This guide sets out how to best "start" with Empire TV Tycoon, which should set you in good stead to attain the "Finish the game on Expert Mode with the Red Channel" Red Fury achievement.

There isn't too much of a disadvantage in playing as Red, the fact you are further away in the lift I suppose, but that's about it.

In Expert, you only get 1 audience "ban", so you need to make sure that you try and please as many audience blocks as possible, with the best quality possible.

Most of the audience "likes" you could guess at, but the best bet is to use Kuggar's Audience vs Genre Guide; I like to keep the Audience Table open on another screen.

Generalist or not??
The benefits from being generalist, I believe, are far better than specialising. Having 2 extra news slots means you don't have to spend too long creating advertising blocks, as news will bring in helpful viewers; and you advertising guru a) struggles to create enough adverts and b) gets expensive.

Also, by specialising, your scriptwriter becomes 1 dimensional, and won't be able to react to award ceremonies with good scripts.

In the game
You get a lot of money to work with at the start, and helpfully, basic advertising and one of every category TV show.

I recommend NOT ever buying the Pirate Movies from the dodgy guy outside, the police will probably intercept your show and fine you £100,000. This will set you back too far at whatever stage you are playing. You can mitigate this risk with a Hacker, but this only lowers the chance, and takes up a worker desk that is useful.

First things first
You compete with the other channels. Everybody gets the same audience every block. This means that if you both show the same type of content, with the same advertising beforehand, the better TV show (higher rating) will win the most views.

This is important, as every block where you have the most viewers will award "Fame points", and this is essentially a guide to how well you are doing against the competition, and opens new tech faster.

So I go the Movie Vendor in the Basement, and swap out anything rated < 4, for a similar genre rated higher. This usually spends 1/3 of our budget, but is totally worth it.

Now we have good films to show poeple.

So the first choice is who do we want working for us.

To succeed in ETT, we need Fame, and we need money.

Money can be obtained from completing random events, making films to win awards and selling later, or through advertising.

Since you receive a random event on day 2 (and an email in day 1), you are best off hiring a scriptwriter (the best one you can) to start writing scripts straight away. It doesn't matter if we don't have a studio yet, just build up a repertoire of scripts.

I keep binning the scripts until I have either Very Good, or Masterwork quality scripts.

Normally I would recommend an audience analyst to show us who we are programming for, but if you are on the ball with programming etc, this is unneccery, as by default you get a few blocks of information to work with anyway.

The desk space is better used for a Marketing Manager (MM) (to proudce better adverts to increase viewership) or a Community Manager (CM) to get more money from successful adverts.

There are positives to having both, so we go to the tech area and buy an additional desk and the studio repair.

We can then hire a CM and a MM and have the CM working on level 2, and the MM on making billboards or level 2.

Now we have all we need, we are good to win the game.

The difficulty is in getting a feel for what news/adverts we need to show, on what TV genres for what audiences to get money from our adverts. They key is working out what combination of pre-show advertising, TV show genre and rating and audience blocks will get the figure required by the adverts.

The first scheduling we have in place already (put in by computer) will 9/10 times needs to be amended to fit the audience, so I recommend replacing it before the game clock reaches 13:00.

Refer to the wiki, or Kuggar's guide to what you think is best. Try to keep red faces to a minimum, or if you have to, ensure you can balance out a few yellow audience groups by placing the appropriate news beforehand in order to get green/happy faces watching.

i.e. If you have an audience block of Men and Women, who like different things: You can get away with showing a Horror which neither like nor dislike, so long as you have the news which attracts Rockers to the audience group if a Horror is showing.


Other than that, you can buy new adverts if you find an audience of a TV show higher or lower than you expected, and swap them out before the show ends.

You should be well on the way to at least staying with the Blue and Green channel's fame.

"Scheduling" Quests

Sometimes you'll be asked to schedule something for money, usually quite an attractive sum. Except sometimes it's really not worth it. Here you can see a "Comedy" requested for a Rockers and Athletes audience.


One is red, and one is yellow (See Kuggar's audience guide). So in this case it's best to simply ignore the request, and put on an Action, Musical or Sport.

Fame is worth more than the money, and if you are making advert targets, you shouldn't be out of cash.

Getting to 70 Fame

As soon as you hit 70 fame, I like to sack the scriptwriter, and hire the Public Relations staff member. You can then get 100 fame actors, simply to fill the scripts with. As soon as you have done this (you should fill 4 or 5 very good/ masterwork scripts) you can sack them, and hire a Production Assistant. This will give you more points to use when producing the films.

This is a cost effective way of producing all your programs at once.

You can then rehire a scriptwriter once everything has been produced, or if you get to 100 fame, then you can get a 4th desk.

Managing Advertising
At around 200-300 Fame, you should only be showing films over 7.5, either created by you, or bought with money from advertising. The computer player channels will however, still occasionally secure more viewers than you by advertising.

This means you should always ensure you have your best adverts available, and occasionally, this means having 2 marketing managers, if you don't need a scriptwriter.

I like to swap out scriptwriter for an extra MM, or PA as and when required.

Come on, this is a guide.