Tycoon Zone

Berra: Round 1 -2008 Started

This is the first in a series of posts from Johan Bertén, one of Tycoon Online’s most experienced players. Johan will be talking about his company and how he is doing in the game.

=====

A new round has just started and a new empire is rising.

Well i will try to Blog this round and i will write about how i build my company.

The first week of TO is very very fun. It’s always hard to choose what to build and when. You always have to count several times if you can afford that building or you should by more goods.

I started with a Grocery store it makes an nice slow start, 21 until it’s done and i have to start chasing goods. Since i go for an slow start i will not sell my shares until next week.

Day 1

Shares: 5

Workers: 4

Buildings: 1

Total payment / day: 304 iKr

Savings: 950 ikr

/ Johan Bertén

What’s new in January 2008?

A new round of the Tycoon Online business simulation game starts on January 20, 2008, at 16:00 game time (Central European Time). That’s 10AM if you’re in the USA on the East Coast.

Here are the changes for the new round:

• Share price calculation has changed. The new share price calculation replaces the number of spots you climb or fall in C-Rank with your percentage gain or decline in C-Rank. This means bigger share price changes for high ranked players, and smaller changes for low ranked players.
• Stockpile accumulation has changed. If part of your dividend goes unpaid, the unpaid part carries over in your stockpile for the following week. This mostly affects players who have not yet sold all of their shares to other players. Maximum carryover is 50,000 iKr.
• Better transport information. More detailed information is displayed on the transport summary page. Also, you can now see the average queue time when selecting a city to send your transport to.
• Better staff “Building Assigned To” listing. Attribute points and production points are now included on this page to make it easier to decide how to arrange your staff.
• If you become Today’s TO-Player, donations will be collected and then given to you in one lump sum at the end of the day.
• No more version 1.5. Since I tend to introduce at least a few changes every round, I am no longer using version numbers for the game. This round will be called “Round 1 of 2008.”

Good luck everyone!

Congratulations to Round 8 Winners

Tycoon Online Version 1.5 Round 8 ended on January 13, 2008.

Congratulations to Nelly Brave, who finished in first place for company value (CV), and to Victorc Andsuperman who finished in first place for stock points!

Nelly’s performance was quite impressive, beating the #2 player by over 700,000 iK.

Congratulations to the winners! I hope you all enjoyed playing and are looking forward to the next round, which starts January 20, 2008 at 16:00 game time.

I want to extend a special thanks to all of the following people who have been a tremendous help during the last round: Neil Graham, Tabula Rasa, Micke Myhrberg, Johan Berten, Frank Jensen, Ryan O’Conner, Pike Green, Little Pero, and of course, Lord Remington!

Here are the final results for company value:

1. Nelly Brave 3,113,077
2. Imperator Rex 2,371,836
3. Modde Groth 2,146,707
4. Hawkeye Pierce 2,052,588
5. The Wulf 2,000,641
6. Poindexter Sinister 1,998,631
7. Robby Baggio 1,966,983
8. Pup Pup 1,956,851
9. Fjellfot Sensei 1,951,962
10. Vladan Bolovic 1,947,198

Here are the final results for stock points:

1. Victorc Andsuperman 15,569
2. Hawkeye Pierce 14,350
3. Imperator Rex 14,113
4. Brenda Bee 13,567
5. Jik Bok 12,523
6. Little Pero 12,166
7. Bunny Rabbit 12,136
8. Modde Groth 12,129
9. The Buschman 11,834
10. Don Corleone 11,601

And here are the final results for fusions:

1. Fusion Tycoons (William Yochim) - 980,587
2. Tycoon 2008 (Optimus Prime) - 916,186
3. Joint Venture (Swelie Morin) - 899,815
4. Aquarium (Brenda Bee) - 870,731
5. idle (Ada Wada) - 848,942
6. CROWN FUSION (Julia Sky) - 756,198
7. Insider Trading Corp (Neil Graham) - 754,523
8. Tokamak (Tabula Rasa) - 710,260
9. Spider Hide Out (Ivan Rokursoksov) - 707,066
10. The Baltimore Ravens (Eric Siegfried) - 679,835

Why You Should Donate To Today’s TO-Player

Each day in Tycoon Online, a randomly-chosen player becomes “Today’s TO-Player”. That player is featured on the front page of the game, and other players can make a donation which adds to the winning player’s savings. It is sort of a cross between a lottery and a donation. The donation amount starts at 10 iKr early in the round, and increases by 10 iKr each week.

You may be asking: “Why would I want to make a donation to another player? This is a business simulation game — it’s survival of the fittest, not a charity!” Well, good question. You certainly don’t have to donate if you don’t want to. But let me give you two very good reasons why you should:

1. When you donate, you become eligible to be selected as Today’s TO-Player the following day. Only those who have donated the previous day are eligible to be selected.
2. When you donate, you gain 1 iKr of CV for every 10 iKr you donate. This is the best return on your money of any direct action in the game. Even investing only gives you 1 iKr CV per 20 iKr invested.

So there you go — two very good business reasons to make a donation.

Sometimes it is suggested that the selection of Today’s TO Player is biased toward better-ranked companies. This may seem to be the case, but the reality is that you see higher-ranked companies chosen more often because those companies are more likely to donate. They understand the benefit, however small, is worth it.

Besides, don’t you want to be a really nice boy or girl? Donate to Today’s TO-Player!

How New Map Sections Open Up In Your City

As a business simulation game, Tycoon Online allows players to purchase property in order to build factories and other buildings.  Land is divided up into squares called zones, and each 20 x 20 square of zones is called a section.

If you already play TO you know that the most desirable zones are those adjacent to a road. This is because your building gets a 30% production bonus when it is connected to a road. That’s a significant bonus that most players don’t want to pass up.  But roadside zones are bought quickly, and there may be times when the only zones available are those that do not have a road connection.

As a city grows, new sections of the map will open up, making new zones, including roadside zones, available for purchase.  Each type of section has its own rules for when new sections open up:

• Offshore sections:  These have no roads and are only used by fishing fleets. All offshore zones are already active at the beginning of the round.
• Rural sections:  These contain countryside zones.  Three rural sections are active at the beginning of the round. A new section opens up whenever all existing rural sections drop below 50% available zones.
• City sections: These contain downtown zones. One city section is active at the beginning of the round. A new section opens up whenever all existing city sections drop below 30% available zones.

The key is to understand that all sections of a particular type must drop below the threshold, not just one. If you are in a larger city, new sections will open more often, but when they do, players will come in and buy up zones quickly.

Remember, your buildings do not have to be connected to a road.  If no appropriate roadside zones are available, you will need to decide whether it is better for you to wait for new sections to open up, or to go ahead and buy zones without a road connection.

Tycoon Online: A fun business game for everyone

Take classic off-the-shelf games like SimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Transport Tycoon Deluxe, mix them together, then add a web interface and massively-multiplayer gameplay.  That’s the recipe for Tycoon Online,  a great business-themed simulation game that’s fun for the whole family.

The game is based in virtual Sweden. When you start your in-game company, you will choose a city in Sweden as your base of operations. From there, you will build factories, produce goods, sell them on the market or in shops, and transport goods that are bought by other players. There is also a stock market where you can buy shares of other players’ companies, and a bank where you can take out loans or make investments.

Tycoon Online is fairly simple to get started and play, but has depth and complexity that keeps players coming back again and again.

The best thing about the game is that anyone can play for free.  There are no restrictions placed on free players, and although you can purchase a Gold Membership and get some nice perks, the actual gameplay is the same for both free and paid members.  And there are no advertisements or intrusive pop-ups to distract from the game.

Tycoon Online is family-friendly, non-violent, and is suitable for all ages.  It’s fun to play, and is educational too.  It happens to be a great way to teach business basics like hiring staff, managing production costs and inventory, and calculating financial concepts like return on investment, sunk costs, and the time value of money.

So why not become a Tycoon today?  Create your company now — it’s easy to get started!

The Server That Powers Tycoon Online

As long time players will remember, Tycoon Online suffered a series of server problems back when I first took over operations of the game. I greatly underestimated the server capacity needed to run the game, and I also made the mistake of relying on a service provider that used cheap, generic hardware.

I have since purchased my own server from Dell. Dell has had their share of bad publicity for customer service problems for consumer-grade PCs, but they actually do a lot better for their business customers.  Here are the basic specs for the server:

• Dell PowerEdge 1950  (Rackmountable, 1U server)
• Quad-core Intel Xeon processor, 1.6 GHz
• 8 GB memory
• 4 x 36GB serial attached SCSI 2.5″ form factor hard drives, hardware RAID 1+0
• CentOS 5, LAMP architecture

The server was designed with speed and reliability in mind. The quad-core processor sets the stage for a high-speed system, but the biggest speed boost here is probably the memory. With 8GB memory, the OS automatically caches the most frequently read data in memory, avoiding time-consuming random-access disk seeks. In the case of Tycoon Online, this is mostly the database tables and indexes.  Reading data from memory is lightning fast compared to reading from disk, so this change alone probably accounted for the greatest improvement in speed over the old game hardware.

Writing to disk is still time consuming, though, and you can’t safely cache disk writes — at least not with the hardware budget I have. And Tycoon Online is very write-intensive compared to a typical database application. So I opted for a RAID 1+0 setup using serial-attached SCSI 10K RPM disks to get the writes as fast as I could.  Also, with RAID 1+0, I get data redundancy that protects me from a disk failure.  I wanted to keep to a 1U server, so I opted for the 2.5″ form factor disks (that is the same form factor as hard disks used in laptops and iPods).  When I placed the order for this server, Dell only offered these in a 36GB capacity, so I only have 72GB effective storage for now.  That’s plenty of storage for the game, but it does mean I need to keep an eye on the log files.

I’ve been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux at various jobs for several years now, so I feel right at home with CentOS.

The server has a slot for a second CPU if I ever need it. And it has redundant power supplies, just in case one fails.  Right now, both Apache and MySQL are on the same server. Given the capacity of this server, that’s fine for now. As the game grows, these will eventually be split to run on separate servers.

In another article, I’ll write about some of the other steps I have taken to ensure the game keeps running, including MySQL replication, and the data center I chose.

Time to invest?

Once you reach a certain point in the game, you will get a message from your secretary with the subject line “Time to invest?”  This means the “Investment” feature in the game has been unlocked and made available to you.

When you invest, every 20 iKr in savings that you invest turns into 1 iKr in Company Value (”CV”).  Since Company Value is the way companies are ranked, investing can increase your ranks.  For example, if you invest 200 iKr, your CV will increase by 10 iKr.

The term “Investment” is a little misleading, because it is not like real-life investment.  Typically you invest money in the stock market or a bank with the hopes that it will grow into more money over time. In the game, your Investment turns into CV immediately, and the transaction is over. You are really just buying CV.

So when is a good time to invest? It comes down to evaluating what your options are.  Let’s say you have 10,000 iKr to spend.  In Tycoon Online, there are really lots of ways to spend your money, but let’s compare just two options: Investing and building a factory.

• If you invest the 10,000 iKr, you will increase you CV immediately by 500 iKr.
• If you use the 10,000 iKr to buy some zones and build a factory, your factory is likely to generate 300 to 500 CV per day for the remainder of the round.

In this example, it is pretty obvious that the factory is the better choice, unless it is the last day of the round. In fact, building more buildings is nearly always a better choice, so you should keep building until you reach your limit of 25 buildings. Even then, it may make more sense to replace a less profitable building with a more profitable one.

You do need to factor in the cost of zones, since they can get very expensive. If there are only 10 days left in the round, for example, it is probably not worth the cost to buy zones to build a 25th forest, since those zones will be very expensive and 10 days is not enough time to recover the cost.

In general, you should probably think of investing as a way to spend your money when you have nothing better to do with it.

Why are my employees so unhappy?

The level of staff “dissatisfaction” affects how likely it is that your employees go absent or become sick.  This value starts at 1% and can go as high at 100%. The higher the value, the greater the likelihood of staff absences.

There are exactly four ways for your staff dissatisfaction to increase:

1. Every day at midnight, it increases by 1%.
2. If your warehouse overflows, even by 1 good, dissatisfaction will increase by 20% the following midnight.
3. If your salary account does not have enough money in it when salaries are paid, dissatisfaction will increase by 20% the following midnight.
4. If your company has negative savings at 01:30, 02:30, 03:30, 04:30, or 05:30, dissatisfaction will increase by 50% the following midnight.

Note that in every case, the increase occurs not at the moment of the problem, but the following midnight. This can lead to confusion about what caused the jump in dissatisfaction, especially if it goes unnoticed for a day or more. You can generally find something in your transactions log to explain the cause of dissatisfaction jumps, but you may have to look through several days of logs to find it.

If your dissatisfaction level is high, you can take Absence Prevention Measures to reduce it. There are six different measures to choose from, each with a different level of effectiveness and cost:

1. Danish Pastry - reduces dissatisfaction by 10% at a cost of  50 iKr per employee
2. Health Care Program - reduces dissatisfaction by 15% at a cost of 98 iKr per employee
3. Company Kick-off - reduces dissatisfaction by 20% at a cost of 154 iKr per employee
4. Home Computer Package - reduces dissatisfaction by 25% at a cost of 178 iKr per employee
5. Business Journey - reduces dissatisfaction by 30% at a cost of 220 iKr per employee
6. Bonus - reduces dissatisfaction by 35% at a cost of 300 iKr per employee

The measures take effect immediately when purchased. You can do several measures at once if you need to, but remember that each measure can only be done once per week.

Once you reduce your dissatisfaction level, employees will be less likely to go absent. But the ones that are already absent are not going to come back any sooner.

Controlling staff dissatisfaction and preventing absences are critical steps to ensuring your company’s success. Keep an eye on creeping dissatisfaction levels, and always respond quickly to jumps that are caused by mistakes. Keeping dissatisfaction low will help keep staff absences low, and that will make it easier to keep your buildings operating at a high capacity.

9 things to do when you’re bored

It’s not uncommon to reach a point in the game where you think there is nothing more to do. But, in fact, Tycoon Online offers a number of opportunities to learn the game in more depth and improve your success. Here are some ideas for things “to do” if you are trying to figure out what to do next.

1. Build more! Many new players build 3 or 4 buildings and then stop. Your goal should be to reach the maximum of 25.
2. Check the unemployment list. You never know when a good employee might pop up.
3. Optimize your staffing. Make sure absent employees are in the head office, and make sure as many people as possible are in the correct building for their profession.
4. Check on your transports. You may have vehicles idling that don’t need to be. Move them away from cities with long, slow queues so that you can keep them earning.
5. Review the trends page. Look at pricing of goods — both current prices and pricing trends. If the market is about to change (or if it has already changed and you didn’t notice), consider changing out some of your buildings to become more profitable.
6. Study transportation trends. This takes more work, since it is not summarized on the trends page. But you can look at data for each city from the Maps link on the right. If you track this data over time, you can figure out which cities tend to have the fastest and shortest queues.
7. Read the helpfiles. There is tons of info here. If you read just one section in depth, chances are you will learn something new that will improve your game.
8. Research the top players. Look at who is in the top five, and start doing some detective work. Try to figure out what they are doing that makes them so successful!
9. Ask for advice! Don’t be afraid to ask for advice in the forums.

There are lots of other things to do, but this list should give you a good start. Have more to add to the list? Post a comment!