Tavern Tycoon – Episode 10: Dragon’s Hangover

Having completed the remix of a blast from the past, I finally found myself at the journey’s end. Will I be able to use everything I learned to climb this last mountain, or will this final challenge be my undoing?

I guess there is only one way to find out!

[G^G] Let’s Play Tavern Tycoon – Episode 10: Dragon’s Hangover

Episode Index

We are finally here! The Dragon’s Hangover is ours to manage, and the level has some fairly favorable conditions to boot. Other than some initial difficulty finding the tavern sign before the recording, it was a pretty straightforward process setting up the tavern. There is lots of space, no need to expand, and tavern walls to deal with.

Honestly I was expecting a bit more of a challenge in this level. Granted my knowledge of this game has expanded tremendously over the course of the last few weeks, but I was hoping there would be an interesting wrinkle I would have to deal with to really test my knowledge. Something like a new natural disaster(dragon attack!?) or maybe a new patron class that very likely to cause trouble. Instead, the only wrinkle is that tavern goers like to spend more money.

While a different approach to level design may have made the final stage more challenging, the larger issue is that I’ve simply graduated past the normal difficulty. At this point if I am going to continue playing the game I am going to need to kick things up a notch…

Lesson Learned: Try to avoid modifying your storage

This ended up being a fairly minor issue, but in general you should avoid modifying a storage room if possible. The reason being that whenever you delete a storage shelf with someone’s belongings on it, the belongings disappear into the ether and you start losing reputation as a result of it.

This happened to me on the previous level as well, and I was eventually able to recover the belongings by dropping down new shelves, but I am still unclear on how that mechanic works. Regardless, it is best to just finalize the layout up front and avoid the problem all together.

Lesson Learned: Early on use Bonuses Over Raises

The funny thing is, in the early levels of Tavern Tycoon I actually favored using bonuses over raises to keep my staff happy. This choice stemmed more from ignorance of the mechanics than anything, however it turned out that I was actually on to something.

The amount of happiness gained via bonuses relative to the cost of a raise is actually much more cost efficient. What this means is that in the early game when you are strapped for cash, it is often better to just keep your staffs happiness topped off with bonuses instead of maintaining their wage. Now this does get tedious over time, so once your finances are strong it makes sense simply bring their wages up to snuff so you don’t have to deal with it. However, in the early game, those pennies pinched can be the difference between victory and defeat.

Final Thoughts

Although I spent a good portion of this write up complaining about the lack of difficulty, I have to say a part of me did appreciate the simplicity of the level. After the chaos of level 8, and the financial stress of level 9, it was pretty enjoyable to have everything you need up front and just build.

With the last level out of the way, at this point I really have 3 choices, play again on a higher difficulty, check out the endless mode, or wait for hopefully more features to be rolled out.

At this point I’m probably going to at least check out the Endless Mode, but who knows when I get back from my honeymoon maybe I’ll get the itch to really test my management skills!

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Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great rest of your day, week, month, year, and life!

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