Very fun and addictive game. I've seen pretty much all the content and I'm left wishing there was more reason to keep playing. Opposition from cartels or police, more drugs to make/distribute, and some prestige-stuff to blow your earnings on like a drug mansion.
Things I've learned in my playtime about optimal play.
Customers & Dealers:
-Customers have a max spending budget per day, and will buy exactly once per day. You can not get them to go over this spending budget, so eventually high-value drug mixes will outlcass your earliest customer's ability to buy.
-There is no reason not to schedule all deals at late night. Since things stay frozen at 4 AM, you will never run out of time to deal the drugs, you will always get the curfew bonus on top of your payment, and police patrols stop and stand in one place after a certain hour so its actually safer to maneuver around the city. This means you can always deal to all customers each day without running out of time.
-You get experience points from deals made, you get more for doing it yourself compared to dealers, and it is completely independent from money. If you aren't careful, you can make a lot of money moving product through dealers while taking in very little XP. This will stall your progression, so deal to as many people as you can to max out experience. XP is the bottleneck, money will not be an issue after a certain point.
-With these three prior points in mind, keep high-spending customers to yourself and assign low-spending customers to dealers. You will probably have some idle dealers. This is fine, dealers are inefficient. With that 20% cut, the more they sell the more you lose.
-Always barter up to increments of five to simplify dealing and eliminate the need for carrying 1 gram baggies.
-Edit: Forgot one more obscure dealer mechanic. If you give a dealer a lot of high density, expensive drugs that their customers can't afford, they need empty inventory slots so they can create smaller increments to sell. So, if you give a dealer a full inventory of bricks, they won't be able to sell any of them because no customer assigned to them can afford a brick. But, if you leave one slot open, the dealer can create jars and baggies out of bricks and sell those.
Drugs & Mixing:
-Mixing can be mostly ignored but is a core mechanic even if it is a bit finicky. Use the
schedule1 mixing calculator website to find the right mixes to get your desired effects.
-Apart from getting picky customers to join your network and making higher value drugs, I find the best use for mixing is to create super-mixes that your character can partake in. The main effects you want are athletic and anti-gravity. With these two paired in a mix, you will run faster than most cars and can leap over fences and buildings. Highly useful when doing your late-night drug dealing run or restocking ingredients in your mixing labs.
-I believe meth and cocaine last longer than weed, so these are the best mediums for a super-mix as you will need to take it less.
-One viable 4-step mix is cuke->motor-oil->cuke->paracetamol. Automate its production at a bungalow meth lab and sell the excess
-Once you unlock the brick press, this greatly simplifies storing large surpluses of product. Remember that you can unpack product from baggies, jars and bricks at an unpacking station.
-Higher tier areas need higher tier drugs, for meth that means high quality pseudo and for everything else that means drying racks. They are pretty simple to automate into a process.
-Drying rack ratio is 1 weed plant to 1 drying rack or 2 coke plants to 1 drying rack.
Employees & Automation:
-Employees are really buggy. Apart from restocking shelves and moving around product, most of what you do late game is unbugging them.
-One annoying bug is chemists will get bugged out working the coke cauldrons, making it so you can't access them and the chemists never use them. You need to unassign them from the cauldrons in question, save, quit and reload.
-The other bad employee bug is the hauler item deletion bug. An employee will go to restock from a shelf, but will keep grabbing items until the shelf is empty with the items disappearing. Only fix is to fire and replace the handler.
-Most other employee bugs can be fixed by hitting them with a bat or running into them with the skateboard
-Edit: one general tip for automation is, if you have the handler move jobs available, allocate buffer shelves into your production line. Put one between the big phases. For example, at my bungalow setup I have one buffer shelf that all my meth ovens empty into which feeds into the first mixing station in my mixing line, and a second one that my final mixing station empties into that feeds into my packing station. This means that when something breaks in your setup (and it will), the entire thing doesn't grind to a halt.
General Observations:
-You can load directly into the van when parking it on loading zones at certain stores
-The first automation available is the sweatshop. It has 1 employee slot, so its good for running a botanist on 8 weed plants. You can produce enough weed to supply everyone in the first three or four areas very easily this way. Split the output between two shelves, add a brick press and brick everything up once a day. It will be normal quality but you can manually dry it at the hotel.
-I think everyone knows how to make a pretty optimal bungalow meth lab so I won't go over that in detail. I will point out that its very easy to restock mixing at the bungalow. Empty your inventory, smoke one unit of super-meth and you can easily move four or five full inventories of goods between the gas station and the bungalow before it wears off.
-My late game setup for coke was splitting it between the barn and the warehouse. Growing, drying and boiling it at the barn while baking, mixing and packing it in the warehouse. It worked pretty well, apart from the buggy employees.
