He's writing in response to the announcement of the lite version; he intends to keep replaying the demo until the full game goes on sale.
On Year 12 now Damn, still 3-star mall! Only 500k monthly profit and I'll get 4 star! TIME RUNNING OUT ahhh..
The game really needs something to do with your money in the mid-to-late game. I just finished my second run through and ended up with $272.5m sitting around doing nothing. After maybe 5 years, even if you're doing non-stop investments, you're raking in more money than you can spend, so you just sit around waiting for hearts and optimising your layout. Anyway, some more observations after the second run through. The poster a few pages back was definitely right about there being more than one "very hard" difficulty for upgrades. For ordinary shops, the chance of succeeding increases to about 25% at the second level it tells you something is "very hard". In other words, say you're level two, and it tells you the next unlockable upgrade is very hard. The chance of succeeding with that is basically minimal, less than 10% and maybe less than 5%. If you go to level three, it may still say "very hard", but the chances of success increase to 25% or so - enough to chance it if you have a lot of hearts, as you will do on your second playthrough. Interestingly, the specials seem to be half a level ahead when it comes to difficulty. The "very hard" services for special locations at level one are a 25% probability, not a <10% probability as for a normal shop - this could be useful to know if you want to level up your specials quickly.
Does anyone have any general tips for this game? I'm on early year 5 and still a 2 star mall, and I'm having trouble making much money at all. The investments, combos, and stores simply cost way too much, especially the investments. I think my money is hovering somewhere around the 10k mark at this point. I do have 2 combos set up in the store, both are several flights of stairs up, but can't afford to unlock any of the other stores as gaining hearts is soooo slow (on average only like 3-4 hearts per month). Is the 4.5 "online ads" function worth it? Does popularity affect # of customers at all, or is it just a "charge meter" where when it reaches 100 you get that bonus round?
Pay attention to what the customers are looking for and always invest as much as possible in the surrounding areas. I cannot emphasize courting regulars enough. They spend more, they come regularly, and they unlock stores and/or other customers who will start coming to your mall. Each investment in the surrounding areas automatically generates one customer, who when they become a regular may generate another customer, and so on and so on. The game is not that hard. I had a 5 star mall year 7 my first play through and year 6 on my second play through. Once you get the engine rolling it takes off pretty quickly.
Malls are supposed to make a profit. It makes sense. Partway through any Kairosoft game the money just rolls in really hard and that's how you end up with a lot of cash for your high scores at the end.
I have about 6 regulars at this point. Supermarket is the cash-generator, sometimes people spend like 20k in one trip lol. Right now my concern is just generating 250,000 monthly cash, which I'm absolutely nowhere near (I think I'm only getting like 80k per month right now max) that's the only goal left for me to reach 3-star.
This is the only thing that disapoints me with their games - I love the challenge at the start of the games, and uncovering combinations (which helps with the replay value) but the end-game tends to be a bit dull. I'm not interested in topping high scores online, I just want a good game from start to finish.
Hah, I failed to get 5-stars by the end of the game, but got 5-stars on Year 16 M12! Forgot the high score, but the game kept having more invests and store plans to buy even after game was over! Best Kairosoft game ever!!!
Does anyone have a list of how to unlock all the stores? I'm missing a few stores and they're not part of the "buy" list, so they gotta be introduced by certain customers. On year 6 and aiming for 4 star now, that 500,000 mark is so hard. So far my favourite Kairosoft game, slightly easier than hot springs story (combinations are way too complex) but much harder than game dev story, which I found way too simple. Now if they only supported zooming in/out... don't really like having to keep sliding around to view the entire mall.
You can zoom in and out to an extent. Also I really liked the game but it was way to easy to me. IMO Pocket Academy is the only game of theirs that has a good difficulty.
I'm not even sure what I did, but I got five stars towards the end of year 9. I'm currently on year twelve with nothing to do, and over 20 mil. Must've gotten lucky or something, since my mall is pretty far from optimal
that's odd, i thought pocket academy got easy really quickly. hot springs story is a lot harder to me, or maybe it just makes less sense i find the meat of the gameplay in kairosoft to be "beyond" the explicit goals (in this, getting to 5*) since you can usually get them out of the way relatively quickly. it's more about how high you can push your score at the end, and that's what gives them replay value for me
I got 5 star around year 10. If you didn't get 5-stars by year 16 then you didn't really complete the game. IMO you should replay it with a different strategy to at least get 5 star before year 16. About the investments, the game has a set number of investment, therefore no matter where you're at at the game you will still have investments to unlock unless you unlock all of them. If you are replaying it, try to unlock investments as soon as you can because they bring in more customers. More customers = more money.
Does anybody know how the leafy plant is unlocked? i unlocked more hard to get stores like the shoe store but cant seem to get the leafy plant, i tried upgrading the rest area but still no luck. Any ideas?
