Ren'Py Abandoned Lab Rats 2 [v0.51.1] [Vren]

[Doejhn]

Ingenious equation, really. High level economics.
But seriously. If I don't hire any employees, I can make just barely enough stuff to break even. If I hire any employees at all, I cannot make enough to break even. I've tried this four or five times and went belly-up every time. What SHOULD the profit margin be on an early serum? The highest I've been able to get is 70.

What I do is, first research basic medical application and stick that on a serum with primitive serum trait for the trait slot, then research that to have it available on the production line.

Next, hire two employees, one that generates 30 something supply per turn, and one that generates 30 something production per turn. Their salary should be in the 30-something per day range. Save scumming is your friend here if you don't get the employees you like when selecting to hire new employees.

Stick them on their respective areas, make them produce the basic medical serum, and sell whatever they produce every day. Be sure to do some HR work every now and then to keep your company's efficiency up. Investing points in charisma at the start of the game should make HR work easy, though honestly I'm not even sure if the extra charisma is even necessary as far as HR work goes.

Hiring an extra pair will increase profit, and so will investing some money in serum production policies for better efficiency at production.

PS: On a different note, the arousal suppression serum trait is bugged as hell and maxed out Stephanie's core sluttiness in a couple of turns.

 

[Thora]

Can you share your secret? I cannot figure out how to keep a positive cash flow.

Getting to a positive cash flow is easy once you figure how the UI works. Sadly this is the main/only aspect I find interesting in this game. I would gladly support this developer if the story/graphics were as compelling as the financial simulation.

A few general tips:
- Focus entirely on the money aspects of the game until you are financially secured.
- Initial bottlenecks are supply and production - put most of your early character points in Focus, Supply and Production.
- Keep track of goals and try to accomplish them whenever possible. Replace goals as needed.
- Never let research idle - focus on the most lucrative traits initially.
- Money scales with employees - when you can, add production/supply employees in lockstep.
- Early employees are expandable - don't train, talk or try to retain them; just fire/replace when you can.

Here's how I get cash flow positive early on:

1. Monday/Tuesday research Basic Medical Application and create/research your first 70$ serum.
2. Wednesday set your supply and production quotas then hire 1 supply, 1 prod, 1 hr, 1 marketing.
3. From now on, just split your time evenly between supply and production.

Doing nothing else, you should hit 900$+ by Friday night and 1.1k+ next Monday night.

Upgrade to tier 1 research on Thursday, then research Improved Serum Production and Clinical Testing to get a 215$ serum in production by W3.

From there, just focus your research on the more profitable traits and upgrade your serum in production to the most profitable design. Whenever you have money, upgrade the batch size, employee count and recruitment policies first.

-T-

 

[RustDust]

How do you raise sluttiness? After a while flirting stops working. Do I just have to pray for random events?

 

[Pretentious Goblin]

How to trigger the new events at home?

 

[Trollden]

How to trigger the new events at home?

You got to increase the sluttiness, love and obedience stats of the mom and or sister. They event should start popping up if you have had some influence on them.

If you just want to check out the events you can also trigger them through the console (Shift+O to open, if you have it enabled) and type

jump mom_selfie_label
jump mom_morning_surprise_label
jump lily_morning_encounter_label
jump family_morning_breakfast_label

Note that the events might not function exactly as intended when called through console if the requirements it checks for aren't met.

In terms of what stats you need it seems to be 20+ Love on the mother for the breakfast event, 45 Love for the morning surprise and 40 Love + 40 sluttiness for the lingerie surprise event.

 

[Alex Mars]

How do you raise sluttiness? After a while flirting stops working. Do I just have to pray for random events?

Random events are one possibility, yes.

You can force an increase by interacting with the girls. For that, you need suggestibility. Don't bother interacting with girls without, waste of time. Have sex with her. That will give her temp sluttiness if there is none - or it will turn temp sluttiness into core if there is some temp sluttiness. She has to climax, ofc. Rinse, repeat.

That's all to it, really.

If you just need to reach certain thresholds, like for research unlock go with the flat increase serum traits like +15 slut, +10 obi. Apply multiple times if needed.

Cheers, Alex

 

[Thunderbolt]

How can i fire an employee?

Finally found the option under the section performing. -.-

 

[ParadigmShift]

Ingenious equation, really. High level economics.
But seriously. If I don't hire any employees, I can make just barely enough stuff to break even. If I hire any employees at all, I cannot make enough to break even. I've tried this four or five times and went belly-up every time. What SHOULD the profit margin be on an early serum? The highest I've been able to get is 70.

If you want to discuss higher level business economics, I can write a new work event where you have a weekly board meeting to discuss the prior weeks EBITDA numbers. I sure everyone would enjoy that. How about monthly P&L reports? Employee benefits and insurance?

 

[Bloodly]

You'd have to tune the numbers right up for that. Although benefits upgrades that could influence happiness upwards passively is a thought to think about, maybe?

 

[ParadigmShift]

You'd have to tune the numbers right up for that. Although benefits upgrades that could influence happiness upwards passively is a thought to think about, maybe?

I know! It started as a joke....but now Im seriously thinking about it.
I need to figure out if the policy lists are appendable.

The current mindset of Starbuck, Trollden and myself is to try to avoid modifying the base game files completely, or at least as much as possible. Ill have to dig into the business policy system and see how the list is built, if I can append new policies to the list or if it would have to be manually edited to add new policies.

My gut tells me it may be possible to add new policies, but to design these policies the way they should be, ie having an additional $$$ cost per employee for, say, giving them insurance, as well as how to apply this increased employee cost...
The employee salary is an attribute of their object, which is stored in their array (the_person.salary), and the cost is subtracted each time the game advances to a new day. I could either modify each and every employee and increase their salary, OR I could add a new value to the final calculation when it deducts the cost of all employees (something like $20 x employee_count for health insurance) as well as add additional functions like (if health_insurance: if the_person.happiness < 100: the_person.change_happiness(2)) ----- translation : if you have health insurance policy, add 2 happiness per day, to a max of 100.

Problem is those functions I'm pretty sure are hardcoded, so would require modifying the script OR creating a function override to rewrite and replace the entire function.
Ill need to think on this.

 

[LZ_Starbuck]

I know! It started as a joke....but now Im seriously thinking about it.
I need to figure out if the policy lists are appendable.

The current mindset of Starbuck, Trollden and myself is to try to avoid modifying the base game files completely, or at least as much as possible. Ill have to dig into the business policy system and see how the list is built, if I can append new policies to the list or if it would have to be manually edited to add new policies.

It's append able. I looked into when investigating the possibility of a mod to create an HR supervisor position.

EDIT: You could extend the investor event. Offer 20k investment funds but each week answer to a board of directors

 

[ParadigmShift]

If you've ever been in a position to have to deal with financial numbers of a business, you know that, even if you hire that new employee at $10/hr, its actually going to cost the business $15-20 / hr, depending on all the benefits you offer.
Paying into a vacation escrow for instance. Many large corporations offer vacation time to their hourly employees based on time worked. if, for example, an employee accrues 2 days (16hrs) paid vacation after working 4 40-hr weeks (160hrs), thats basically equates to every 10hrs worked, you get 1hr paid time off (this business is very generous with vacation).
If that employee is getting paid $10/hr, the business pays 10% (because they get 1 hr ever 10hrs worked) of whatever their salary is into an account where the money just sits there until they take vacation, where the money is then paid out.
So, based on just vacation time, that $10 employee costs you $11 (in this example). Add on liability insurance (for non employee incidents, as well as lawsuits), workers compensation, employee health insurance, 401k,...just to name a few. Its pretty easy for a $10/hr employee to end up costing $15+/hr.

Departmental P&Ls with hundreds of employees, in corporations with EBITDAs in the tens/hundreds of millions, with tens of thousands of employees, are...interesting. A P&L for a single department in a single property is enough to make a single person's brain do barrel rolls in their skull.

 

[RustDust]

So how do you raise obedience for the mother?

 

[Alex Mars]

If you've ever been in a position to have to deal with financial numbers of a business, you know that, even if you hire that new employee at $10/hr, its actually going to cost the business $15-20 / hr, depending on all the benefits you offer.

Make that flat times 2 here in Germany. New guy hired for € 20/hr will cost you about € 40/hr. Most of this is insurance btw.

The employee itself also pays about 30...50% tax and expense liabilities. Yeah, it's a science in modern western countries. No wonder most larger companies have a head too big for the body.

Just keep in mind we're playing a game and don't go overboard with your mod efforts. ;-)

Cheers, Alex

 

[bsjfan69]

Not sure if it's related to a mod (since I didn't try 1.5 vanilla) but there's this new serum trait that gives 20 core sluttiness and kind of completely breaks the balance of the game almost as fast as outright cheating. Also the sister morning event says she's completely nude... even though she never is. Just pointing this out in case it's mod related.


Aside from that... I'm starting to think there's a fundamental flaw with the way outfits work. The intention is for the girls to wear sluttier clothes as their sluttiness goes up (naturally) but outfits are never removed from the selection (unless you do it manually and that requires obedience), only added to their pool of outfits to choose from, which means one day they might wear a super conservative attire and the next day go out stark naked, which just feels completely unnatural. Furthermore the way outfit sluttiness requirement is calculated is totally borked, and it doesn't even take transparency into account.

 

[Trollden]

Not sure if it's related to a mod (since I didn't try 1.5 vanilla) but there's this new serum trait that gives 20 core sluttiness and kind of completely breaks the balance of the game almost as fast as outright cheating. Also the sister morning event says she's completely nude... even though she never is. Just pointing this out in case it's mod related.


Aside from that... I'm starting to think there's a fundamental flaw with the way outfits work. The intention is for the girls to wear sluttier clothes as their sluttiness goes up (naturally) but outfits are never removed from the selection (unless you do it manually and that requires obedience), only added to their pool of outfits to choose from, which means one day they might wear a super conservative attire and the next day go out stark naked, which just feels completely unnatural. Furthermore the way outfit sluttiness requirement is calculated is totally borked, and it doesn't even take transparency into account.

The event and the serum trait are both from the vanilla game, I believe Vren is aware of both issues there.
(Serum trait is supposed to be -20 and not 20.)


Your observation regarding the outfits is correct and needs to be worked on some.
Have made requests before and will prompt again for changes to it, but it does not seem to be a priority.
What I have found to help regarding outfit selection is to remove any of the "Full Outfits" from the Master_Default_Wardrobe.xml (complete nudity is considered a full outfit) and only have Overwear / Underwear to select from so that it usually ends up being a combination of sorts and never fully naked.

 

[tab2]

I've been trying to cheat money over in the android version using saveeditonline and I can't find business money anywhere. Is that variants being hidden somewhere or have they changed it? Like I literally can't find the my cash amount (600) anywhere.

 

[Trollden]

I've been trying to cheat money over in the android version using savegameonline and I can't find business money anywhere. Is that variants being hidden somewhere or have they changed it? Like I literally can't find the my cash amount (600) anywhere.

mc.money is no longer in use and instead you have to look for funds as in mc.business.funds or in saveeditor it is stated as main_business > funds.

 

[tab2]

I'm not seeing it at all. Maybe it's something weird with the Android version

 

[qwincy]

ok maybe im missing something but when I go to outfit manager im completely unable to escape it which instantly breaks the game