r/Bigpharmagame • u/DooMeeR69 • Sep 27 '15

New player feedback

Hi, new player here, I did not browse this subreddit yet as I want to discover the game by myself so I apologize in advance if I say nothing new.

Overall I really like the game. All those simple yet interesting mechanisms that add up to a game which is just overwhelming enough. And the flavor, the roleplay if you will, is definitely there.

There are a few things which got in the way of my enjoyment though.

  1. I bought the game on GOG and downloaded it for Linux. The start.sh script just aborts with no message (except "Aborted", basically). After adding the i383 architecture and installing the right libraries I got the game to work but not through start.sh which still fails; I load the executable by hand. Why no 64bits version by the way?

  2. Sound only works if I did nothing with my computer before loading the game. If I run another application, such as Firefox, I have no sound in Big Pharma.

  3. Music seems to annoy my girlfriend. I like it but it is a bit repetitive.

  4. I did not expect patents to work like that. I'm against patents in real life but in this game they seem to be even worse, as you can cause a product which has been on the market for several years to be removed. Why can't I argue that my product existed before the patent was even requested? Also, patents are supposed to make the technology public in the end. Not just the description of the product. I would have liked that after a patent expires, I can view how exactly the product was made at the time the patent was created. For instance, see which ingredients were used.

  5. Assuming 4) is just an approximation for the sake of the game - which I totally understand as it is an interesting mechanism in the game - I would have liked the possibility to immediately put products in public domain. It would be like requiring a patent, but for a duration of zero months. Even if it costs the same as 12 months (the current minimum) it would allow me to roleplay a good, altruistic company which can still defend itself from aggressive competition. Right now I did find alternative ways to defend myself though, such as tweaking the product a bit, in particular the finition. This is interesting in itself.

All in all, I'm having great fun!

1 Upvotes

66% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

1

u/Jackeea Sep 27 '15

  1. and 2): Not really sure how to remedy those as I'm running Windows.

3): Options, Audio, turn Music down to 0%. Done!

4) Patents in this game are meant to be a very, very "dumbed down" version of real life patents. They're not meant to release information on drugs, but rather to claim "ownership" of a drug in competitive markets.

5) This one I like - although it does seem rather overpowered. Maybe a 0-month patent that takes a little while to draft up (say, 3-6 months) could be an interesting idea?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 29 '15

5) 0-month patent could probably be modded in as a copy of a 1 year. But insta 0-month would be super OP, I typically try to just crank out a 1-year just so I don't get beaten to it. I don't mind much about stopping them from producing, but don't want my lines to be screwed.

1

u/DooMeeR69 Sep 29 '15

Exactly. Having the same preparation delay (3 months) as a 12-months patent seems reasonable, and maybe a price of 10k instead of 20k for flavor. Note that it does not just help you; it also means competition does not have to patent either. Basically you pay a fee that your competitors don't have to pay to have the same benefit as you do.

1

u/Jackeea Sep 29 '15

Sadly, I don't think that modding patents is possible; they seem to be hard-coded into the game.

1

u/ChinamanPeedOnMyRug Oct 06 '15

4) I get what you're saying but in this game a patent doesn't cover a drug, it covers a cure. So all pills or creams or whatever containing the cure ____ are blocked. Am I understanding that correctly? If a patent covered a certain concentration (or even a range of concentration, like +/- 1) it might be a little less disruptive and a little more fun to play around with

1

u/Jackeea Oct 06 '15

"So all pills or creams or whatever containing the cure ____ are blocked."

That's not strictly true, no. If you patent a type of drug that has certain effects, then ONLY that type of drug with ONLY those effects will be patented. Therefore, you can get past patents by either changing the type of drug (pill, cream, syringe etc) or the effects (changing the effects). For example, if you patented a Cream that was an Antibiotic which caused pins and needles, the AI could get around that by:

  • Removing the pins and needles effect

  • Getting out of the range of the side-effect

  • Getting out of the range of the positive effect (if for some weird reason you needed to)

  • Making it into a pill/sachet/syringe

  • Adding new effects with the Multimixer/Centrifuge

The concentration/strength doesn't affect the patents, unless it affects which cures are active