Welcome to my basics tips.
I’ve compiled them over 10 game playthroughs. After the 4th try, holding to the tips below allowed me to win every single game and not go bankrupt even once.

Those were tested on easy-normal-hard difficulty levels, with -20% Research cost starting bonus and Historical Map. Game ver. 0.9.8.03

Shortcuts used:
PC = Personal Computer, HC = Home Computer, HH = Handheld device, portable = laptop,
RP = research points, PP = production points, DPP = desired production points, LP = logistics points

When you start the game, you have to choose 2 managers for your new company. CEO and your University friend.

1) For your CEO keep rolling the dice until you get values of at least 50 in both Charisma & Manufacturing.
You'll need Charisma to search successfully for new managers.
Manufacturing helps a lot at the beginning but also do not brake your company, later on when you want to start searching for new managers (if you choose logistics as secondary then you'll suddenly lose critical LP while on search for new manager).

2) For your friend keep rolling the dice until you get at least 50 in Research (my record was 75). RP is the most expensive resource in the game and any bonus on start is significant.

3) With later Managers you should prioritize Research until you're well ahead of competitors in tech (usually one more needed) then you can go for logistics (in late game you're going for the whole world and enough LP is very imortant) in each case minimum of 50 value is a good start.

4) From the beginning delegate your managers to your sites, CEO to poverty/production site and Friend to Filthy Rich/lab site.
There is little value now in using their active abilities almost through entire game.
You will be ahead of competitors in tech so no point in stealing,
You will get fans easily if you make good tech stuff.
The only exception is to search for new managers (CEO) and Software/games licenses but they require good marketing so it's a waste of a manager to specialize in.

5) Get as many of new markets as fast as possible. Start from filthy rich and move your way down the poverty line. If you can choose from several markets in the same category then go for the more populated ones first (lower sum of Tax & Ressler Cut second). Do not spend your LP on getting lower resellers cuts, prioritize new markets as rich and populous as possible.

6) At the beginning get 2-3 populus filthy rich/rich markets (USA-Japan-Germany is my preference on historical map). With that you will have decent size high profit market.

7) If you have more PP than DPP expand into logistics, otherwise into factories.

8) Try to expand to always meet the DPP with PP. (only exception is when you're like 1 month after new hardware generation premiere when world goes nuts over the new tech). And remember that when you over expand you can turn some factories down in site management screen with sliders. This will greatly reduce your upkeep while you wait for this new uber GPU (works on other buildings too but PP demand fluctuate a lot where LP and RP do not).

9) Early in game keep ratio of every new research site for every 4th-5th production site. (1 research site for 1 to 4 production sites, 2nd research for 5 to 8 production sites etc.)
Research IS VERY expensive in early game (in term of $ costs, not RP) so do not over stretch.

10) If you can chose bulling 4 research buildings in “poverty regions” that will give you 4 RP for 174,7k $ each (because you have office there) instead of 1 research bulling (upgrade) in filthy rich region but with 350 $ on each RP point (even with office lvl 3 its 245k) then OBVIOUSLY build it in poorer regions. The example is marked green below:


11) The same as above goes for choosing between upgrading a building or getting new site with factory/logistic (think how much points you need and how you can get them as cheap as possible).

12) DO NOT neglect to build offices! they really do well reduce building maintenance for respected site. (Warning: lvl 5 office should be built only if you have at least lvl5 factory or research lab in this site, otherwise your max is lvl 4)


13) Build marketing centers as they are essential from the start as they give passive "income" on marketing campaigns. They reduce small amount of the global marketing costs but THEY DO STACK globally. Ex. 25 buildings with 4 % discount give you cost free marketing campaigns. A lvl 1 is worth building as soon as your marketing campaigns cost you more than 1M $ globally (if you have multiple products then sum the marketing costs)

The costs you can find in build screen in Marketing tab:

14) You have to stay on top of generation tech race. By generation I mean best CPU-GPU-HDD trio (performance – features – capacity). Every time you have 2 new products of those 3, then it’s new generation for you. Parts generally cost the same but generation differences are HUGE ex. 109 $486 have 46 performance vs $116 Plent 125 performance.




15) Get to PCs as fast as you can. From now on you can live only of selling parts without even going into full build assembly. (Research all techs with dark blue background)

16) When you got PCs. you can sell parts of PCs on their own. Do it! You can win the game selling only PC parts without ever making a new build. With each new hardware generation don’t archive automatically the old parts (archive whole PC builds but not the parts). Keep them on the market just sell them on different prices. I always leaved 3 gens of parts on market and with price ratios (below) they were making money all the time. You can set prices for each part here:


17) Early in game when you do not have big tech advance over competition use 2 tiers of systems:
a. TI – hi-end, all tech you can put in – just mind the production $ costs value
b. Eco – basically new tech, but without “nice to have” things (like heatsinks, hyperthreading etc.) made more on “bang for the buck” logic

Later on, in game competitors will significantly lag behind in tech so there is no need for TI tier, build only eco systems.

18) You can make cross-category (hardware) parts. Use it. It saves time a lot. I designed mostly 2 variants of each part, with which I covered all products I’ve used for respective generation. (PC TI & HC, PC Eco & portable), IMHO HH are broken right now. You can set the cross-category here:

Here are my “golden ratios” but first small theoretical introduction:
In every hardware build, in pricing tab you have “default” price for this item. (“Average budget”) This is your starting point for all the ratios. Ex. 4000 $ for PC, 200 $ for OS, 200$ for PSU.
The other thing you need to take into account is cost of the item (“Average cost” for whole build and “Cost in $” for parts)
With that in mind I use 3 Gen’s VS 2 Tiers’ matrix where:

Production cost for Ti Tier have to be below 0,25 of it’s default selling price
For Eco it’s below 0,1875.
Ex.: for CPU with average (default) sell price of 400 $, Ti part cost have to be below 100 $ and Eco part below 75 $ (HC build default sell price – 4000 $, Ti cost <1000$, Eco <750$)

They are like this, because by default “poverty” group clients are discounted for 75 % (you can change that manually every time but the rule still applies) so 400 $ part in filthy rich country is sold for 100$ in poverty countries. Cost of production is the same in all countries so for you not to go bankrupt, you have to sell that part for more than 4x of the cost. (for ECO parts it’s lower because will go into below “default” price, but that in a minute.)

!!!WARNING!!!
A single part with -3$ profit in poverty region can basically bankrupt your company in later game (when you’re selling to all markets - whole world, and most of them are in poverty regions). You will have “only” -3$ on a single product, but will have like 100 M sales of this single product.
It's the effect of scale.
In such case you can adjust the discount by clicking on "Discount %" value and correcting it, but remember it's done only for this single product.


In the beginning of game when you have only “Home Computers” you can use the two tier system: first a tip-top tech and price it as PC TI and second made as PC Eco (use the same cost/sale ratios)


This is cost side of production but now for the sale pricing part:

- For whole builds my sweet-spots are
Eco PC & HC -> 3K – 4K $ (check competitors pricing)
TI PC -> 8K $ (HC TI in early game)
Portable -> 5K $

- For parts :
TI –> 2x – 1,5x – 1x of “default” price (newest gen – middle gen – oldest gen)
Eco -> 1,5x – 1x – 0,75x of “default” price (newest gen – middle gen – oldest gen)

For marketing tips there's a very good guide made by Kenji Hatsune here:
The Market Guide by Kenji Hatsune

Start on Historical map, with 20% Research bonus, Normal difficulty
Reroll the skills of CEO till you find ~50 Charisma and Manufacturing (In my case 45 at both)
Reroll the skills of your friend till you find Research +50 (70 in my case)

DO NOT START TIME YET

Go to “Computers” tab (bottom right icon) and select “New”.
Choose “Home Computer”, later on here you’ll be able to chose PC, Portable and handhelds.

At start we’ll make a tip-top build but later on we’ll differentiate between ECO and TI builds.


In here:
- grey border tiles are optional
- red border tiles are mandatory
- red interior tiles are unavailable (not researched yet)
- accessories tile shows how many accessories are chosen from all available (0/0 because not researched yet)

First change the name from “My Computer #1” to HC 721 (my naming system – HC= Home Computer, 72- year, 1 – version) by clicking on it

Now click on “Memory” tile, then “New”. Hardware designer window will pop-up.

Click on “DIP Memory” & “Heatsink” and move both “Base Clock” and “Capacity” sliders to max.

We do not have factories yet so the “Cost in $” is 0, but later this will be one of 3 most important values. Remember where it is.

Press “Create”, and now “Add to Computer”

Now for the other modules:
CPU – “4040 CPU”, “Heatsink”, “Base Clock” to max
Power Supply – “AC/DC Converter”, “Heatsink”, “Quality” at 0
MOBO – “DIN Connector”, “Quality” and “Features” to max
Operating system – “Opcode System”, “Features” and “Ease of Use” to max
Storage – “Winchester Technology”, “Quality” & “Performance” at 0, “Capacity” one step above 500KB (511,85 in my case)
(with slidera you can slide it to side and use arrow keys for “regular” jumps or try to pick with mouse sliding or click the value and type a new one but this only works for % and multipliers not KB nor hz )
Display – “Blinking Idicator Lights”, “Features” and “Prestige” at 0

Yous should have build like this:



In here remember the ”Average Cost” it’s the same as “Cost in $” but for the whole build not single part. We’ll get back to it later.

Now go to “Marketing tab” and set it all for “HC”, “Gamers”, “Base” campaign according to The Market Guide By Kenji Hatsune

Finally go to “Release” tab and press “TEST!”

This start 30 day testing period that will improve your build. Always use it.

Ok, we have our first build ready now it’s time to build or factories and labs.

Close this window with “X” (Computer window too), and choose “Market List” icon (bottom right menu, third from left, the one with star”)

First we want one lab site so on filters to the right uncheck everything from “Wealth” part an leave only “Filthy Rich”. Chose one county (in my case Kuwait) and press “Build Site”, confirm the cost.

Do not close this window yet, we’ll make factory sites too as long as we’re here, now in the same filter group uncheck “Filthy Rich” and check “Poverty”, Indonesia and Pakistan are good here for a start, build site in them too.

If you have trouble finding them then sort the list by population (click 2 times on the dash above 5 people icon)

Now you can close this window, and choose “Building Site List” icon from bottom right menu (the one with crane)

Now both in Pakistan and Indonesia build LVL 1 Factory (under gear icon), Office (people icon), Logistics (truck), Marketing (TV)

In Kuwait build LVL1 Lab(microscope), Office, Logistics, Marketing

Now we have our basic Sites set up. Now we need to delegate our managers.

Close the “Site manager” and go to your garage, pardon “Office” (left most icon in bottom right menu).

Press “Set task!” on Your CEO, choose “Passive” then “Manufacturing” now press “Delegate Manager” either in Indonesia or Pakistan (factory site).
Do the same for your friend but choose “Research” in Kuwait (research site).

Now before we go forward, on all 3 sites take the sliders to 0% on all Factories, Logistics, Marketing (LABS LEAVE AT 100%). We don’t want to make unnecessary costs while we do not produce anything.

OK, first HC build, factory sites, research site and managers are done then it’s time for Research Queue.

Close the “Site Manager” window and click “Tech tree” (microscope icon third from the right in bottom right menu).

Now in here you can click on interesting technology and “Add to Queue” or go faster and “Open Queue” and choose which available technology to add.

Here we want three category unlocks first (remember those red not researched tiles in HC build screen?) then, manufacturing technology (cheaper production) and some “good to have fast” if we’ll have time to get them onboard before next build.

So prep the Queue in this order:

1) Compositer Chips
2) Tape Drive
3) Keyboard
4) VLSI
5) S-100 Bus
6) Printer
7) BIOS
8) Glass Teletype
Ok, now we’re ready to start the time. Go to “World Map” (second icon from right in bottom right menu)

And press the double time (two arrows in top left menu). Hitting Space pauses time. Lets move to 16.01 and pause there.

Our first batch of buildings is completed so let’s go to “Building sites list” (crane icon) and make the second batch.

In all sites build LVL 2 Office and Marketing, in Kuwait lvl 2 Lab in Indonesia and Pakistan LVL2 Factory.

If you click on lvl 2 logistics you’ll see info that we need office lvl2 as prerequisite. That’s why we’ll wait for the batch 2 to finish and then build logistics lvl 2 in all sites.

Lets, fast forward to 01.02

Second batch of buildings is complete so now start building LVL 2 Logistics on factory sites (you won’t have mony for the third), and turn back all the slider to 100 %.

Now close this window and go to “Market List” (Star Icon).
From Wealth Filters choose “Rich”, sort by biggest population and top thre should be USA, Japan, Germany.
Double click on each, when “Are you sure to sell in this country?” window pop up then press “A” and move to the next.

Now we’ve spent our 3 LP (Logistic points) on our first 3 markets.

We’ve chosen those 3 because we want proper profit margin (rich) and market size (population). Filthy rich countries give better profit margin but are very small markets, poverty countries are huge markets but give next to none profit margin at this point and we do not have such enormous factory capacity to utilize effect of scale.

Go back to world map, and click the “checklist” floating icon in top left part of the screen (the only black one).
It will open our HC 721 Build, Release tab where we’ll click on “Market!” button.
Congratulations your first build is on the market, now close the window an start the time, it’s time to start earning some cash.

The demand should be stable near 4th of feb (with us being in green and earning ~200K a day) so lets go to “Building Site List” (crane icon) and adjust our factories output -> no need to burn our money yet on surplus production.
Adjust the factory Slider on our factory sites so that you’ll have max 100 000 PP/day surplus.
In my case I have a DPP (Desired production) of 587 615 and factory production of 1112500


So I’m turning off (0%) my factory in Indonesia as Pakistan alone is producing 612,500 PP

Now after 2 weeks we’ve build 2 new lvl 2 logistics, start building the 3rd lvl2 logistic as you should have enough cash already.

It’s a good idea to have a minimum 30-40 mil of cash surplus. That is because when your HC build will stop earning enough money to maintain your company in green then you’ll have a buffer of time to design and test new build.

Now on how to decide where to expand.

Open your HC build, (computer icon in bottom right menu), in this window in filters leave only “On Market” and press on each of your competitors to add them to the list. You should have a view like this:


The one on the top is ours build (HC 721) lets now compare the values.
- we’re the biggest seller
- our build is the most expensive (good profit margin)
- our build is best in performance, capacity, features, and easiness of use
- but there is one better build in terms of prestige and we’re the worst in quality

Conclusion we should concentrate on markets that do not mind worse quality or prestige.

So lets now close this window and go to “Market list” (star icon in bottom right)

From filters in poverty part leave only Rich and Filthy rich, and from first group (lets call it presence) uncheck the “Market” option. This way we’re still looking at the good profit margin countries without our already established markets.
Once again sort the list by population and let’s analyze what we see.

From the left you have a columns with:
- country name & dominant player not important for us right now, later on watch out for markets that have colored borders in dominant player column, that means you’ll have a competitor there
- population and wealth (values we’ve already filtered on)
- tax and reseller cut percentage - very important values at this is how much from the original earning you’ll lose, so we want them (their sum) to be as low as possible
- performance, capacity, features, prestige, easy of use, quality – here you see a market preference for each attribute of your build in %, (yeah I know they do not add to 100% but they doesn’t have to in real life)
This is all the info we need right now but in the future you’ll also consider next columns
-logistic points used/max on market – by assigning more logistic points you can lower reseller cut but it’s worth to take care only in late game when you’ll be present on all markets
- local company profit per 1M ppl – this shows if your build sale is in green taking into account only sale, tax, reseller and production costs
-global company profit per 1M ppl- this is as the above but with global costs added in like research, management, site maintenance etc.

If you’re in red on those two columns then you’re losing money in this market so it’s a market to dump (remove all LP points)
If you’re green on local but red on global then you can consider creating them a custom build for their needs or lowering reseller cuts (market to fight for).
If you’re green then we have a money maker, we want those as much as possible.

-and finally, the state column (unused, with market presence with factory/lab site presence)

OK, so now we know what’s where so lets find the most populus(big market), rich or filthy rich (good profit margin) country with lowest sum of tax and reseller cut(we want as much profit as we can) that have low values of quality & prestige (as our build suck at them).

We have 6 spare Logistics Points so my preference is:

-Italy, Spain (for low quality & prestige requirement and sensible taxes/reseller)
-UK, France, Belgium, (for low quality & prestige requirement, sizeable market but pretty expensive in tax/reseller so we’ll monitor their profit)

Now we have Canada and Australia but they really like quality & prestige so they are no go, further countries are below 10 mil ppl so not enough for us at this stage of game to lose our precious LP

You can see it in the screen below, where green is "good", yellow "we’ll see" and red is "no-go"


For the last LP we’ve run out of populus rich markets then lets see what’s in the average part of the world.
Most populus average states are closed communist countries so no way of getting there yet.
In here I’ve chosen Malysia for the high population, low tax/reseller rate, low prestige and medium quality requirement.

REMEMBER TO TURN BACK ON YOUR FACTORY – so that you’ll be able to fulfill new demand and run the game till the third lvl2 logistic hub is built.

Now after we have next 3 LP let’s analyse our markets and do the necessary changes.

Let’s go to “Market list” and filter only “Market” presence for all countries.


We can see that we’re in green in most countries, we’re basically even in France but we have two countries in red to analyze:
-Germany – they like to much the prestige we do not provide
-Malysia, we do not yet have the effect of scale to go into average markets.

Conclusion, we’re to week to go into Average markets and in next build we need more prestigious solution.
For now lets dump Malesian and German markets(reduce the LP allocation to 0) in favor of
Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, and Denmark – they are all rich countries with low to medium quality/prestige preference. Unfortunately, they’re with smaller population and medium taxes.

We may dump them in next market corrections batch.

Ok, now we’ll do some fast-forward till we can build a next HC Build. This will be a mini research race so in the meantime, please control (otherwise you’ll won’t make research in time and bankrupt):
- factory output – max 100k PP above DPP -> no need to burn money
- market corrections – DO NOT maintain presence in markets in red
- get minimum 40 M $ buffer
- maintain min 100k in green earnings.

We’re stopping the race when:
- We’re in red above 500 K $ in earnings
- You’re below 40 M $ cash and in any red earnings
- You’ve got whole research queue done

In my case I’ve finished my research queue with 350 K in green in earnings and 221 M in cash reserve after 2 market corrections. If any of the conditions above were first then go straight to 2nd build preperation.

Let’s start thinking about our 2nd build.
!!! WARNING !!!
The screens from now on may differ drastically from your experience as it depends what you’re competitors have built, which markets competitors occupied and on which markets did you stayed and which you’ve dumped. But the logic still applies.
!!! WARNING !!!

First let’s see what our markets like.
Go to “Statistics screen” (pie-chart icon, fourth from left on the bottom right menu) and Preferences tab.


My markets favor prestige, ease of use and capacity/performance in this order while global market loves capacity and all other (prestige, performance, ease of use and quality) are weaker but on par.

This means that we need to have high capacity, significantly improve our build prestige and good performance and ease of use could be good. We can ignore features and quality at this time.
Take notice that this will give us good build for our market with fine head start for the global market.

Now let’s close this window and go to “Computer List”.

Compare all the builds along with competitors to so what we have to be better from.
(we did similar comparison on our first build)

Write down the max values for each category and the minimum price of those builds that had at least one max in attributes. (The price we’ll need for the eco build in a minute)

In my case we have performance maxed at 3,86, capacity at 500, features at 21,16, prestige at 38,36, easiness of use at 18,13 and QC at 33,43.

Lets see if we can beat that. Go to Computer build and prep new HC build.

Once again we’re building TI build so the best that we can get within our price limit.
Remember that we’ve researched VLSI so we want to have all possible parts use it so their production would be cheaper.

- Get all the accessories

- Memory-> DIP memory, Heatsink, VLSI. Base clock slider and Capacity to max

IMPORTANT: now we do have factories working so we got the “Cost in $” value. This is very important because from now on we know our cost/profit ratio. We can start using it for optimization.
From tips you can see that TI memory should by at max 75$ cost, I’m at 69,49$ so I’m good to go but if you’re over then you need to tweak your part. For memory I propose capacity Slider as this one still gives very little overall capacity increase with compared to cost increase. (Especially that we’ll go wild on storage capacity)

IMPORTANT 2: I basically ended up with the same attribute memory but lower cost thanks to VLSI. (10 % to be exact) This is why we need to always include new manufacturing tech within build. No matter that we’re paying again the upfront cost of the new part, the savings is well worth it.



IMPORTANT 3: You may notice that I’m already naming the part as TI that’s because it’s price is within TI (75 $) limit, but way over the Eco (56,25 $) limit and I don’t want to mix them up with Eco build. I’ll say it once again, one part at -3 $ after discounts can bankrupt you.

- CPU-> 4040 CPU, Heatsink, VLSI, base clock to max. Price 52,09$ is within limit of 100$

- GPU-> Compositer Chips, DIP Memory, Heatsink, S-100 BUS, VLSI, Base Clock and Memory to max. Price 77,51 $ is within limit of 125$

- Power-> AC/DC Converter, heatsink and Quality to the max. Price is 9,44 $ from 50 $ limit.
Right now you may ask why we’re giving all those parts heatsinks?
At this stage they only give us a fixed (5) bonus to quality but later you will need to manage heat and noise of your build. Heatsinks give -1 heat and no noise, where fans are better with heat but make noise. In future build you’ll have to balance them so that heat and noise stay within acceptable level (green) here:

- MOBO -> BIOS, DIN Connector, S-100 Bus, VLSI, Quality and features to max. Price is 15,67 $ within 100 $ limit

- OS, the same we had last time, we didn’t research nothing new here and we maxed it out previously

- Display -> Glass teletype, Features and Prestige to max. Price 71,98 $ within limit of 100 $

- Removable Media (INPUT)-> Tape Drive, Heatsink, Features and performance to max. Price 46,62 $ within limit of 50 $

And now this part will need explanation. Storage.

Global markets love Capacity so we need to max it out without breaking the profit/cost barrier which is 125$ for TI and 93,75$ for Eco version. Also keep in mind that for now max capacity of competitors is 500 so it’s preety low bar.

Go Heatsink & Winchester Technology and max all Quality, Performance and Capacity.
In my case the price is 209,61 $ so it’s prohibitive even for TI build. We need to lower it down.
We have a Quality slider and a heatsink that give quality points. Let’s see which one is better to keep.
Heat sink gives 5,75 in QC here but add 13,1$ to the cost.
The Quality slider on min-max value gives 1,8 in QC at the cost of 131,23.
So we have a winner, we’re keeping heatsink and ditching QC bar entirely.
This way we’re finishing with Best Performance, Best Capacity drive for 78,38 $ at the cost beeing weaker ~25 % in max quality.

IMPORTANT: In the future stick to this logic, you need specific attribute from part (Capacity here) so max it out, all the others are on bang for the buck basis till you get down to your price limit
As a result, I have a build like this:


Please notice that the "Avearge cost" is filled in. We'll need it in a minute for Eco build.

We have 6,88 performances out of 3,86 we had to beat
With 1000 Capacity we’re waaay over competitors 500 which we wanted for our capacity centric markets
Features 57,20 of 21,16; Ease of Use 20,97 of 18,13; QC 67,30 of 33,43
And finally, our little failure, Prestige at 31,42 of 38,36 we had to beat. We can now check why is that.

Lets, note where we’re having Prestige points:

Display 28,75 + Keyboard 1 + VGA 0,83 + Mem 0,83 = 31,41 (ignoring rounding error of 0,01)
Now go back to computer list, show design of all competitors, find the one that is most prestigious and click on it name (it’s a link). Full setup of the machine will show up so you can compare it directly to your own
Our most prestigious competitor have 38,36 final prestige in:
Display 27,63 + Mem 0,83 = 28,46
How come parts sum up to 28,46 not 38,36 ?
That’s because of the one month of test peroid of build before it went to market (This is why it’s so important to test the build).
The conclusion is that we have a much bigger starting point for the prestige and it will surpass our competitor after the testing so we’re safe.
Then let’s get back to out own HC 742 Ti Build to set the marketing values as with our previous build and send it to testing.

OK, now it’s a good time to do a backup save.
If we’re successful with the eco build then we’ll have 2 builds complimenting each other on different market segments, if we fail, they will cannibalize each other and bankrupt us.

From the market analysis we’ve done in previous part we know that we have competitors at:


So taking that in mind we want to hit the ~ 3000 price tag but with better build from IBN HC 1974, all other attributes are additional, we need to beat this single IBN HC 1974.
Our basic goals are performance at 3,86, capacity at 500, features at 14,82, prestige at 34,82, easiness of use at 18,13 and QC at 30,40 price at 3000-4000 $.

If we’re successful in cost department we can try to beat the extended:
performance at 3,86, capacity at 500, features at 21,16, prestige at 38,36, easiness of use at 18,13 and QC at 33,43 and price below 2200$

Keep in mind that we can have a little lower attributes in design build as month of testing will increase them slightly.

First of all, ECO build price is max 4000 $ so its 4000*0,1875 =750 $ max cost per build (this is our max “Average cost”) if we’re lucky we’ll go below cheapest competitor 2200 price so 412,5 $.

SIDENOTE: if you go to my parts cost table for eco build and sum the parts cost then you’ll notice that the parts sum 581,25 $ is lower that of the build price-cost ratio of 750 $. That’s the buffer left for all accessories that are not listed there and minimal profit margin. We don’t want to sell things at bare production cost because who will then pay for all the research, marketing management etc.?

Our 2nd TI build had 433$ Average cost (thanks to VLSI) so theoretically we could sell it this way as an Eco Build.
This is an indicator that we actually do not need Eco build now but let’s continue to do that so you can see the logic on how to make one in the future.

First go thru your 2nd TI build that we’ve just made to see what part gives you what, and what parts are cost heavy (compare the price/cost ratio for each part. We need eco parts so for example, we’ll have to redesign memory for sure)

Look what parts give you most of what attribute: (they will change as you progress in research):
- Performance – max on memory & GPU, CPU very little
- Capacity – max on storage, Mem & GPU very little
- Features – max on MOBO & Display, some on GPU, rest very little
- Prestige – Max on display some on accessories
- Ease of use – max on display and some on OS & accessories
- QC – max on MOBO, power and GPU

This shows you that you can easily slash GPU memory capacity in favor of performance

As a rule in Builds you can over stretch your cost on one part (storage? Memory?) and make it out on different (OS? MOBO?) as long as Average Cost is below your limit.

BUT you can do it only on full design builds. You CANNOT do it on PC parts that are sold separately because (3rd time the charm) single -3 $ part will bankrupt you.

OK after this introduction let’s give it a try.

We’ll aim for the 1700 price limit so 318,75 $ cost to make any challenge here.

Accessories - Keyboard is cheep and give us good bonuses so it’s in, Printer is expensive and gives very little in return so it’s out.

OS - we have a maxed-out OS that is very cheap then it’s in as it is

Power supply - our first supply from 1st build has a decent 5,9 $ cost at 0% quality so we’ll favor it over a newer one of quality +15% for 10 $

MOBO -Our latest TI MOBO costs only 15,67$ out of 75 $ for eco build so we’re definitely taking it

CPU – at this stage it gives us miniscule performance boost but sizeable cost, so we’re designing a new one with 4040 CPU & VLSI technology but at minimum Base clock slider. Its cost is 24,15 $ in comparison to 52,09 $ from TI build.

VGA – our TI VGA costs 77,51 $, it’s below 93,75 $ cost limit but we’ll still try to take it down.
Take all technologies apart from heatsink, and set Base Clock for 833,33 KHz and Memory for 0,06 KB.
This will give us decent 1,22 performance for 50,92 $ in contrast to 1,55 for 77,51 $ TI VGA.

Display – our Ti display costs 72 $ so theoretically it falls within our 75 $ limit but let’s try to optimize it for ultra-low price. We’re taking Glass Teletype tech, maxing Prestige and lowering Features a bit (-4,34%) to end up with 40$ price tag. Why max on prestige? Because it’s almost our only source of this attribute in Eco build.

Storage – both our 1st and 2nd build storages are expensive at 70,02 $ and 78.38$ so we will try something in lower range of ~50-60.
So first of all Winchester Technology and no heatsink. Minimum on Quality and Performance and sizeable 700 KB on capacity (as this is our main source of it). We have 39,18 $ cost. While we don’t care about quality here so we’re raising Performance to 0% and that lands us at 49,59$ cost tag.

For now, we have still Memory and Removable Media missing but we can check how we’re doing.

We’re at 191$ Average cost, 2,44 performance, 46,62 features, 700 Capacity, 39,05 Quality, 20,13 Ease of use and 30,58 Prestige.

So apart from Performance and Prestige we’re within our set goals. We won’t be able to meet the extended prestige goal outright but maybe with memory and 1 month testing we’ll beat the goal.

As for Performance our Memory and Input modules have to provide additional 1,42 combined performance which shouldn’t be hard.

Ok lets wrap this up with Removable media (INPUT).

Our TI build input is expensive at 46,62 $ it doesn’t meet the standard (4k build price = 37,50 cost) ratio so we need to lower it significantly.
Let’s make a basic tape drive without heat sink at -5% at both Features and Performance. This will give us 12,20 cost tag and 0,95 of missing performance.

Now we have very low average cost and minimal requirement for at least 0,46 performance. Very easy task for the hardest to design module. (That’s why I’m leaving it to the end).
Our new module will have DIP Memory and VLSI but without heatsink. We’ll give it 0,6 KB Capacity and 2,5 Mhz Base Clock. This will bring us to cost tag of 29,29$ with 2,5 performance.

This way we'll finally have:


At cost of 233 $ (54% of TI build) we gained 5,89 (86%) performance; 700 (70%) Capacity; 50,07 (88%) Features; 31,42(100%) Prestige; 20,97 (100%) Ease of use; 41,55 (62%) Quality

Our Average cost is 233$ so at Eco ratio of 0,1875 our minimum sell price would be 233$/0,1875=1242,6 $ This is veeeery good result because we were aiming for 1700 price tag.
This will give us ~500 $ profit margin at 1700 $.
With all attributes above our extended goals it may be better to set the price higher - 2100 $, high enough to give us nice profit margin and low enough to compete with IBN.

Go now to “Pricing tab” and set “Base Price” for 2100 $, you can see that
even after Poverty discount we’ll still make a profit


In Marketing tab set all the sliders according to Marketing guide for Cheapskates and then send it to Testing.

Before we start time, we should start building 2 new factory sites the same way as we’ve done it in the beginning.
One more remark here is that in Market list you can press “Stats” button to see this:


Placing sites in populus country with big tax will help you a lot later on by lowering the tax with time.

It’s also a good time to start thinking about next research site and additional research centric manager for it.

Set your research queue again with mind of new generation so that you’ll have some category unlocks/game changers (example : 8080 CPU, CLI), some manufactory updates (up to 3um), and some nice to have (Sprite accelerator chip, Composite monitors, sound chip, ATA, etc.).
Every 2 new of CPU-GPU-HDD trio make a new TI & Eco build.

Go as reasonably fast for PC unlock as you can (Techs: 8080 CPU, CLI, Type Drive, 5 ¼ Inch FDD, XT Power Standard).
Competitors will get there much later on so you’ll be able to monopolize the market and sell also parts without need for full build.

For full builds, whenever you make a new generation TI & Eco builds then take the old out of market.
In Build window in Release tab, press “Archive!” (Where the Test! And Market! Buttons are), this way you won’t lose money for marketing campaign on a obsolete product.

For parts, keep 3 gen legacy option but change the part price. (You can find specific parts in “Hardware List” -> CD icon, 2nd from right in right bottom menu). Older parts put into archive.

This should give you a good start for the rest of the game.
Truth be told the start here is the hardest due to steep learning curve, the longer you play the easier it is.
My personal record was bankrupting all competitors in 1986.

Good luck and have a nice play.