Cartel Tycoon Basic Guide for New Players (Solving Your Problems)

The Residence is a building that specializes in delivering dirty money that keeps your buildings running. You were given one at the beginning of the story mode. It is not very expensive and can easily cover a full production chain, and it has a limited number of trucks for delivery.
This is not a problem because you can choose to run most buildings with legal money, so that they do not require regular money delivery.
You can also connect a lot of buildings to out-of-their-service-radius buildings by going to its Logistics tag and find ‘additional destinations’.
To maintain a positive cash balance, you need to connect your residence to a building that provides income(e.g. Aerodrome, Seaport), unless you want to keep a lieutenant busy on deliveries.

The alternative is to build a hotel in the city. You are given one at the beginning of sandbox mode. It is quite expensive but it covers a huge area around the city, which means all the money laundering facilities of the city are automatically covered, plus it can go to 4 out-of-radius destinations. Like the residence, you need to have dirty money coming into the building so that it actually have something to deliver to your production buildings that runs on dirty money.

It is better to swap some, if not most production to cash and focus on building money laundering facilities.
Also check if you have built too many production buildings as you are more likely to be limited by your delivery capacity rather than your production capacity. The game at its current stage requires not too many buildings to reach a maximum income flow of each end product because of how little the cap of export is. For instance, a seaport only exports 72 ‘opium in vegetable’ every 4 days. This is 3x workshops worth of work. You can easily reach this cap by having 5.25x opium plantation I with 2x not fully efficient veg farm I.

Orange is dirty money and blue is cash(legal money).

As I have mentioned delivery capacity, I need 2x warehouses for each of the level 1 veg farms to deliver them efficiently to the 3 workshops in close distance! Build warehouses if your products are clogged in their buildings, swap all building maintenance to cash, and do not build too many buildings for each production chain in an area. Also, research plantation asap as it saves you a lot of money laundering capacity.

Loyalty level is world-wide. It is counter-intuitive but you can start an event at one of the city buildings in your home city and the mayor on the other side of the map will love you a bit more. Build any city building that contains the tag ‘loyalty’, and you will be able to hold their respective events. Any one event from any city building will complete that mission for you.

Lieutenants are paid according to their rank, so keep an eye on hire because if you are lucky, you can have a maximum of 5 of them staying at $0 or less than $170 pay. Their extra abilities does not really matter in early stage — extra truck, make a deal and cultivator and other skills are all great, but what is better is you can constantly assassinate the expensive ones and replace them. You can also let them get angry and counter their actions. If they try to kidnap/assassinate your other lieutenants, just move the target away from his/her current location. Keep new bloods coming by dropping the old ones into the sea, promise them a raise in dialogue if you do not like their skills, only manually promote the ones with the skills you certainly can utilize at that point.

Aerodromes can be demolished. It already takes you a lot of time to fulfill all the end product capacities of the seaports. You should not need many aerodromes around, especially if you are lacking lieutenants and is paying a high maintenance for their existence, keeping the aerodrome might yield you net loss.

If you constantly miss payments to your lieutenants but you do have a positive cash flow, it might be because they are stationed in a location with no dirty money in storage when the pay happens. Switch to pay them with cash to fix this problem as you do not want to spend money on pay raise to keep them happy.

Yes that is true. Yet you can maintain it at rank zero if you are good enough even in story mode (do not drive through other city unnecessarily, focus on money laundering facilities so that you have the cash to hold events, and use the mayor’s favor to reduce terror level). The dev seems to be reconsidering this design.

When your loyalty level is high, terror level will go down quicker but the effect of the stars stays forever.

When the cops attempt to seize your production buildings, empty the building before they start can counter their move. They will ‘find nothing’ and your building will not be seized.

Also, an unrelated but important tip is that spending 30k at one time will trigger a reporter event that asks for $45000 to not expose you. Both killing the reporter, or letting her report you will raise roughly half a terror level only if your terror is low. Holding an event to reduce one terror level is much cheaper, but there is a cool-down between asking mayor’s favor twice.

2. Calculate the capacity of your export, and build according to its limit. Never exceed that as overflowing goods means net loss. Also always keep an eye on the warehouses’ workload. It is not worth to station a lieutenant for the extra truck in warehouses because in most cases you can just build an extra one.

3. Do not rush to satisfy the other mayor in story mode if you are still new to the game and is not rich by the time you reach the mission. Keeping zero stars is much more important than rushing the quest-line, because the cops will surely cripple your income.

4. Make sure you have positive balance going into your residence or your hotel, and make sure everything (and everyone) that runs on dirty money is connected to them.

5. Try not to build sharp turns on busy roads, as they greatly reduce the truck’s speed.