Mad Games Tycoon 2 – Useful Tips

Your games can’t get past the 10% score (after fixing bugs). You feel really stuck. Here are the tips!

Tips for Newcomers

The key element is, indeed, a low workforce.

Some people will go “OMG but if you hire too many employees you won’t be able to pay them!” these people either haven’t figured out how to do things in moderation, or are hiring Newbie Trap employees, also known as “Legendary Employees” (the only legendary things about them is how overpriced and underwhelming they are.)

Five people making a game is small for January 1976 and I’ll make an educated guess and assume you’re beyond that date already.

Again, look up there. Consider how much experience your studio has with each element of the game, how many stat points you’re getting (you need around 250-100-100-150 in 1976, and that number goes up fast with every passing year) whether you’re using enough gameplay features and matching sub-genre/topics. All those things matter, and even at lower difficulties, having too many things stacked against your game will make your game be mediocre at best.

But even after all that? I have twenty employees in development before 1977 happens (not all of them with development-capable professions, I do a lot of “drag and drop” with employees in early game to make up for lack of workforce, saves me from having researchers sitting on their asses eating up my money,) and I reach a hundred before the eighties. And to me the challenge is to score below 70% in Hard and below, so I like to think I’ve figured out the secrets behind making a good game in MGT 2 (some of which are mentioned in my previous post, there’s more though.)

Sliders are only one small fraction of what’s needed to have good games, specially in higher difficulties. Slider guides are pretty much a double-edged sword because people assumes that all you need to do is get the perfect sliders and you’ll beat the game.

• Use more employees to get more stat points.
• Experience matters quite a lot in higher difficulties, but even in lower difficulties a game element with too little experience will affect your review score. Gain experience by either releasing a lot of trash games with the same genres/topics/platform choices, or doing contract work.
• Polishing can take a game from 30-50% to 80-100% if you do it long enough. How long is “long enough” depends on how many employees you have working on a game.
• You need at least one game designer. Without game designers, your employees will be slower and generate less points. The better your game designer, the better your game, so it’s a good idea to have your CEO be a game designer with 65 points to game design.
• Motivation affects speed. Unmotivated employees will work slower, and thus generate less stats.
• Bad genre/sub-genre or genre/topic combos can affect review score. Having no sub-genre or sub-topic also affects review score, but the effect is minimal at first.