Arms Trade Tycoon: Tanks Reviews

very fun game

great game

i love this game! difficult but verry fun!

I'm starting to believe it is almost impossible to not go bankrupt on anything other than the easiest difficulty

Though, its very grind for the early stages of interwar. Its very fun to create your own "beautys" and I played for 99 hours total on this game, since I had unlimited ways to create French tanks have more additional guns.

Still a work in progress Currently it's a fairly light business sim with a reasonably simple tank designer bolted on. Hasn't currently got a huge variety of tanks but you get the depth from trying to optimise the components.

A very fun take on the development of one of the most influential (and terrifying) machines to ever cross the battlefield. From the first ever British Mark Is to the Mark Vs, the French FT-17 (which coincidentally was also the first tank used by the American Expeditionary Forces when they entered WWI), the St. Chammond, to the German A7V, a pillbox on tracks. Based on the type of tank needed you'll be creating designs based on historical fact, the needs of the nation, or the outright outlandish. Just be aware that every design has it's flaws and limitations. A tank with a purely machinegun armament and light armor won't do you any good vs tank on tank engagements; and a tank with a singular fixed cannon won't be much use against the infantry wall tactics of WWI. If I did have one gripe about the game is that though there are various battle difficulties one might face, 7/10 times the battle is of an 'Extreme' difficulty in which case several tanks (especially the earlier ones) will fail most of the time.

This game is amazing. If they get it to WW2 I'd feel that's fair, but tech and profession to the next act need to be more fixed, or something. It's a great game and I hope they continue their work.

So, I don't normally do reviews but this one deserves it. Firstly, loads of promise, can be fun when things work, and is generally a decent time. Now the not so nice bits: 1. Difficulty Spikes: Going from Easy to Normal (not what they are called in game) is, from personal experience a very big jump. In easy you get really good ratings on most designs and is pretty easy to beat out the AI on contracts, allowing you to spend time further refining designs and modifying components to eek out the best performance for each role your tanks need to fill. Going to Normal however feels like the AI has reduced research times, no maintenance costs to contend with, no design times to wait for and no engineering times to wait for. For example I've made numerous saves per run so I can back track if things don't work out, however upon reloading a much earlier save the contract type evolution changes or the AI is already on a MK.2 variant before I even have the base version of the tracks or hull. This means your designs, which are now being more "fairly" rated, cannot compete with the AI's designs. Note this is not me saying that AI designs have a rating boost but that they have a design that better fills the requirements while you have just gotten to the point of being able to start meeting them. 2. Maintenance Costs: While I understand these and they make perfect sense, with a reduced budget, higher wages and higher maintenance costs overall, coming into Normal and trying to keep up with the AI and contract demands is really really tight. Every building has a maintenance cost, and every upgrade increases this cost again. Even with all the admin upgrades to reduce these costs and without hiring any more workers, you can still be looking at 150K gold per month when you are struggling to fill contracts, and that's without upgrades to anything else. As mentioned in the section above, if you struggling to keep up with AI designs, purchasing some of the research lab upgrades or for the design bureau or engineering lab, can help but now you higher maintenance fees. Now you are not only losing contracts, you're failure condition is coming at you much quicker. If you can keep pace excellent, but now you have to make sure you get those contracts and are constantly creating new component designs to meet demands. 3. Engineering: This one might be the biggest issue, for me personally anyways, as the time constraints and the massive number of alterations that are required. For example: You've got the 6 and 4 cylinder engines as the Brits, but you may have to have 6 versions of the 6 cylinder and 2 of the 4 cylinder for different designs, however you have to wait up to a month for these to be done, which means overall you could be looking at up to 180 days of waiting, before you finally have something that works for 1 contract and by then a new type of classification has come out. But now this issue is on everything. Hulls, weapons, tracks, engines, turrets. Everything. 4. Research: So you 1 research slot and 3 different categories. Each piece of tech in the categories takes progressively longer and longer to research, pretty standard. However as mentioned in section 2, the AI always seems to be ahead. I've had all the focuses added on to speed up the research, I've had the breakthrough lab on and my first administrator attached to boost the speed and grant a chance to instantly unlock it. However as stated there is no way to know which contract type will come first, or if the AI will generate a contract for that tank type after researching it. For example, I had already got all the research for Exploitation type tanks done; tracks, hull, engine, even the bits from later researches that provide good bonuses; still haven't had a contract generate for it... Overall it's a bit of a mess. At the time of typing, I've done 5 or so runs in Normal difficulty to varying degrees of failure. I either don't have the parts researched by the time a contract comes round or the AI is on Mk.2 variant for the contract before I've seen the contracts. (I've done runs in easy and I am now just sitting on a piles of gold by the end of era 2) I didn't even mention that the research of components unlocks more components that you need to for the engineering alterations or the trophies being reverse-engineered further unlocking more parts for those alterations. Or the fact that contracts a fewer with the difficulty increases. NOW. I'm not one to write a review and not leave some suggestions. For the difficulties, I'd suggest leaving the starting resources and gold the same as easy. At least going from Easy to Normal, this gives the play a chance to mess around a little and find their footing against an AI that is more on the ball. A little wiggle room to get things wrong means a player can still make a few mistakes but make it through the games quirks. For maintenance costs, I'd suggest changing how much they increase by, now if we are doing the option listed above, then this may not be as necessary but if the changes to the starting resources and the like stay as they are this would also be a viable option. For engineering, this one is the option I'd like to see the most. The more copies of something you make the quicker the engineering turn around time. For example if I'm making 6 copies of the same engine for different contract requirements, the time should either linearly or exponentially reduce with each subsequent iteration. My engineers know this engine and how to fit components like a race Pit-stop crew at this point, why is still taking a month? The other change I would like to see with this as well, is upon the completion of the research, the first component is designed by the player and that becomes the default option. Right now it makes one with whatever tech the devs have deigned to attach, when the research is done, instead let the player design it and that becomes the first accessible one without having to wait for the engineering time. For research, there are 5 slots listed but even in ERA II to you have access to 2... so making extra slots available for purchase would be a good alternative, then remove breakthroughs for both players and AI, this levels the playing field and means that players need to be more strategic in the selections but can buy an extra slot in each era (max 2 slots in era 1 and max 4 slots in era 2) to attempt to catch up if they selected the wrong technology. It would also allow players to research companion technologies within a a more reasonable time frame, as again you have 3 tech trees with no crossover unlocks (ie, you don't unlock the tracks with the hulls currently). Ultimately, we are going to have to wait and see as there are still menus and mechanics that haven't been implemented yet. I know there is a page where you can see the budget breakdown of the nation, so does that mean we can tweak how much goes where to speed up research or reduce production cost/time, and so on. I do hope they don't over complicate the mechanics too much and I do hope that some of these suggestions are at least looked at. In the mean time I am going to go and start a 6th run and record which contracts appear when, get as far as I can, do a seventh run and see if I can use my guide to stay a float. Best of luck to you other would-be-Tycoons!