you're giving away free tea, you're not. You're just pocketing the profits of your shipments. For example, let's say you sell 600 billion cups of tea. Sell each cup at 1 pence net profit, that makes 290 million pounds profit. That's 21.3 billion pounds in today's prices! Sadly, the Chinese only bartered in silver, and Britain wasn't going to open its treasury and give its silver to anyone, least of all China. In other words, your opium/tea business will be worth more than the software empire of Bill Gates (80 billion USD), but you can't use your profits to get any more silver coins. I think something the developers didn't think of is that just because you have to spend your silver coins on tea, doesn't mean you have to spend silver coins on opium as well. Allowing the use of English currency to buy opium would have added an extra layer of complexity and common sense to the game AND lowered the difficulty a little. It'd also show you you're actually making money. Sigh -_-
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Great game! Needs a back to menu button. I frequently want to restart, and I have to reload the screen and cut through the opening video and tutorial over and over again. Very annoying.
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Would be a very good game if there was an option to "Buy All", where you use all your money to buy tea crates. Either that or enter an amount to spend/buy.
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Game definitely needs bigger numbers on purchase and sale especially since making the deal locks you from buying any more.
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The games not actually a no win scenario as many people thought. You simply have to expect to make massive losses in the last two years. Don't spend too much time thinking about each trade, set yourself a limit. I set a 50 silver plus minimum on selling and 40 or below for buying. Any time they came up I clicked them. By the time I got to year 8 I had about 40000 silver and a fairly big stock. Sadly I barely beat the game without enough silver to buy a turnip... but hey, a wins a win!
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KEEP ALIVE. Make opium trade a priority, you need as much silver as possible to see you through the end of the game where tea demand is ridiculous. Buy opium whenever price is below 40 and you have money, sell to prices of above 60 regardless of quantity, though in early stages when you have 1/2 boats, go for largest quantity available. Only worry about buying tea once britain starts becoming unhappy, so you can keep silver for as long as possible, so if opium prices fall below 40 you can snap it up (nb. happiness resets after every order and late deliveries don't affect game score as far as i can tell, but make sure it never reaches zero for you will get game over) only focus spending on tea when there is no demand from britain if there is a price crash to below 20, otherwise it is worth holding onto silver for buying cheap opium when its available. REMEMBER buy @ below 40 and sell above 60 only, do not get impatient, just hold stock and hold out until the market favours you again.
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Seems no one understands that having the chance to serve Her Majesty the Queen is already the greatest reward in return.
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Help for getting the last achievement: Most people don't take into account the hidden cost of the risk increase every time you do business. Towards the mid- to late-game, do NOT sell any opium unless the number of crates you're selling is more than 20. You have to pay more attention to the profit per transaction, not the profit per crate. It's better to just sit and wait for better opportunities, than to make a bunch of small sales and turn all the ports risky, and therefore not be able to take the good opportunities later. Focus only on opium during the early game, and you should have enough money (20-40,000) at the end to buy all the tea you need at the maximum price. Also, it seems that better deals come along more frequently (eg 60 crates at 90 coins/crate) when you're sitting on a large stockpile of opium. When the price drop events for opium happen, don't worry about causing the price to increase from overbuying, there seems to be a limit of about 20 coins/crate.
Hope this helps
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This game is very luck dependent in the early game, 1838 needed 570 tea chests to advance to the next year. You can't reasonably buy that much tea in the late game because if you buy about 150 chests of tea prices of tea skyrocket. Therefore, you must stock up in the early game which is difficult with only one ship. I've noticed that many of the best deal requires lots of opium, for example 40 chests of opium at 99 each is sweet.
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i think this game is fun, however it gets pretty hard by the end of it. and i agree with mnenemth that you should be able to sell your ships whenever you want to.
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i needed one more shipment of tea, but could they wait no, just drop your best merchant cus the people selling him the tea cant move fast enough.
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Well, after getting millions of Chinese stoned on Opium for ten years, and getting millions of Brits waterlogged with tons of tea, I ended up failing due to a sudden unmanagable rise in prices for both tea and opium simultaneously in my last year, preventing me from meeting Britain's obscene demand of 660. I had a brief window to load up, but alas, 30 crates at a time was too slow in comparison with the price hike. Still, it is a fun game. 5/5
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what the heck am i supposed to do when the prices are 60/chest and nobody will buy them for more than 50 a chest?!?! it won't go back down either
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Regarding the score, I have found another aspect. When you let the British vessel wait for the tea, you may accumulate much more money. Additionally, Britain will ask for much less tea. However, that directly affects your score. When I sold 3540 crates tea and 3615 crates opium, I achieved 128 million points. When I sold 2250 crates tea and 3035 crates opium, I just achieved 68 million points. Maybe one can sell more opium, but I doubt that it compensates the 1290 crates of tea that one will not sell to Britain...
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I think you should be able to sell a ship when you want rather than having to wait for the game to tell you when you can
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I think I've got an idea on what to do for the Hard badge. The following worked for me: 1) DO NOT be picky when it comes to selling opium, except early on when you only have one or even two ships. Generally speaking, if you can make a profit with a trade, do it, especially since by endgame, you'll have more ships than you need, unless you lose a few in dodgy trading. 2) If you lose the bribe around 1836 or 1837, you've done something wrong; you shouldn't have the bribe at that point in the first place. Take advantage of a (usually) great trade you could make in a risky port. 3) Try not to buy one commodity five times in quick succession, especially after the price for that commodity nose dives. You can make 4 deals for one, then one for the other, then go back. Also, slowing down once in a while will maintain that low price for a while. 4) There seems to be a cap in how high tea and opium prices get early on. Take advantage of that, especially regarding tea. Good luck!
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There REALLY needs to be a larger buy amount, at LEAST for tea. Near-constant buying takes way too long on the last shipment.
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It's a good, fun game, don't get me wrong, but a few key changes could make it a great game instead of a good game. Either slow everything down, get rid of the cooldown for buying things or at the very least allow us to buy more at a time. It takes weeks comparing the cooldown of buying tea to how long passes in the game and I'm not even sure if you can buy enough tea to fulfill the later orders if you don't have a huge stockpile going into the order.
You have no chance of buying low and selling high if you can only get 120 crates before prices skyrocket. Later in the game if you wait just a bit too long to buy all your tea for the shipments then you'll end up losing because it won't cool down quick enough. And I know you should be buying tea nearly constantly, but when opium and tea prices are high, and every port is being watched so it's nearly guaranteed that you're going to lose your ship and opium on any deal it's a little difficult to get things done.
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definitely let us buy more then 30 of each at a time. How am I supposed to get 660 crates of tea in 12 weeks at the rate of 30 crates at a time. it's insane
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This game is great. One suggestion, though: let players set their own pre-set trading numbers rather than having just 5, 15, and 30 as the defaults. From my perspective, I never needed to buy less than 30 crates. If I could have had something like 30, 100, and Max, then I would have had a better time. Still having the prices spike when large quantities are bought would be fine.
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Found a bug...i sent two ships to different locals...one ship got busted...the other NEVER CAME BACK!
What happened witch my 100 buckets of Opium? =s