I suggest instead of pause you have realtime, faster, even faster, then fastest when a player yacht is travelling.
After doing the beta for a short while I got the hang of the UI; the main issue I had was that you cannot do repeat shipments; like if you bought 1000 units of stuff you have to have each order deliver only one freighter/whatnot's capacity at a time. You can order the transport to return to the initial loading point but you cannot tell it to load and transport somewhere again, either the same sales point or different. You can however visit a series of countries, unload/sell 1 gun in each, and then return to the load point. It would be nice if you could have it deliver, return and load, deliver, return and load etc. It would also make it easier to do if there was a 'repeat orders' button where it repeats (doubles) whatever orders are already listed.Repeat shipments and a repeat orders button would cut the number of required orders for large purchases in mid and late in the game a fair amount I would guess. If you could add a checkbox that says 'sell at a loss' you could have the option to interrupt the shipments if the price lowers below your cost while you are on repeat orders. If there was a second checkbox that says 'return to origin if interrupted' you could have the option of your transport waiting at the supply country if the price lowers beyond what you purchased for while it's cargo is also merged with whatever is left in the supply country's warehouse, possibly saving the player another order to move it around.
The yacht also cannot end a trip in the same location the trip started.
Someone said you can only move one shipment at once; that's only true if you move your yacht first. If you send out your other shipments before the yacht you can have them all moving at once. Once I had a few ships I just parked the Yacht in a supply nation and moved it when bounty hunters or agencies were going to show up.
If the Russia > Kazakhstan route is the same as it was in the last beta I tested, the route starts in Siberia and takes something like 38 seconds to complete while Kazakhstan > Russia took only two seconds to complete as it went to a closer city. It's unfortunate because Kazakhstan always seems to be buying something Russia is selling. It made me think perhaps the largest countries should be split up by region but better start point and destination choice would be just as good so as to avoid strange travel times like the above example.
As you or your transports visit countries the entry time decreases, from 30s to 0s. That means if you travel through certain countries a lot it can be a good idea to send a spare transport through it 30 times. Once you have a second transport (you only need one at first before you are buying $100million worth of stuff at a time) I would suggest having it drive around empty on a long journey. A good one is Russia > Turkey to Turkey > Russia. Russia is a supply nation and Turkey links to a lot of the Middle East countries and the best part is they are only a 2s journey both ways so you will mostly be waiting for entry time to pass. Another good one to send spare transports around thirty times is Russia > Norway > Iceland > Canada. That's my route to the New World as Israel (the other supply country) is two links from Russia and I can never remember which African country links to the US. I think Portugal links across the Atlantic too but I might be mistaken.
The easiest way to do trades is once you have to option to not store in a warehouse. Initially you can ONLY store in the warehouse whether delivering with the Yacht or other transports. After you do some business in the country (not sure what triggers it exactly but I think you have to visit it personally or have good relations with it's alliance or some such) you will be able to sell immediately when your shipments arrive instead of storing in the warehouse. It is a bit annoying though as your first shipments to a country sometimes will not autosell and you will have to visit the country with your yacht if your funds were tied up in that shipment.
Press c to review the mission thingy you get when you start. The end reward is worth a whole lot of money but you'll want to sell it with your yacht despite the many trips it will require because it's a discounted purchase so the profit per item is very high. It can be worth it to wait until a conflict starts to sell them but mostly if it's right next to the US as you'll be using the Yacht, which you will have to order on return trips as well.
Buy whatever the first SMUG auction is for, the Yacht is too small past the very first few days even if other transports take 10% of your profit per item.
Private Transport screen is one of the best places to purchase intelligence at. A good idea might be to go to a supply nation, purchase one of each of their weapons, then look at private transport. On the screen that shows the transport's route you can click on the country and on the right it shows the intelligence cost. I generally buy any intelligence under 100k immediately. After you have intelligence, any weapon that can be sold at a profit in that destination will be green. Be warned it might be stored in a warehouse rather than sold so check to see what that checkbox says as you may have to visit in your yacht later. After you determine what weapon sells for how much profit at what private transport stop, check the potential profit versus how much the private transport costs to use. I think it's generally a good idea to ship high value and high profit per unit items to offset the large rental price on limited space. I am unsure how the different varieties of private transport vary.
I think it would be nice if the inventory screen would close when the inventory button is pressed again when it's open as it gets in the way of other screens but must be closed with the corner x.
I also have a few feature suggestions. One is that freighters should be barred from land bound countries. That would give a reason to own a fleet of trucks, especially if they are less likely to be searched than airplanes. I'd also suggest that you can purchase 'normal' trucks, planes and ships outside of SMUG that come with a good chance of discovery of smuggled goods without expensive post-purchase modification, but that the SMUG sells custom built smuggling vehicles. It would also be cool if you could ship around normal goods as cover with the more storage percentage taken by normal goods the less likely the smuggled goods are discovered if there is a search, with SMUG transports being especially good with their secret compartments etc.
Finally, a bit of a time saver as I saw in that review by Lucky he missed it as I did early on: instead of loading your stuff to a transport one at a time by clicking the arrows, instead click on the numbers and hit a number key five times or so. That should change the number box to be the maximum of that good that the transport can fit OR as much in there is in the warehouse able to be loaded.
Author
Topic: Arms Dealer - Back from the Dead (Read 56274 times)