This is a guide to help you get the medals in the new game Recordshop Tycoon. Since you're basically guaranteed to get all the medals if you just play the game long enough, this guide is going to be different than most, in that I'm going to put more emphasis on general strategy than specific strategy.

Medals (5, 155pts)
It's There For A Reason (5pts) - Read through the entire manual. And really, you should anyway, because it explains in detail how the entire game works. If you do this right at the beginning, you'll get the medal after buying your first location.

Crowd Control (25pts) - Get more than 50 customers in one day.

Sleep Is For The Weak (25pts) - Play for 50 (in-game) days.

Major Player (50pts) - Buy all four properties. Order is not important. You may only buy one property a turn, and any news that's going on (a run on a genre, increased or decreased traffic, raised or reduced supplier prices, etc) will not carry over for the new store. You can theoretically win the game only selling discs at the first location, but it would take forever and be no fun.

No Nobility In Poverty (50pts) - Get a daily net result higher than $500. There is a bug in the game where when you get a result higher than $250 it says $500 by mistake, so don't freak out if you get the message but not the medal; that was supposed to be the message for $250. You'll get the medal the second time you see that message.

Building Your Store
The most important thing to do is upgrade the register. This should be your first task at all your locations, including the first one. You can upgrade it twice, for $250 and $500, and each time it speeds up transactions by 25%. The other things you can buy for your store are as follows:

CD Rack: Used for storing CDs. It costs $200 to store 10 CDs, and can be upgraded twice for $100 and $150 to add 5 each time. If you have the money handy, it's better to buy a new rack than upgrade two, and you don't need to upgrade any twice until you get to your last shop.

Demo Booth: A waste of $400. Save your money. In theory, anyone who listens to a song at the demo booth will buy an extra disc in their purchase, but after the second day nobody ever uses them. Cannot be upgraded, but that really doesn't matter.

DJ Booth: 80lbs of awesome in a 2lb bag. Costs $900, and everyone who enters your store gets an instant karma boost. Odds are you won't ever need one if you play the game well, but I usually put one in my last shop just because I can. If your karma is tanking, the DJ Booth will single-handedly save you in a single day. Cannot be upgraded, and occupies 4 spots on the floor.

Hi-Fi Set: Seems to increase the patience of your customers by about 50%. Costs $500, and is worth it, especially early on.

Neon Sign: Costs $750 and dramatically increases the number of people who enter your store. When you've got enough stock that you're never selling out, this is a worthwhile investment. It's not worth it for your starting shop though.

Karma
The higher your karma, the more you can sell discs for and the longer people will wait in line to pay for them. Conversely, the lower your karma, the less your selling value and the less their patience. Karma is important to your ability to succeed in this game. The following things affect karma:

Negative: long line at checkout. This is the largest karma dropper in the game. Solve it by upgrading your register and getting a hi-fi set.

Negative: high prices. Solve it by lowering your prices. I like to think this one's fairly obvious.

Negative: out of stock. They want urban, but there's no urban. Know your customers' musical taste, and cater to it.

Positive: DJ. They enter the shop, see the DJ, and your karma goes up. And lots of people enter the shop.

Positive: low prices. Depending on your karma, "low prices" could actually be above market value.

Positive: completing a sale. People like buying things.

Note: You lose significantly more karma from one person giving up on the line than you do from several people not finding the music they want. For this reason, it is important that you never have more people in your store than your checkout line can deal with, unless you have massively high karma and can bear it.

Locations
There are four locations for your stores which you'll use throughout the game. Each one is progressively larger, with a larger clientele. When you change location, your music and equipment do not go with you; you start from scratch each time, with only the money you have saved up. As such, you should make sure you have enough money saved to make a go of it at your new location. You should also sell your stock before moving, for the extra bit of cash. I like to plan my move, and try to limit my stock selection so I have a chance of selling out to my customers before moving, for maximum moving capital.

Below is a list of the four locations, showing which location they are, how much it costs, how much you should have saved up before buying it, and the musical preferences of your clientele. Any genre not listed for a location should generally be held in token amounts, where "token amounts" will vary based on the size of your customer base; from 2 or 3 at the beginning of the game to 15 or 20 at the end. It is also worth noting that these are just trends, and there will be days that completely defy this list.

Location 1: $100 / $450 - Urban, with a bit of pop and indie
Location 2: $750 / $2700 - Indie, then pop, then evenly distributed among the rest
Location 3: $1500 / $4150 - Lots of classics, then indie, then pop
Location 4: $2500 / $5850 - Pop, then urban and dance, then indie

Note that the more money you have when you buy a location, the less time you will spend there before being able to move on. Also note that with careful play you can move into location 4 before reaching day 50. It's also possible to move into location 2 before day 25, but it's much more difficult. The $450 for location 1 is your starting cash, and the $5850 for location 4 assumes that you're going to keep playing the game after buying it; if you're just after the medal then $2500 will do. In fact, if you're just after the medal you can save $4000, buy location 3, tank a turn, then buy location 4 and be done with it. But where's the fun in that?

Strategy
You want to increase your customer base as you expand the size of your musical selection, and after you've upgraded your register to handle the number of people coming in. It is vitally important for your karma that you avoid having your customers get fed up with long lines, so make sure you can handle the increased foot traffic before doing the promotion to get it.

To this end, in the first turn of the game you should upgrade your register, and stock your shelves with urban music. On the second turn, go for an 8-1-1 split between urban, pop and indie. Spend the next few turns restocking those same discs until you have enough money saved up to upgrade your music rack after refilling your stock, and then to buy a second rack. At this point your disc distribution should be something like 3-15-2-2-3, and you'll want to keep roughly those ratios for as long as you're at this location. Other locations have different ratios, which you'll learn as you go.

At this point your game becomes one of managing supply and demand with your ability to handle customers. If you're keeping the line at the register short enough that nobody's getting fed up with the wait and leaving, then you want to increase your shelf space and marketing. If people are starting to walk away, you need to stop that and either buy yourself a hi-fi set or upgrade your register again. I usually go for the hi-fi set before the second register upgrade, because I think its effect is greater, though I haven't been able to objectively measure it by the nature of the game.

In the general case, that's the entire game. However, certain in-game events will change how you play the game for the following day. If record prices are up, don't overstock your shelves, as the profit isn't there. If record prices are down, it's time to expand. If a genre has become popular, abandon your customers' usual preference and load up on that genre. And if an event happens that affects the size of your customer base, adjust your stock and expectations accordingly.

When buying the neon sign, make sure you have about 40% extra stock over what you usually sell in a day, because your foot traffic will go up that sharply. When placing CD racks, put them as far from the register as possible in order to delay your customers from getting there; it will help keep the line short. This becomes less relevant after you've upgraded the register twice, so don't get too hung up on it.

The last thing to discuss about gameplay is placement of CD racks. You can't block foot traffic within your store, but you can overlap it as long as the two racks are facing each other. This will let you put 4 racks in your first location, by having 3 across the top facing downward, and one in the middle of the bottom row facing upward; it cannot face right.

Cheating The System
The game only saves when you finish each day, and at no other time. It saves before the next day is announced. What that means is if you get a news item you don't like (or none at all), you can just refresh the window and continue your game, and you'll get a new one. So if you want to really progress quickly in-game, you can just keep refreshing until every day the suppliers are having a half off sale, and you'll make oodles of profit every day. Of course, it takes away the fun from the game, and makes it drag on and on as you spend more time refreshing the screen than actually playing the game, so whether you do this is up to you.

Known Bugs
Sometimes the register will just simply stop ringing people up, which will tank your karma if it happens early in the day. The only thing you can do about this is drop your prices and buy a DJ Booth, because the DJ's effect on your karma is legendary.

If you use Build Mode and don't turn it off before beginning your day, even if you go to the Office first, the Hi-Fi Set if present will appear in blueprint colours. Only a visual bug, but kind of entertaining I think.

Late in the game, it will sometimes stop working and bloat your memory usage. Unfortunately, all you can do about this is restart your browser and hope for the best.

Sometimes your customers will walk through the walls and head off in random directions, or check out nowhere near your register. This doesn't affect gameplay at all, but it's sure funny to watch.

The message for doing $250 in business is typoed to say $500, which is confusing because there's a medal in it for actually doing $500 in business. When playing the game, ignore the first $500 announcement and wait for the second.

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