Cartel Tycoon is a game where strategy, management, and a bit of daring ambition can elevate you from a humble trafficker to a ruthless cartel kingpin. For those who are just starting, or even veterans looking to optimize their operations, this guide offers a collection of eleven expert tips that will help you refine your strategies and become more efficient in managing your cartel. From building upgrades to smuggling techniques, here’s everything you need to know to gain the upper hand in Cartel Tycoon.

1. Skip the Lower Tiers and Go Straight to Level 3 Buildings

One of the most important pieces of advice is to skip the lower building tiers and go straight to constructing level 3 buildings. While it may seem counterintuitive, level 3 buildings are not only more productive but they also save you on upgrade costs. To unlock this, you’ll need to build a university, which costs a hefty $120,000 in legal money. While this is a significant investment, it will pay off in the long run. The key point here is that upgrades for level 1 and 2 buildings don’t carry over to level 3, so researching lower-level upgrades only results in wasted resources.

If you’re confident that you can stay safe from rival gangs and authorities, it’s well worth skipping the grind of upgrading lower-tier buildings and heading straight for the university to unlock higher-level constructions. This approach significantly boosts your efficiency and helps you get the most out of your investment.

2. Streamline Your Operations and Avoid Overproduction

In Cartel Tycoon, overproduction can actually harm your operations. As you produce goods, remember that they must be shipped out to generate money. However, your selling points—such as ports or airfields—have limited capacities for shipping out goods. There’s a crucial limit to how much dirty money you can launder per day, and having too much dirty money in your possession can negatively impact your operations.

Excess goods or dirty money lead to increased terror, which can raise your profile with the authorities, and that’s a situation you’ll want to avoid. Focus on streamlining your operations: produce just enough to keep your selling points and money laundering activities working at full capacity. Anything more than that is wasteful and detrimental to your cartel’s stability.

3. Leverage Level 3 River Ports to Boost Efficiency

When it comes to selling goods, the level 3 river ports stand out. These ports are more efficient than seaports and don’t require lieutenants to man the selling slots. In contrast, most selling points need lieutenants stationed at them to unlock additional slots, but with river ports, all five slots are available for use without requiring personnel to manage them.

Furthermore, level 3 river ports allow you to sell illegal goods without the risk of having them confiscated or causing unwanted attention, making them an invaluable asset. The upgrade cost is $100,000, but it quickly pays for itself. With river piers at the core of your operations, you’ll be able to move goods efficiently without the added complexity of managing lieutenants for each selling point.

4. Smuggling Made Easy: Containers Are Key

Using containers for smuggling illegal goods can significantly boost your ability to move products. You’ll need containers to ship illegal items through seaports or airports, but there’s a hidden benefit to using them that goes beyond just transportation. Some legal goods, such as vegetables and coffee, can hold illegal goods within them—vegetables can store up to three illegal goods per container, while coffee can store five.

This clever trick allows you to move more illegal goods than you would be able to otherwise, and it’s especially valuable when combined with the high selling limits of legal goods. For example, a level 3 river pier allows you to sell 24 dried cannabis per slot, but if you use coffee as a container, you can store up to five dried cannabis per coffee container. This allows you to move up to 900 units of illegal goods per shipment. While workshops are needed to pack the goods into containers, this strategy can significantly increase your profits and streamline your operations.

5. Optimize Your Supply Chain with Multiple Warehouses

As you expand your cartel, you’ll find that your farms and factories often produce more goods than your warehouses can handle. This leads to bottlenecks, especially when trucks can’t move goods fast enough to keep pace with production. To solve this, create specialized warehouses tailored to different parts of your manufacturing chain.

For example, if you’re producing cocaine, set up a warehouse that focuses on collecting coca from farms and supplying drying racks. Once the coca is dried, transfer it to another warehouse that specializes in moving the dried coca to labs for processing into cocaine. By creating these specialized warehouses, you’ll keep your supply chain moving efficiently without overwhelming your transport companies.

6. Play Nice with Other Gangs to Expand Your Reach

While Cartel Tycoon allows you to engage in violent confrontations with rival gangs, it’s often more productive to form alliances. Every capo has their own personality, and if you pay attention to what they say, you can respond in a way that builds a stronger relationship with them. Once you’re on good terms, they won’t attack you, and you can even absorb them into your cartel peacefully. This not only saves you from the cost of fighting but also brings you more resources, contacts, and territory.

Building strong alliances is far more beneficial than engaging in constant battles, and it gives you access to a larger pool of potential lieutenants and resources.

7. Handle Lieutenants Carefully to Avoid Rogue Behavior

Lieutenants are the backbone of your cartel’s operations, but they can cause trouble if their loyalty drops. To keep them loyal, you’ll need to either raise their wages or assign them to difficult missions. However, sending lieutenants on suicide missions or assassinating them can have consequences, such as reduced loyalty among your remaining lieutenants or raising terror.

There’s an alternative that’s less obvious but equally effective—using the prison in Los Grandes territory. If you send a lieutenant there, you’ll gain the option to have them surrender, effectively removing them from the game and temporarily gaining control over law enforcement. This option offers a strategic way to manage your lieutenants without causing massive disruption to your cartel.

8. Test Building Placements Using Dirty Money

One of the sneaky advantages of using dirty money in Cartel Tycoon is that it allows you to place buildings without actually spending any money until the materials are physically moved to the location. This is particularly useful when optimizing your farm and chemical plant placements, as it allows you to experiment with road layouts and building placements before committing to the full cost.

This trick can save you time and money, ensuring that your infrastructure is as efficient as possible before you make the final investment in construction.

9. Increase Population Loyalty for Additional Resources

In Cartel Tycoon, the loyalty of the local population plays a crucial role in the stability of your operations. If loyalty is low, you’ll face increased challenges with your business. While there are several ways to boost loyalty, such as spending legal tender or holding concerts, there’s a hidden way to raise loyalty using dirty money.

By purchasing goods from villages or indigenous settlements, you can improve the population’s loyalty. This strategy is not only useful for raising loyalty but also provides you with goods that you can use as containers for illegal goods, further enhancing your smuggling operations.

10. Be Strategic About Promoting Lieutenants

While you’ll recruit many people to your gang, it’s essential not to promote them too quickly. Each lieutenant gains abilities as they are promoted, and not all of these abilities will benefit your cartel. It’s important to think carefully about which abilities are useful to your specific operations.

Set limits on how far you want to promote each lieutenant and only promote those who will offer new and valuable abilities. If you run out of space for promotions, you can always send someone to prison to free up a slot for someone more useful.

11. Use Dirty Money for Efficient Operations

Finally, remember that you’ll likely have more dirty money than you can launder at any given time. Use this to your advantage by buying goods that can be used as containers for illegal products. Not only does this help you launder dirty money indirectly, but it also gives you a more efficient way to smuggle illegal goods across the globe.

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With these eleven tips in your arsenal, you’re ready to take Cartel Tycoon by storm. By focusing on efficiency, building the right relationships, and using your resources wisely, you can climb the ranks of the cartel world and establish your dominance. Now, get out there and start making those shipments—world peace isn’t going to promote itself.