Codigames’ 15-strong app portfolio contains a variety of games across different genres but most of it categorically belong to the simulation group, particularly idle clicker games. With numerous successful idle clicker titles like Hotel Empire Tycoon, Idle Theme Park Tycoon, and Idle Supermarket Tycoon just to name a few, Codigames has cemented its mark on the genre. Amassing well over 80 million downloads across its games from the Google Play Store alone, and maintaining largely positive average user review ratings as well, the company leaves fans and followers of its games eagerly awaiting their new releases.
Idle Police Tycoon is Codigames’ brand new idle clicker game, that’s available on both iOS and Android platforms. This game stands as a unique business sim title in the sense that you will be managing your very own police department. Given that police departments are government institutions and are not established for profits, the idea alone of making one your own to grow and develop much like any entrepreneurial venture breeds excitement more than the usual business sim concepts.
Idle Police Tycoon does not rely on the sole uniqueness of the game’s concept as it offers a plethora of features and content that both idle clicker game enthusiasts and newbies in the genre can revel in. After playing through countless idle clicker sim games, we can say that Idle Police Tycoon is not as straightforward as the others are. It is still as simple and as easy to pick up and play but holds a lot more aspects you need to look into and balance to ensure a steadily increasing amount of income.
Profits also stream continuously but if you will it enough, some facilities within your police department can incur losses. It provides more challenge than the average idle clicker game but still maintains the fun and immersive aspects of the genre.
There is a quick tutorial to greet you as you hop into Idle Police Tycoon to introduce you to the usual purchases, hiring, and upgrades you will regularly invest in as you make progress. The game’s controls and interface are as simple as they come so even total beginners can easily grasp the basic concepts. The challenging part lies in balancing out salaries as expenses and income generated by each division or facility within your police department, especially as your business continue to grow.
If you are looking for ways to make your business venture more profitable, then look no further as our Idle Police Tycoon beginner’s guide contains all the tips and strategies you need to know to have the best police department in town!
1. Keep The Profit Multiplier Active
It is only natural to want to explore around the police department and start investing idle cash away as soon as the tutorial ends and you are allowed to do as you please. While doing so still brings about overall positive results, the most important activity to initiate over anything else is the profit multiplier. You can just as easily activate it by tapping on the play button at the bottom of your screen.
The profit multiplier is an ad boost that that doubles all income you earn for 10 minutes. You have to watch a 15 to 30-minute video ad each time you activate it and you can consecutively do this to rack up 60 minutes-worth of boost at a time. While you do not necessarily have to do so each time, a more efficient approach towards maximizing your police department’s profitability means ensuring that the ad boost is always active as having 2x income at any point in the game essentially cuts down time to earn as much profits by half.
The best course of action is to launch an ad boost as soon as you are able to do so before going about tending to your growing police department. There are certainly a lot of things to do in the police department but you will always have idle times as you wait for idle profits to generate. Within these times, you should stock up on ad boosts and ensure that the 2x profit multiplier stays active. If ever you would have to leave the game, try as much as you can to leave it with 60 minutes worth of boost as the same applies to offline rewards. Once you log back into the game again, initialize the profit boost again before anything else.
2. Maintain As Little Idle Cash As Possible
A common feature of every idle clicker game is earning profits over time. For the most part, you will continue to earn profits regardless of what you do as soon as you jump into the game. Just like business ventures in real life, every bit of profit you make contributes to the feeling of success that grows the bigger your idle profits get. As you watch your cash grow to record-breaking amounts, you might be enticed to keep it that way. Keep in mind, however, that in any idle clicker sim game, more idle cash means less efficiency as far as investments go.
In Idle Police Tycoon, spending idle cash to improve the police department does not always merit a direct increase in the profits you earn. Considering that some investments are necessary for continued operation such as hiring police officers and investigators, while others are needed as well to improve the efficiency of facilities and the workforce like generators and furniture, each investment option available contributes to an increase in profits just not as directly as others.
The only exception to the general rule of leaving as little idle cash as possible is when you are aiming to purchase an investment that you cannot afford given your current funds. As generalized as this may sound, it is up to you how to define the line between waiting for more cash to come in or investing your idle cash elsewhere. This will also depend on how much time you have to spend actively playing the game and the estimated amount of time it would take to reach the target amount.
3. Follow The Basic Investment Strategy
Relative to our second strategy, there is also a general rule you should follow in idle clicker games like Idle Police Tycoon when it comes to choosing where to invest. To begin with, you will come to discover a lot of investment options even after just a few minutes of diving into your continuously growing virtual police department. While these investments can be categorized based on which facility they belong to or what type of upgrade is involved, a basic way of aligning them into a dichotomous branch of choices is through their outright cost.
Even on the starting location, costs of upgrades can vary between 4 to low 5-digit costs and some have 6-digit costs that takes a lot of time and patience to afford. We are only considering initial costs here, meaning, the acquisition of a certain item or the first level of expansion in the area of coverage. If you noticed, some upgrade options within each facility of your police department are repetitive and that some have the exact same effect but costs a lot higher. In this sense, it is only practical and efficient to go for the cheaper ones especially if the subsequent impact is exactly or almost the same.
The more challenging decision point comes when the cheapest upgrade in a given facility or expansion is much higher than the other choices but likewise is needed to boost your police department’s efficiency. Going about it should be based on your current standing and how much time you know you will actively spend on actually managing your enterprise. If it will only take a few minutes to meet the required funding for the expensive upgrade, then it is always best to wait it out. Once you have made the purchase and still have some active time left to stay online, then you can proceed to invest in the smaller purchases and upgrades.
If you are about to go offline, the general rule to follow is our second tip, which should leave you with as little idle cash as possible, so spending all your earnings on smaller investments will work better. Once you have logged back in and claimed your offline rewards, that will be a rare occasion where you will have a lot of idle funds in your hands. These situations make it wiser for you to spend your cash on the more expensive upgrades.
4. Focus On Arresting One Most Wanted Criminal At A Time
One of the more exciting aspects of Idle Police Tycoon is that there is a wide variety of crimes and criminals you can catch on a regular basis. Beyond that, however, most wanted criminals provide you with more opportunities to earn some extra cash as well as gems and these criminals give you a more specific set of extra missions to accomplish. As an added motivational incentive, each of the most wanted criminals you will encounter in Idle Police Tycoon, resemble some real life celebrities you should recognize, especially if you are a fan of movies that involve criminal protagonists.
You can check the most wanted criminals via its icon at the lower right side of the screen. Note that every mission you accomplish relative to each of these criminals will earn you gems. Completing all the missions and finally arresting the most wanted criminal earns you lumps of cash, more gems, and a permanent boost to your hourly profits.
For starters, you would want to unlock each of the most wanted criminals early on, and you can do so by tapping on the city map icon at the bottom of your screen, and choosing to expand your police department’s jurisdiction on more areas within the city. These expansions cost a lot of cash and should be a priority whenever you have acquired a huge sum of money from offline rewards or other sources. It is best to unlock all the most wanted criminals to start accomplishing missions sooner, but when it comes to focusing, choosing to complete missions related to one criminal is the way to go.
You can actually see on the most wanted criminals window how many missions you need to accomplish to arrest them and your status on each one. It is fairly easy enough to determine which of these criminals is the easiest to arrest so you should target them first. What you are actually after when focusing on a criminal, is the permanent profit boost that he will generate while he is in lockup so the sooner you arrest one, the better it is for your department, specifically in relation to idle profits.
Keep in mind that before you can arrest a most wanted criminal, you need to build an isolation cell for them. The number of isolation cells you can build within each police department tells you how many most wanted criminals you need to capture. There is no need to build all these cells, though, so feel free to do so only when you are ready to capture someone.
5. Invest In Booster Cards
Yet another exciting aspect of Idle Police Tycoon comes with the gacha aspect of obtaining cards that can boost your police department’s efficiency. While you can only spend gems, which are a premium currency, to obtain these cards, gathering just a few goes a long way in terms of productivity boost. While it is far more challenging to earn gems from missions and capturing most wanted criminals, actively playing will soon earn you enough to purchase some card packs from the store.
At the shop, there are 3 choices of card packs you can purchase. The basic pack costs 200 gems and contains 34 cards, 4 of which are rare. The advanced card pack costs 500 gems and contains 120 cards including 20 rare cards, and the expert card pack costs 1,200 gems and contains 546 cards, including 96 rare cards and 50 epic cards.
Given the costs and card rarities involved in each pack of card, the most viable choice to go for is the expert card pack given that it is the only way to get your hands on epic cards. However, it may take a long while for you to earn the required number of gems to make a purchase so if you are not as active managing your police department business, our recommendation for you is to settle for a basic card pack first to start earning boosts and then save your gems later to purchase an expert card pack. It is actually okay to secure extra copies of each card as it will level up the unlocked boost and multiply its effects.
You can check the cards you have unlocked and their specific levels via the gold card icon at the upper right side of your screen. If you look closely, will either result to an increase in the efficiency of the different facilities within your police department or boost profits. Now this can be a point to consider in prioritizing subsequent upgrades you invest in moving forward.
6. Habitually Check On Your Management Standing
Efficiency and profitability also come as natural aspects of facilities within your police department. Except for the electricity room that provides more power and the tech zone that generates tech points for various needs, all other purchases and investments within the police department will either cause an increase in efficiency or profits.
Naturally, the goal is to continuously maximize profits and while investing across various facilities within the police department eventually lead to that, there is a chance for you to have some areas that incur losses. As we mentioned earlier, one of Idle Police Tycoon’s unique feature is that it can have you incur losses instead of profits, at least on some areas of your police business. You can keep track of each division’s performance via the management icon at the lower right corner of the screen. The fact that it is colored differently from the surrounding icons should give you an idea about its importance so be sure to look into it every once in a while.
Some areas, like the crime lab, naturally only incur costs but investing in it leads to a faster processing of criminal charges and the eventual capture of the criminals involved. Prison cells, on the other hand, will only contribute to profit as each prisoner kept within a cell contributes to your hourly profits and security cameras further add to those profits. What you need to look into more critically, are the areas within the department that cost more than what they are making or are incurring more costs than they should.
An example would be the tactical unit that caters to specific cases, which may not be largely available if you have yet to upgrade latter districts within the city. In these cases, limit upgrades to the tactical unit until it comes to a point that makes it absolutely necessary. In the case of the crime labs and fraud and counterfeit division, you should likewise invest in them only when there is a lot of work available to them, respectively. In any case, incurring extra expenditures on some divisions within your police department will not lead to bankruptcy as you will always be earning profits from more sources.
The key word to apply here as far as overall efficiency is concerned is balance. In some instances, you will notice early on that your reception area and the detective division maybe shoulders deep in crimes that they are tending to. As you click on a division, you may see red lines indicating that it is struggling. It simply means that there is an overflowing demand for their service but they lack resources or proficiency to cater to all incoming clients. These are the divisions that you need to spend more investments on.
On the other hand, you may easily unlock the crime lab and the fraud / counterfeit division but hardly have any related cases come in to them, respectively. One of the most basic upgrades you will purchase across most divisions is the expansion, which increases the number of consecutive cases or crimes that they can handle at the same time.
From here, you can already determine the need to prioritize in terms of which divisions require more of your cash. If the initial capacity of 10 cases does not fill up, then there is no urgent need for you to spend upgrades on a division, otherwise, if the casesare always full even at max expansion level, then you simply need to spend more resources on the division to lighten up their load.
7. Expand Your Business In Another City
Your journey towards being the top police tycoon does not end with a maxed out police department in the starting city of twin hills. If you check the “cities” icon at the right side of your screen just above the most wanted list, you will see other cities where you can later set up another police department. It is based on your performance in managing the current police department, which can be determined by the number of badges you have earned at the upper right side of the screen.
As you continue to purchase new items, hire more people, unlock new facilities, and capture more criminals, you will notice the bar underneath the badges fill up. For your first expansion, you need to earn 3 full badges so that the residents of the next city, La Ruidosa, will want to hire you as their chief of police as well. This will not stop you from managing your police department back in Twin Hills and, in effect, you will have to multitask across both departments.
Your profits and respective purchases and upgrades are separate and distinct between different cities. The proficiency and income boosts you receive from the cards, as well as the profit booster applies to both. As you play actively on one city, you can continue to earn idle rewards from the other cities as well.
Each subsequent city comes with a much bigger police department to begin with. Although most of its facilities will stay locked up for starters, continued progression through territorial expansions and investements will eventually lead to unlocking each new facility. Each division within the subsequent police departments will hold more upgrade options on top of new features that may not be available in the previous cities, making for a longer grind and dedication to max out the new department. Despite how many cities you have police departments in, you can still stick with all the tips and strategies we mentioned in the guide as the same concepts basically apply to each one.
8. Take Advantage Of Other Ad Boosts
Video ads have long since become a common part of many free mobile games, especially in hyper-casual ones and idle clicker games. While it is naturally acceptable to have these ads around, it may happen that some players may still be annoyed by its presence especially the ads that pop up every once in a while as you play.
In Idle Police Tycoon, there are a lot of video ads you can play but each one is entirely voluntary and will only initiate if you choose for it to do so. The 2x income booster we discussed on the first tip is an example of these ad boosts and, while unnecessary, will tremendously increase your profitability and speed up your progression in the game.
On top of the 2x income booster that you would want to keep active, a huge opportunity to earn a lot of cash comes from claiming offline rewards. Note that you can only claim offline rewards for a maximum of 2 hours but if you choose to play a 15 to 30-second video ad before doing so, you can double the amount of offline rewards you will receive.
Another common sight to see are the special bonus rewards you can claim that randomly appear at the right side of the screen. These rewards may come in the form of extra cash or extra prisoners. Extra cash means an outright increase in your idle capital and extra prisoners boost rewards for the duration of time the prisoners stay in lock up. Either way, extra income is always goo and if you are idly waiting to earn cash to purchase new upgrades or expansions, you might as well spend it on playing these ads.
That sums up all the tips and strategies that we have come up for Idle Police Tycoon. We hope that you picked up each of the tips and strategies we mentioned with ease and that you will as easily apply them to your progress in the game moving forward. We would like to stress the idea that despite being an idle clicker game, actively spending time managing your police departments will lead to much bigger profits and faster progression, just like businesses in real life.
If you have spent a lot of time playing Idle Police Tycoon and have chanced upon some neat tips, tricks and strategies in addition to what we have already shared above, do not hesitate to let us know about them!