The best introduction to Profiteer is to play the tutorial. That will interactively introduce you to every aspect of the game. These instructions are provided as an alternative or as a reference guide.
What do I do?
Your aim is to earn as much Ching as possible and to do so quicker than any of the other players. The more Ching you have, the more things you can buy including goods to trade, fuel for your space truck, upgrades and more trucks.
How do I earn Ching?
You need to go to the market and buy goods that are being sold at cheap prices. You transport these goods to other planets where they’re more expensive and sell them there.
How do I know where I'll make a profit?
In the market there’s a button at the right of the screen labelled “supply”. Tap the button or touch and drag it across the screen. This shows you how good the supply rate is for each type of item on each planet. If the supply rate is high, the price will be low; if the supply rate is low, the price will be high.
Why are some of the supply columns red?
The columns are arranged in order of distance from your current planet. The leftmost column is where you’re docked. The rightmost column is the furthest distance away. Unless your truck is massively upgraded, you’re unlikely to have enough fuel to travel to the farthest planets. Planets you cannot reach are displayed in red columns.
How do I travel to another planet?
Go to the navigation screen. From there you can tap on a planet to select it. Tap on a selected planet and you’ll travel through hyperspace to your destination.
So how do I sell my goods?
There are two ways to do this. Rookies tend to go to the market and sell their goods in there. Seasoned Profiteers usually sell all of their goods as soon as they reach a new dock by touching and holding the market button!
What's the bank for?
This serves two purposes. You can borrow or repay your loan and you can deposit or withdraw from the bank here. If you have a loan it will have interest charged every turn – the money you owe will get bigger! If you have money in the bank it will earn interest every turn – the money you have will increase! Ching in the bank is considered to be safely stored. Ching that you take with you when travelling between planets could be at risk from pirates!
Why is the bank button flashing red?
This is because your loan has got bigger and has exceeded the loan limit. You need to pay some Ching back or you won’t be able to continue.
It takes too long to use the bank every turn
Some Profiteers like to have precise control over their finances and enjoy balancing out their loans and deposits. More seasoned Profiteers tend to use a faster method. Touching and holding the bank button will ensure you have all your available cash in your hand. It will bring your loan to its limit and withdraw all Ching from your bank. Touching and holding it again will repay as much Ching into your loan as possible and will deposit any remaining Ching into your bank.
I don't have enough fuel to travel anywhere
In that case you’d better buy some more! You can go into the garage and purchase as many glugs of guel as you’d like from there. Again, seasoned Profiteers tend to want to do this more quickly. They touch and hold the garage button to purchase a full tank of fuel in one go!
I wish I could carry more cargo
Maybe you should consider purchasing a truck upgrade? Cargo space is just one of the upgrades that can be purchased from the garage. Upgrades can also be sold back to a garage later, but never for the full price you purchased them at.
Other trucks keep beating me to my destinations
There are a few solutions to this one. Look at the navigation screen and you’ll be able to see how many trucks are on each planet. If trucks arrived before you, you’ll also be able to see where they’re flying towards next. This can help with your planet selection. Alternatively, maybe you’re choosing planets that are too far away and hence others are getting there first because they’re not travelling as far. Finally, you might want to consider upgrading your engine at the garage. It’s possible that other players have already done this to their trucks!
Why can't I select my miscellaneous upgrades?
Garages never know which miscellaneous upgrades they have in stock at any given time. It’s entirely pot luck! Also, it adds excitement to the purchasing of miscellaneous upgrades!
I've bought another truck so why can't I select it?
This is something that’s easiest to explain by way of an example.
- You’re docked at Flurbsprime in your Standard Junkbuster and purchase a second truck (a Zippy Weaselfish).
- You set off to Adaptopare in your Standard Junkbuster.
- Your next turn (possibly after some of the AI players) will be piloting your Zippy Weaselfish which will start with no cargo or upgrades at the planet where it was purchased (Flurbsprime).
- You buy cargo for your Zippy Weaselfish and set off to Halkranis.
- In the next game turn you will start with whichever truck arrives at its destination first – the Zippy Weaselfish is the faster ship so may well arrive first even if travelling slightly further than the Standard Junkbuster.
And so it proceeds. You can earn a lot more Ching each game turn by controlling multiple trucks but it also takes more management. If you send all of your trucks to the same destination, for example, you might find that there’s nothing left in the market for the trucks that arrive there last.
How do I delete an unwanted save game slot?
Touch and hold the save game slot until a delete option appears.
How do you win this game? I can’t really seem to find any information on this anywhere and the tutorial doesn’t tell you either.
The winner is the first player to reach 1,000,000 Ching. After that point it’s up to the player if they wish to continue playing the same game to compete against the leaderboards or not.
hi guys.
the bank loan seems to high.
I’m always struggling to keep up with payments 🙁
thanks
dan
Hi Dan,
Thanks for getting in touch. There are various strategies for repaying the loan. Firstly, it’s worth pointing out that the loan is much less of a problem on the easy difficulty setting so that’s a good introduction to Profiteer and a nice way to improve tactics. Regardless of the difficulty setting, we would advise against taking risks in the initial stages of a game – check the news, avoid pirates, avoid illegal goods, don’t gamble at Vlern, etc. Make sure you’re purchasing goods that have a supply rate as high as possible (ideally 90% or higher) and travel to a planet where the supply rate is as low as possible (ideally less than 10%). You should be spending all your Ching on goods. If you have any left, pay it back against the loan before traveling so you’ll pay less interest (press and hold the bank button for do this quickly). If you’re feeling lucky you could always trade your way towards New Earth. Freddy Fingers will sometimes make time to chat with players there and, if you’re very lucky, he might even reduce your loan rate. Keep on mind that there’s always the chance he might be in a bad mood and do exactly the opposite… Try these tactics and let us know how you get on with them.
cool thanks for quick reply.
i couldn’t find the setting for difficulty :-\
cheers
dan
After pressing New Game you can set a variety of options – game type, winning target, AI intelligence, market difficulty, etc. It’s the market difficulty that controls the game’s difficulty. Depending on your screen size, you may have to scroll the options screen to see all the settings.
The new update said you could select which ship to start with. However, I don’t see where you’re able to select the ship. Please advise. Thank you and I love the game.
When you start a new game you have the options for selecting the game type, difficulty, etc. There’s a new option at the bottom where you can select the truck type to start with. Depending on the screen size of the device you’re playing on, you may have to scroll to the bottom of the options to see it. All players will start with the selected truck type to ensure nobody starts with an advantage. The exception to this is if you select ‘random’!
Hi there, this is easily one of the greatest games I’ve ever played on Android, and I will almost say it may be one of the best trading games as well. Question and suggestion.
1. I may be daft, but is there a way to see what I paid for a certain item? If i long press on it in supply, would be nice to see what i last paid for it. (This may be irrelevant for teh way the game was meant to be played, as I notice there’s emphasis on selling ALL your cargo once arriving at a new planet. So i didn’t know if some players only sell certain items when they stop, holding the others for when they hit a planet with a better price).
2. When i sell an item in the Market screen, after clicking SELL ALL, it should take me back to the Market screen, instead of having to hit the red X to back out. (Again, i could be missing a function of how it’s played, but once i have sold all of something, i don’t need the sell screen to stay up, as im never going to immediately buy it back).
Thanks for any suggestions or help on this. Killer game, it woud be great to “re-skin” and apply this model in a medieval setting! I bet you’d capture a whole new market with that flavor added to this great game design.
Firstly, thank you very much for your kind words! And now, in answer to your questions –
1) Although you can see how much your entire cargo was purchased for on the main docking screen, there isn’t any information on a per-item basis. Our preferred tactics are to sell the entire cargo when reaching a planet and to then purchase the items likely to make the most profit (which may occasionally include items that have just been sold). But there are no “best” methods – just personal preferences.
2) That’s an interesting point (and I suppose the same could be said to apply to the “buy all” button, too). We’ll test it out here and see how it feels. If it feels natural, it may well go into a future update.
As for the ability to re-skin the game, that’s an excellent idea. It’s not something we’ve seen in an Android game before but if it’s logistically possible then that’s certainly something we’d like to look into.
Love the game! Makes me nostagic for my old cpu games in the 90s. Thanks for it.
Wanted to make a few suggestions. . .
1. There should be more game data available at end of game. Rather the just losing and being returned to the home screen you could include some info. Mahbe a break down in what you spent in gas, upgrades, interest. Also it would be AWESOME if we could see what the AI characters had on their ships going into end of game.
2. The top score page and page where we choose ‘new game’ or an old game should have more such as date, value, no. of turns anything ratjer then just seeing my handle over and over
3. Itd be nice if there was one more element to hav3 to play with. Maybe deciding whether to buy insurance or an option to pay a subcontracting cargo shipper at a hjgher rate for those times we stumble upon a great deal. Just one extra calculation to take some chance out.
4. Itd be nice if we had a choice to see ALL items available for sale in the galaxy. Itd help add some stragedy as we decide whether to go for profit or save money for some other epic deal going on. We could guess if stock would run out or not. Itd add a bit more stragedy.
5. Could we see what characters are at what planets?
6. Long pressing an item should auto sell all or auto buy all. Were used to the long type already and we dont look at descriptions enough to justify using for that
7.Certain planets based on their cultjre shoukd have certain items that always seem to sell high or low not determined by availability. Dont spell it out for players let them learn it. For instance if Lux is full of holidayers then maybe some booze shoukd always be towards tbe higher side and steel boots the lower side whether its available or not. Ppl on vacation dont want to buy steel boots whether theres 95% available or 12% available.
Thanks again for the great game
Thanks for the kind feedback and excellent suggestions. Other than bug-fixing there is no on-going development work on Profiteer at present. I do, however, have plans to overhaul the game to make it easier to maintain and add new features in the near future. I will certainly take your suggestions into consideration when undergoing that process.