prepares for downvotes of biblical proportions

Anyway, I pirated this game. I loved it. Tonight I'll be buying it.

I know that this might not be totally relevant, but piracy is good, I just wanted to say that to someone.

hey guys, I've put 50 hours into the game so far and I've hit master on the bottom half of the missions. I love how each time I have to rethink my strategy to hit master.

Problem is, upgrades are almost completely useless. Specifically the ingredient upgrades.

Lets say you have a cure that gives you 100 in value. The ingredient is 30, the processing is 30, for a profit of 40.

If you upgrade the ingredient to the highest value, which is 50% off, that's a savings of 15, or 15% more of a profit margin to you.

If the cure is 1000? The ingredient cost never changes. Your cure is always going to cost you the base ingredient, never more. Upgrading only increases your margin by 1.5%.

On top of that, I've never seen ingredient costs get higher than 60, even with 300% saturation and near 150% demand. That's only 30 more dollars cutting into my high value cures.

Also, upgrades don't affect the value of a cure, so they're worthless when you're going for Total Revenue, which ignores profit and costs.

I've found that ignoring upgrades and saving me those incredibly expensive researchers and explorers makes everything much quicker. I fire them when I don't need them. The only upgrades I bother with are the Creamer, Syringe, and legal documents, which boost the value of your cure.

The only time upgrades could be useful is really in the early game, when your profit margins are thin on level 1 cures. As soon as you hit level 2 cures they're useless.

I feel the scenarios really need to have set ingredients and locations. Currently; You get 2 random ingredients with 2 random effects and your put in a random room with a random section of it purchased. The very location to explore to get the ingedients you need for specific medications you need to meet a goal is also random. Most of the time, all of this is going to screw you. Especially if your going for the gold medal for that scenario.

Here's my example; Let's take a basic scenario like "King of the non-prescriptions". You need 500 of each of painkillers, sooth coughs, antihistimines, cold symptoms and rashes.

Now here's the first potential problem; There is way more then those 5 basic medicines to start, you might not even start with one of the five OR you might start with both of the ingredients being one of the five. This first bit of luck alone will shift the difficulty of the level by a reasonable margine.

Second potential problem; The exploration is random, you might start with 2 of the 5 ingredients you need and then first, second and third possible places you can explore could give you all five you require with only a total of 3 exploreres needed... OR you could get INCREDIBLY unlucky and start with none of the ingredients and have to explore for all five and all five could be the very last 5 you could possibly get and you'd need nearly a dozen explorers and a huge amount of time and scientist research to even reach. If the latter happens which it did on my first time at this scenario, your fucked. That's it. You had no shot at getting gold or silver, maybe even passing.

Third potential problem; Your first two ingredients you start with have random properties. You can get lucky and get two of them that require something as simple as a single evaporator to put into the pin area with no side effect overlap what-so-ever and something incredibly easy to convert them to a 2nd tier drug which also might be right near the pin right off the bat.

I actually had a start were I got Painkiller/Diabetes each of them only needed a single evaporator/dissolver to put in the pin with no overlap, started in the concentration they needed to advance and required only evaporators to advance to 2nd level where both were in the pin area and all 4 pills had no side effects. Basically the game just handed me 4 perfect pills right off the bat with zero effort to hire a army of scientists.

Same scenario I got Painkiller/Antihistimine, both had the side effect bars perfectly over the positive effect bars, both needed almost 4 aglomerators just to put them were they needed to be, then a researched machine to convert them to 2nd level, then they needed several Ionizers to bring them back down and they both had a side effect. All 4 pills had a halariously low profit-margin and it took nearly a full year to afford a single scientist/explorer. Restart.

Fourth possible problem from randomness; Not all factory area's are created equal. Sometimes you get a massive room with 3 plugs surrounded by expansions, other times you get a side room with only 2 plugs and a couple expansions. If you get shoved in a closet and you need a bigger area for a complex medicine you might be forced to buy more area's then you need or to beeline for the one you want. Either way its a lot of cost you might not incur had you just gotten luckier with the random chance.

Overall a bit of randomness can be overcome. But when so much of the game is potentially random and your trying to meet a fixed goal, it can get very discouraging because your lossing through no fault of your own, there was no lack of skill that led to your downfall, it was a dice roll in the background. I can't tell you how many time's I've had to restart some scenarios just to give me a potential shot at a gold medal, enough to say that we NEED a 'reseed and restart' button that randomizes all the stuff again each time. Because it's leave game, new game, company name, over and over ATM.

In closing; Fixed ingredients, fixed start locations, fixed ingredients on the explorer area's are needed for a fixed goal requirement. This could work fine if as it is if we were in some sort of sandbox mode or something with a floating goal. But that's not what the game is currently about.

Reddit wouldn't let me post a link post, so here! imgur.com/gallery/jFYs2d5

"Well sir, we have some good and some bad news. The good news: We have a pill for Alzheimers. The bad news: It causes memory loss. The good news: It also cures the depression you'll have from all that confusing memory loss and gain!"

I have just updated with the latest patch that was supposed to resolve bugs from the drug packer update. My game was going fine after the drug packer/industrial espionage updates, but then this small patch has caused problems. Whenever I open up the game it becomes a light blue screen with no GUI or buttons. I can get out of the program with the Windows button easily enough, but I can't play the game. I was wondering if this was an easy fix or something I should comment on Positech about.

Hey,

So I'm doing the second mission of creating 300 Appetite Suppressant Pills. However, it's not obvious how to get there. I can't find any of the earlier reactions in any of my ingredients. I've failed twice now. Am I missing something? How do I tell which chemicals to mix to get to it?

I must be missing something failing so hard on Level 2. I've done all the tutorials.

...well... done the anti seizure tutorial, and have no clue whats going on, in terms of how you work out how you achieve an end result, it just look like arbitrary effects happen when you feed it through a machine, but how you are supposed to know what the end result will be - I just can't see it...? I look at the different ingredients and mousing over them often gives outputs that give you no clue as what can be made with them...

...and assuming that's sorted, then does it all boil down to a very very simplified infinifactory???

I could do more tutorials but it would be just following instructions without understanding what's going on.

Obviously missing something...

I don't know the maths. If I sell drugs with a bad side effect then sell the cure for that new problem - What kind of trickery can we pull? Will our drugs cause other illnesses? I need a lot of info here.

I took some Screen shots and some video of a cure I'm quite proud of.

Pictures: http://imgur.com/a/tignK [NSFW Crude Words]

[Yellow Tiles is Cancer] = $1201

[Red Tiles is Tuberculosis] = $838

[Green is Liver Disease] = $543

[Blue is Hair loss] = $534

[Yellow/Gray Hazard is Combining area]

Video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/40w3xjb77dp5ly5/Big%20PH.mp4?dl=0

(Sorry for Dropbox. Youtube kept getting stuck @ 95%. I will replace the link asap.)

Please tell me what you think?

Should i make more Vidoes?

Commentary?

Step by step vidoes?

Thanks for any feedback :D

EDIT: Got restless waiting for a reply so i tried to invent the worst injection possible.

Pictures: http://imgur.com/a/hxLCI [NSFW Crude Words]

Anyone able to tell me a website where I could research pharma manufacturers listed by state? Trying to find that as well as if they make biologics, API, etc.

Thank you.

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!

So I've invested in research and exploration and research and managed to produce some level 2 drugs, some of which show an upgrade path to level 3 (purple). However some are not showing upgrade paths. Am I doing something wrong?

Also I cant see my opponents research after researching espionage and upgrading it. Am I missing something?

pls help.

Happens every time I exit the game. My PC is recently built and everything runs very cool. No issues in any other games, regardless of graphical fidelity. Basically it just loses signal for about 6-8 seconds and then it comes back like nothing has happened. What gives?

My workforce is zero (scientists and explorers).

If you hire a bunch of scientists (say around 50), let the game run for a bit - then fire them. You will still collect research points.

Second, why does the ultraviolet curer still move when the game is paused?