Thank for the clear and comprehensive tips.
I guess I'm most confused by the serum manufacturing. I need to
1. Research
2. Design serum (combine the research outputs). This is where I don't know what I'm doing. Just combine randomly?
3. Produce product
4. Sell product
Is that correct?
After two weeks of research, I'm more or less out of money, with just 3 employees, Stephanie, Sarah, and a random. And not anywhere near designing a product, let alone produce anything that can be sold.
So, more of a money managing problem than anything else.
Some advice I can give for early starting focus.
On your starting stats, I would recommend a min-max strategy. You want to focus your work efforts in as narrow a focus as possible where you are most effective, and then diversify later on. I would advise fully investing all your starting stat points in charisma, supply, and foreplay. I'll explain why.
- Charisma: This impacts not only your effectiveness in some work functions (supply, marketing mainly) but also your interactions with girls. One of your best abilities as a boss is a daily free action with each employee to professionally compliment or professionally insult them. Complimenting adds +1 love and also adds your charisma value to the girl's happiness. Insulting them costs -1 love and -2 happiness, and results in an increase in her obedience by your charisma value. If you can flirt with the girl, it costs you a mere 15 stamina to professional insult her and then pay 15 stamina to regular flirt/compliment her, resulting in a +charisma to her obedience, with the love and happiness washing each other out. Once obedience starts going past 160, you can do all sorts of things; make her strip, have sex with her, make her test a serum. You also can abuse her as an "employee"; normally as a girl becomes more skilled she will expect a higher salary, and if she doesn't get it and her happiness is low she will quit. With a very high obedience (like 200) you can keep lowering her salary until she works for free, and she still won't quit. Either way, a highly obedient employee is ideal for a regular sex partner early game, both to meet sex goals for level ups and to gain clarity which is needed to unlock serum traits.
- Supply. So you've got Steph working on R&D. And you've got her sister Ashley who joins around week 2 to work production. That leaves HR, marketing, and supply procurement. Steph and her sister are both skilled enough (duty capacity) that you can assign them a paperwork duty so they don't lower business efficiency, meaning you can skip HR entirely. And once you get larger, Sarah steps in to become HR director, so you definately don't need HR skills ever. Marketing, you're still low sales volume enough that even if you don't market, you won't notice much of an impact on your sell price, and by month 1 Alexis will join you to work sales. That leaves supply procurement, which you either need to do yourself or hire out for. You will likely want to spend some turns doing non-work stuff, so having high skill in supply & charisma means you can buy enough supply in 1 turn for a full day's production out of Ashley.
- Foreplay. This is fairly basic; you've got to warm a girl up with 1st, 2nd & 3rd base before she'll be letting you nut her poop chute. Being able to get a girl to quickly orgasm from light play will open her up to more daring actions, so you should be maxing foreplay then oral then vag then anal. And before that you should max stamina, but you can't with your starting stats. You want to be a master of one skill at a time, not a shitty jack of all trades.
For your first few weeks, take things slow. You need to unlock serum traits before you can do anything. I'd recommend high capacity and basic medical procedures, then suggestion drugs and caffine or some other benign trait. You'll basically want 2 production pipelines;
- Legitimate drugs. Like a primitive serum, high capacity, basic medical, caffine serum. This will be your starting moneymaker, sell it as you make it.
- Shady deal / illicit actions. Like a primitive serum, high capacity, suggestion drugs + something else (birth control suppression / +slutty). Contract offers may request these, but you can only sell so much because the attention you get will cause problems.
- Not a true production but an R&D route. When you finish researching a new serum design, you get 1 sample. Usually this is sufficient to learn what you need to know about it to negate side effects. Feed it to an employee in the morning, if you've got 250 base stamina, you can do 3x each of flirt, small talk, and compliment for a +1.8 mastery of all its traits in 1 turn. Very easy to get +5 or more mastery by the end of the day if you continue to spend all your stamina with the test subject. Then no need to produce the serum design, you've unlocked the next better design, scrap it and move on.
Talk with Camilla and set your goals and objectives. Early game, you've got no game, so having a goal of impregnating a chick is unrealistic. Focus on work-a-day for stat improvement, work production for job skill improvement (like buying x# of supplies), and flirting for sex stat improvement. Reroll your goal until you've got these. Spend your stamina every day flirting and try to level up your stamina every day, and then use your remaining stamina to small talk new women so you've got a bigger pool of women you can flirt with. Start with Steph & Ashley, plus your sis & mom, and then branch out to random girls. For the other stats, continue min-maxing by maxing charisma and supply before diversifying. This will help your mac game and your business.
Don't spend money on anything except;
- Steph & her sister Ashley's salary
- Buying supplies (yes, even before you've got a serum to produce, you want a stockpile)
Once you've got a basic serum that can make money and has no attention stat, set it to production and auto-sell. Have Ashley produce it 100%. Continue unlocking new traits. You need 4 traits and one of them needs to be a suggest drug, then you can talk to Steph, have her sample one of those suggest serums, and that will unlock Tier 2.
If you find yourself going broke, you've got 3 options.
- Walk around the downtown streets. There is an event where you see a wallet drop, easy $100 to pocket. Only triggers maybe 1/8 times, so not reliable but if you save-scum you can do it every time.
- Help your sister do a photo shoot in the morning or evening, easy $50 and the event is always guaranteed.
- Sell your old serums. Around week 1 end your mom gives you a dozen old serums from LR1. You can sell these for cash if desperate.