Dealing With Stress

One of the most limiting factors in dealing with stars is their propensity to become stressed out as they make films. Shooting a film causes stress to build up, as does practicing on a set, to a lesser degree. You'll be able to gauge your stars' tolerance for stress by right-clicking on their icons on the left side of the screen; stars with a low tolerance for stress will require more maintenance than highly tolerant stars.

This is mostly because stress thresholds are one of the prime barriers to getting a good performance from your team. If a star reaches the lower end of their stress threshold, they'll often walk off the set if they're shooting and refuse to return to work until they've cleared their heads a bit. Thus, if possible, it's best to get them as mellow as possible before sending them in for rehearsals. There are a number of ways to do this, obviously.

Environmental Distractions: If you notice that a star's getting stressed, you can attempt to relax them by picking them up and tasking them on a basketball court, a nice fountain, a car, a bath, a park bench, etc. These items can help them relax a bit, but are generally going to be somewhat inefficient in doing so, since your star will often just poke around the item for a bit and then walk away.

Creepy grin notwithstanding, some environmental objects, like these free weights, can de-stress a star and also fulfill other needs, like Physique.

Note that, when you unlock trailers, you'll be able to plop plants and decorations around the trailer (indicated by the small property line around it) to further increase your star's happiness. They might not use the objects autonomously as often as you'd like, but they will help boost the star's prestige meter. When you have trailers for your stars, you'll also be able to drop them directly onto the trailer to cause them to Relax.

Food and Drink: One of the most efficient ways of decreasing stress levels in The Movies is to pick up your star and put them near a bar or restaurant. A little taste of the finer things in life is usually enough to perk your stars right back up, but of course, you'll have to watch their addiction meters to ensure that they don't wind up getting hooked on the good stuff. If your star is more resistant to food than drink, then you'll want to place them at a restaurant, and if they can hold their liquor better than their food, use booze to get them back in the swing of things.

Just be sure to keep an eye on your stars when they conspicuously consume. They seem to "stick" to bars and restaurants for a bit longer than they would other environmental hotspots, so if you just leave them there they might go on something of a binge. Try to remember whom you've placed at a bar or restaurant, and pull them off when their stress meter backs away from the critical line.

As your stars near their addiction meter, they'll start to behave more erratically. Stars that are heavy drinkers, for instance, will sometimes stagger around drunk, making for a perfect photo opportunity for the paparrazi. Unfortunately, they'll also sometimes leave a film set while it's shooting in search of a fix. You should be able to correct this by watching for red exclamation points that pop up when shooting is interrupted. If you notice one of your stars wandering off the set for booze, you can manually drag them back to the set and force them to get back to work; so long as their stress meter doesn't drop below their threshold, they should be able to hold out until the end of filming before they need to get back on the sauce.

Free Time: Sometimes, all your star really needs is some time away from the stress and pains of the jetset life of a movie star. After shooting wraps on your 40-month production, for instance, you might want to just let your stars do their own thing for a while, instead of ramming them back into another production right away. The AI on your stars isn't necessarily as efficient as you would be in attending to their needs - they'll often wind up doing nothing at all - but if you let them wander off and do their own thing for a while, their stress meter should gradually restore itself, just by virtue of being off the set.

Maximizing Prestige and Star Power

Star Power

Each star of yours, whether actor or director, has a star power ranking which scales up from zero stars to five stars, in a fashion similar to that of your studio. Increasing the star power of a star will increase the quality of the movies that they're in, but will also increase the star's salary demands and other desires. You also need to increase star power in order to earn some of the rewards that come along with having a star at a certain star power level; maximizing this rating is quite difficult, but can be done.

If you click on your Studio Rating in the upper right corner of your screen (the large sun icon near your available money), you'll pop open a few different tabs of info relating how your studio compares with the others. If you click on the middle tab here, you'll get a list of your stars. Hover over one of your star names to learn about all the factors involved in star power; there are nine in all. You don't need to worry about all of them at the outset, but as you try to get your talent up above four stars in their star power ranking, you'll eventually need to deal with all nine of them.

Movie Success

In short, the star rating of the last movie that the star was in. (This may also be an average of the last few movies, or it may just take the highest value rating from the last few movies.) Since you'll be unlocking advanced Script Offices, new technology, and things like post production and PR, you shouldn't have a hard time releasing five-star movies pretty consistently after you're a few decades into the game. Just keep your stars practicing in one or two core genres, and keep their moods up, and they'll contribute greatly to the success of a film.

Salary

At zero salary, you'll have no stars in this factor; it maxes out at around $100,000. Of course, you might have to wind up paying your stars more than that to keep them happy, but as long as you're paying them at least 100k, you should maximize the effect that their salary has on their star power.

Performances

This factor depends on the kind of performance that your actors have been giving in recent films, which mostly depends on their mood and genre experience. Attempting to keep your stars in the glowing green mood stage will help maximize this meter, but you should also keep in mind that they'll have a hard time giving appealing performances in most genres as they get older.

Image

Image primarily revolves around looks and fashion. Looks are mostly dependent on youth; the younger a star is, the better they'll look. However, if you're looking for a five-star performer, you'll need to build them up over decades, meaning that you'll probably have to indulge in some plastic surgery to increase their looks when they start to get too old to be hip with the kids. Physique rating can also help here, so be sure to have your stars work out whenever their physique stars to slip into uncomfortably low ratings. You can also use the Implants or Liposuction options in your Cosmetic Surgery building to increase Physique.

Fashion is somewhat easier to deal with; just plop your star in the Makeover Department every few years and select the most fashionable clothing that's available. Your stars get quite upset when they have to wear outdated clothing, so check back for new clothes around the end of every decade, or when your researchers unlock new clothing options.

High-powered stars need a big entourage, even if they are kind of creepy-looking.

Entourage

Like Salary, this is a linear factor. Your star has no influence here without any entourage members, but will maximize this factor when they have six assistants. Entourage members can be taken out of employment lines, or can be retasked from other jobs, but won't be able to do anything other than fawn over your star, and also seem to lose all the experience they've gained in their other jobs when they become assistants.

For most of the game, you'll probably want to give your biggest stars just enough entourage members to keep them from throwing a fit; when you try to increase their star power to five, though, you'll have to give them six assistants to put them over the top. If you're just doing this for the sake of earning a certificate, then you can immediately retask all of the assistants back to other jobs when you earn the reward.

Also, keep in mind that when a star retires or is fired, his entourage members disappear. If someone's creeping up on their 70th birthday, be sure to grab all of his or her assistants and plop them into another job before they go away.

Trailer

This indicates how fashionable the star's trailer is. As you proceed through the game, you'll unlock more trailer options, with new trailers becoming progressively more expensive, but progressively nicer as well. Maximizing this rank will require the most expensive trailer, most likely.

You can also increase the trailer factor by building numerous decorations and plants into the area around the trailer. When you're in the zone of influence, your item placements will turn green around their bottoms, with a small nub pointing towards the trailer; this indicates that planting your object in the spot indicated will add to the prestige of the trailer. Obviously enough, a variety of highly expensive items, such as cars and fountains, or the $8,000 entrance stones, will have the biggest impact here. You can even build other small structures, such as VIP Restrooms, on the trailer's lot.

Note also that trailers do have maintenance values as well, and that these can affect the prestige of the trailer. If you're having trouble getting your Palatial Trailer up to the full three stars, try dropping a Builder onto one of the maintenance spots to have them get it back in tip-top shape.