Cartel Tycoon – Tips for Beginners

The best tip for newbies who are having trouble getting started.

Tips for Newbies

Note: Credit goes to Joebear

1) Build Webs, Not Chains

Your warehouse is the center of that web. It supplies everything, transports just about everything. You can build individual roads from the center of your web (warehouse) to all your farms, dryer and lab, even your smuggling point — and it makes for way higher efficiency than to try and put everything on a grid, or a “chain.” If a smuggle point is in range of your warehouse you don’t even need a transport company.

If you do need a transport company to reach the smuggling point, be sure that it’s in range of the warehouse or it won’t be supplied. To my knowledge this cannot be fixed by adding a warehouse as a location to a transport company out of the warehouse range, because the transport company only delivers to the destinations it’s assigned – it does not pick up. So, supply works like this:

• Farms produce
• Warehouses delivers produce from farms to warehouse (duh)
• Warehouse delivers produce from warehouse to dryer, lab, if applicable
• Warehouse delivers processed produce back to warehouse
• Warehouse delivers processed produce to smuggling point (if in range) or transport company
• Transport company delivers produce to smuggling point (or alternatively to other warehouses or supply webs but this is a bit more advanced and will come with understanding the basics)

Understanding the process will help you build more efficient webs.

2) Make Use Of The Cargo Screen

To my knowledge, this is the main piece of information I seemed to miss in tutorials – not sure if I missed it or if it’s not included but it should be. This in combination with the webs is what really seems to make the difference between chaos and organization in your web/chain/empire. The best thing to do, at least to get a hang of the game, is have one warehouse dedicated for one substance. You can sometimes combine it when things share resources (both meth and coke use precursor). But it can get very messy very quick if you have 1 warehouse operating for several farms, esp if the efficiency rate is high and you are producing a lot of product.

For this, look at cargo tab on the business**(if it’s available for the business). Here is where you choose what resources the warehouse/transport company will store. If you have a weed operation next to a coke op and you have a warehouse for each, you can click on each picture to turn it on/off for the particular business. I pause the game as soon as the business is built, then click None, and then individually select the 1-3 items I want in the warehouse (coca, dried coca, cocaine – and maybe an applicable container if I’m packing for seaports). This is applied to warehouses, transport companies, and smuggle points and once I got a grasp on this and nipping it in the bud early, it made everything a lot more automated, easy to follow and track if and when mistakes do arise. Generally the only time I’m making lieutenant delivers now is when I make too much money, although there are still times here and there I forget to turn something off fast enough and am left shoveling a few units of opium back to the proper warehouse.

3) One Web, One (Or More) Smuggle Point

Generally, for anything that isn’t a seaport (and has 2 slots for materials to smuggle) one supply web takes 1 smuggling point. If your web is efficient enough you will find that you often need 2+ smuggling points for one well-managed supply web. If you need multiple supply webs/chains for a single smuggling point you’re probably doing something really inefficiently as I was when trying to understand the game.

The exception here, again, is with seaports. I think they’re the only business atm that has 2 slots for substances rather than 1. So this would be the only smuggling point worth supplying with multiple substances in my humble opinion. Otherwise, ie with an aerodome supplied with both meth and coke — it’s just going to sell one at a time and I’m still not exactly sure how it picks. Maybe whichever has the most stock? Vanilla or not, you’ll soon get to the point where storage is a problem if you are putting too many supply webs/chains on a single smuggling point.