Deadliest Catch Flash Game

For those of you who regularly read Penny-Arcade.com, you probably already know this. (And for those of you who don't...well, you probably should.)

Discovery has released a Flash game based around their popular series Deadliest Catch. The series is a documentary-style television show that chronicals New England lobster fishermen, and the game allows players to command their own ship and crew for one 120-hour season and try to maximize their profits.

The game is available at http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/deadliestcatch/game/game.html

It's pretty clever marketting strategy (Season 4 starts next month), but the game itself is also fairly entertaining. Players are limited to 120 hours, 1 ship, 4 crew members, and a $250,000 budget; the trick is to discover how to maximize these parameters to get the most profit. A bigger ship can deploy more traps simultameously, but it will also move between locations slower. A more experienced crew will be able to accomplish tasks more quickly, but they will also demand a larger salary. Assigning multiple crew members to the same task will also allow them to complete it more quickly, but each crew member has a finite amount of stamina that can only be replenished by allowing them to rest.

It's fun to play around with various strategies to see if you can improve your profits. If you want my advice for a first season:

1. Buy Boat 4 with all the class B ammenities
2. Hire Charlie, Rob, Lonnie, and Dan
3. Assign everyone to bait traps and pick a location to fish about 6 hours away. Hit "Go", and the boat will start moving while the fishermen bait.
4. Pick 2 crew members (preferably 1 greenhorn and 1 deckhand) to drop traps in the new location while the other 2 rest
5. Move the boat to an adjacent location, and then drop additional traps there. If any problems arise, try to fix them while en-route so that you don't slow down your fishing.
6. Repeat steps 4-5 until you have 4 sets of traps out.
7. Move back to the location of oldests trap. Locate them and haul them on-board.
8. Repeat step 7 for all 4 sets of traps.
9. Lay out all 4 sets of traps again in new locations.

Using this strategy, I can net about $1,000,000 profit each season. I've experiemented with a few parameters, but usually the results are about the same. Right now, the high scores for the game are all above $2,000,000--I have no idea how you score that well.