At the same time, we encourage players to share their own understanding and guides for the game—whether in reviews, guides or on outside websites. If your post is marked helpful by 5 or more players, we will send you a Steam key for Rich List: The Order.
Rich List: The Order offers an enormous range of ways to make money, and every player explores in a different direction and enjoys a different style. Speaking only for myself, I usually skip the career track and apply for a basic job first, because it costs no Action Points (AP) and provides a relatively steady income.
Right after that, I open all three Side Hustles in the very first month. The three Side Hustles grow on their own over time and bring in ever higher income.
In the early game you basically get only one AP per month, and at this stage you only need to watch the “Stress” stat. Each month’s AP mostly goes to “Take a Vacation” and “Exercise”: these actions cost little, yet keep Stress firmly under control. Meanwhile, the physique built up by Exercise not only extends your lifespan but also raises your Energy. Keep exercising and, with low Stress, months with 2 AP will show up from time to time. That is when the ROM Forum side hustle—Brand Deal—lets you build up seed capital fast.
If you watch “This Month’s Calendar” on the home page, you will find a key indicator of the stock market cycle. The market keeps cycling through “Bull Market”, “Overheating”, “Crisis”, “Recession” and “Recovery”. The timing is random, but the cycle always comes around.
Once you are familiar with the huge swings these turning points cause, the seed capital you built early comes into its own. Gradually open short positions when you judge Overheating has hit its limit, gradually cover after the circuit breaker fires, then flip around and buy the dip in the Crisis. If you know the pattern well enough, you can even keep getting more margin credit as the market surges and keep adding leverage. Basically, after just one full cycle it is easy to accumulate more than a million dollars early on.
At that point, you can decide whether to keep making money in stocks or to found a company. If you feel short of AP, you can first go to the “Asset Market” and buy a Personal Assistant under “Services”, or a residence under “Residences”. The Side Hustles I mentioned have one more benefit: a share of the fans you build up can be brought into the company when you found it. Fans give a big boost to every phone’s first-month sales, so the more fans you gather, the easier the company gets off the ground.
If you choose to found a company, one thing many players find hard is that the phones you make at first rarely succeed. That is true. In its early days the company’s real role is to earn liquid cash, “Business Reputation” and fans through “Outsourcing Contracts” in the bottom-right corner of the “Company Dashboard” page. That is what a young company is for—you can imagine that the bar for a tech company to succeed is never cheap. If the company runs short of cash, you can also go to Company Dashboard → Capital & Competitive Intelligence → Capital → the red area at the bottom, “The Boss’s Wallet” → “Inject Capital into Company”. You can keep moving money from your personal account into the company. Personally you can borrow from the bank, or more aggressively from the casino, but the interest is high either way. You can also set the salary the company pays you here.
Generally speaking, the company should operate for at least about two years first. Use the “Organization & Hiring” page to hire R&D staff as a priority, then go to the Tech Tree and research some technologies. Early technologies are very cheap in the current version, and you should always speed research up with “Rush R&D” in the bottom-right corner of the “Company Dashboard” page—it is extremely cost-effective. Accumulate as much technology as you can and keep the directions balanced.
Don’t forget to visit the “Channel Map” as well and upgrade some “Home Market” channel levels first, especially “Company-owned Stores”—the “Brand Strength” they provide matters enormously! Do not try to release a “High-end” phone as a start-up. The high-end phone market weighs the “Brand Strength” factor very heavily; even with the same rating, it is very hard to compete with well-known brands. An “Entry” phone is always the best early choice, and it does not matter if high costs force you to price above the market.
Brand Strength grows slowly through products with Word of Mouth of 55 or higher that keep selling (more than 60,000 units a month), and through the number of Company-owned Stores. It is the single most significant indicator in the phone business.
Before designing a phone, be sure to visit the “Professionals & Officials” category of the “Network” and raise your favor with “Industrial Department · Director Qi” to obtain the Small-Business Support Grant, which lowers your costs. At this stage you should also try to keep around 8 to 15 million dollars of company cash on hand for the prepayment. Do not bet too much on your first phone: first, releasing your first phone triggers a story arc with enormous pressure; second, a low-cost test run is a better way to learn how competitive your phone really is in the market. Once you get the hang of the phone business, you have the game’s first money printer, and your margin for error grows a lot—then you can boldly explore the rest of the game and its many ways to make money.