Bugs probably

[Stylesjl]

These earlier levels I think should be easy so that new players can be somewhat gently introduced to the new mechanics of how to manage a city. If experienced players want a challenge they can use this:

HarderDifficulty.png (227.54 KiB) Viewed 338 times

Which by the way does NOT change any of the CES difficulty settings, you still have the same city cash, public expenses, donations to rival political parties, etc.

[Stylesjl]

So I just gave this a test again. Tried the first level and didn't succeed as trying to grow the second city (Busan) was proving too difficult. But I came somewhat close to victory. It looks like I have improved from last time.

The main issues were:

- Struggled to get elected as I had to donate substantial amounts of money (tens of millions) to fend off rivals, which drained my corporate budget. And I had to repeat this for every election due to the Rival Donations rule.
- Balancing the budget of both cities was tricky as I had to raise taxes or starve public services. Maybe better to lower public expenses a bit.
- Number of competitors I think was enough - more would make it easier to grow the city but would also make it harder to make money so probably best to leave this as is.

This is just for the first level which I think should be easier on newer players to introduce them gently to the city simulator.

[Stylesjl]

Update on this: I was able to finish the first level. The main struggle was to get the population of Busan (starts at a much smaller population) to 600K. There is a tendency for the population to stall out at 500K and it gets much harder to push it higher. It can be overcome if you throw a lot of investment money at the city (i.e make a lot of profit in Seoul and redistribute to Busan).

In contrast Seoul only needs 700K but I was able to push this to 900K without really consciously trying to.

The other objective for mayor rating was easy to achieve.

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Overall the strategy I used was to build up an industry in media/automobiles and not worry about getting elected for several years. Once I had profits flowing in I would make donations, get elected and then add a few more public services (not too many as it is easy to bankrupt the cities). The economy would gradually grow over time, along with the tax base. By the end though I had to directly inject a lot of money into Busan by buying land and then building lots of public services to push the number of jobs up.

It is doable for a skilled player - but for someone who is new to this DLC this would be pretty frustrating to finish, which is very different from the other levels in the base game and the other DLCs which are much easier (but still challenging).
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I have some level specific recommendations:

- Set public donations to rival parties to 0 so that new players don't have to worry too much about running out of money during an election.
- Lower the public expenses, maybe to 70%-80% so that new players don't have to struggle with the balancing of the budget as much. Alternatively maybe just raise the start cash of the cities to high.
- Increase the Seoul population objective to 800K and lower the Busan objective to 500K.