The purpose of this guide is to help new players to get the hang of the game faster. It applies to 0.2.7 and later.
Company Creation
When you start up the game you will be met with the company creation screen. Simply input your company's name (note it can't be the same as a competitors'), and your CEO's name, which can be anything as long as it's under 26 characters. Lastly select your desired difficulty and press 'Done'.
Starting Up
After you've successfully created your company you will start in 1970 with an amount of money depending on selected difficulty. If you have less than $30k you should take a loan in the bank before anything else. To open the menu click "R&D" then a page will show up.If you have enough funds you can research 'CPU Development' in R&D. To start researching it, click once on the square that is available, then close the tab and on the center top you should see a progress circle and if you hover over it, it will show more stats..You won't be able to develop CPUs until you research it.
First Hardware
After the research is finished you can either research a more advanced DIP18 package/higher max clock speed or design your first CPU right away. In order to do the latter click anywhere on the garage and press 'New Hardware', then click on the CPU icon.
CPU Design
On this screen you must choose every component for your CPU, set its price and name it. If you have previously researched something beyond 'CPU Development' you should choose that component (you can click the small textbox that tells you the highest clock speed you can use to set it immediately) and create a powerful CPU. Otherwise you should keep your unit cost as low as possible and go for a cheap processor to gain some popularity, which helps you sell more CPUs and makes marketing more effective.
Epilogue
After your CPU goes on sale, and hopefully brings you profit, keep an eye on your funds and repay your loans as fast as possible. When its near the end of its lifetime, consider getting a new loan and researching new tech.
Keep on researching new tech and making better CPUs, and remember, competition never sleeps!
Tips
- Don't worry about marketing at the beginning. Only start campaigns after you establish a good source of income.
- You can change the price of your CPU by clicking its name in the sale box and clicking 'Change Price'.
- Since 0.2.8 price affects review score so you can focus on either creating cheaper and efficient low-power CPUs or cutting-edge high-end ones.
- Don't forget about Technology research - it's crucial to stay competitive, it allows you to make cheaper components quicker.
- Using experimental dual-core in your CPUs is unadvised, only basic dual-core and dual-core are efficient enough.