I mentioned this on the original thread. "The best way to improve the game to a whole new level instead of these micro changes is to add real world consequences to the game. You're selling a lot of these serums? To whom? Wouldn't the game be a lot more amazing, if you see random women on the street having suggestibility coz they took the serum? Or their body changes, or sluttiness increases? Having suspicion levels so you have to start off small then as people acclimate going to next tier. "
The problem with that idea is three fold.
1. It breaks the current progress levels in the game. People being effected by the serums without having to meet them will cause general issues of speeding up too greatly the development of the city and employees. Aside from that you have the logical issue of men and women should be effected and that customers also should have been outside of the range of the city.
I am not going to say this is a bad idea. Ideally we could have standard customers who we know are in the city (game lounge [kinda implemented], mom's business, strip club [already implemented], bar, school). Ideally we should have males being able to be effected in more than cutscenes and our beneficial ones. But this flows into our second issue.
2. Implementing this in code. How would it be decided who is effected and keep track of that. The best way to do this would be to have other businesses have inventory. Have logic on which employees recieve it or customers order it and then make custom orders for the businesses. Something like this aside from processing overhead increase for each turn also creates new bottle necks in your manufacturing that would need to be fixed/addressed. It would make a decent difficulty spike but again Ideally male characters should both exist and be effected by this.
3. Performance will suffer keeping track of all of it. The game will noticeably slowdown when too many serums are in effect and/or too many characters exist. I know I have had the game crash from having too many copies of a serum on one person and by having too many clones in the world. This is an optimization problem that would require an entire rework of how everything works. The current method of checking for effects works well and I honestly do not know of a better way do it with the large variety of traits, people and how they can interact. The problem is that this will scale stupidly quickly requiring more resources for each turn. There are only two potential solutions for this. 1. 1 turn serums based solely on location this would then use location data to apply serum enforced changes or 2. Simplify serums so we can track prebuilt effects over time. In theory there is option 3 which would be reducing the number of characters to track but that would go against current game mechanics.
A large amount of the problem is the scale of the gameplay and the limitations built into the original base game.
