Hey all, the latest patch is out for Big Pharma. The majority of the fixes affect the Marketing and Malpractice expansion only, but some of the bug fixes also affect the base game.
Changes:
Fixed bug where there was a very small chance that a trial with no disqualifications still received bad publicity.
Trial results now update immediately after a trial is completed
Executives are not returned until completed trial results are confirmed. This prevents a bug where two trials on the same product could be completed.
Prevented hack where you could increase price after selling a product to win a "product with price greater than" challenge. You have to sell a product at the required price for it to count now.
Increased price requirement for Big Money Products challenge slightly but decreased number of products needed for Master.
Fixed glitch where buttons above sockets would become hoverable when you switched tabs, even when zoomed out.
Reduced Expert and/or Master level requirements for various challenges: Bottom Line, Game of Margins, Show Me the Money (also reduced time limit), Not for Profit, Regulation Business.
Added an extra forest ingredient to the following scenarios: Intermediate, Advanced, Crippling Debt, Room to Maneuver, Full Unlock.
Fixed bug where custom games did not always have 1 of every catalyst requested.
Discussion
After lots of playtesting and based on some feedback from players I decided to add an additional forest ingredient to many of the scenarios. This eases the competitive pressure a little in the early game, especially in the scenarios where you have two opponents.
This makes the requirement to go up to Desert exploration a little less pressing (although still highly viable) and enables additional viable strategies such as getting an early Multimixer and going for Level 1 Catalyst cures.
In addition I've tweaked a number of the expert/master ranking requirements just based on my own playtesting. Some of these felt overly tedious or dam right impossible to achieve and so I believe the changes I've made should help that.
Please feel free to continue to feed your thoughts back to me via the forums.
v1.06.08 Patch
Hey all,
Latest bug fixes:
Bribes in free build are now possible.
Fixed hover on challenge window for operating profit based challenges.
Fixed graphical issues with ingredient/export bubbles above sockets - turning grey and background disappearing.
Daily profit includes daily repayment of loan, rather than just interest.
Stopped AI assigning executives to old products.
Fixed bug where AI would research the same project multiple times when reloading a game.
Thanks to everybody for reporting bugs, it has been tremendously helpful. Keep it up!
Tim
v1.06.07 Patch
Hey all,
I've just set an update live with the following bug fixes:
Tweaked the following challenges because the recent reduction in the number of ingredients and addition of booster effects made them impossible to complete on master rating: "Two is the magic number" (renamed to "Three is the magic number" - its original name!), "Good press", "Huge portfolio"
In challenge "Aiming to please", demand is shown as a decimal per day e.g. (4.0/d) as opposed to as a percentage so that it is consistent with the numbers on the cures tab in M&M DLC.
Added boosters to Free Build mode
Added boosters to Custom Game mode. There is a slider which allows you to choose the number.
Fixed bug where if you start then stop a trial and then start another one and allow it to complete, the game crashes.
Fixed bug where you could not proceed with gameplay if you have Briber perk and complete a trial with a negative cash balance.
Reduced time it takes to research Subzero Training and Deep Sea Exploration as reduced number of cures make these necessary for many more challenges than pre-DLC. Some challenges would be too hard without these reductions in research time.
If you spot any more bugs please let me know. I'm also interested in your feedback on balance issues.
Tim
Big Pharma: Marketing and Malpractice - Out now!
The official expansion for Big Pharma, Marketing and Malpractice is officially out.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/458640
Since we announced it a month ago, I have been creating a series of video blogs taking a detailed look at some of the new features.
To get an idea of whether you're interested in the expansion you can check them out below:
Big Pharma Vlog #27 - An intro to 'Marketing and Malpractice'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8cFhil23fk
Big Pharma Vlog #28 - Booster Effects and Trials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhI-vDYjjYI
Big Pharma Vlog #29 - Stock gates and socket transfer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B68vkbifFNA
Big Pharma Vlog #30 - Perks and Disease Awareness Campaigns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUyevPZQDbg
If you do decide to pick it up, I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think below. :)
Hi all, I've done a number of updates to Big Pharma over the last week, the majority of which do not affect the base game, instead they are allowing the base game to interface properly with the Marketing and Malpractice expansion releasing early this week (Tuesday, 26th April).
However, one of the tweaks I made to the shared code between the base game and expansion had a knock-on effect and caused a minor bug in the base game, therefore I thought I'd better post some proper patch notes to let you know what's going on.
Patch notes:
Fixed bug where challenge 'Full Unlock - The Big Five' stopped working
Improved balance of ingredient distributions. There are a few less ingredients in each scenario which will reduce the number of duplicate cures and also force the player to get new location research earlier.
Added 'Reset Progress' button to options menu. This wipes all challenge progress and save games.
If you're curious about the second bullet point, this is a change I've also made in the new expansion and I find it much better from a gameplay perspective. While fixing the bug I decided it was worth pushing this change into the base game too. :)
Tim
Untitled
In the latest update we say "Hola" to Spanish pharmacists!
Big Pharma v1.04.00 is now live!
With it comes a plethora of bug fixes, UI improvements and balance changes, as well as two significant language based features.
Firstly we have noticed, since launch, a budding community of Spanish pharmacists using an unofficial translation created by the community. We're very grateful to all the people involved in the unofficial Spanish translation but we've decided it's time to roll out an official Spanish language version of the game.
As if this wasn't enough, we've also added pan-European font support to the game, including the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets plus every accented version of the letters of the latin alphabet.
The result is that it should now be possible to create unofficial translations for any European language now. I know there has been special demand for this among Russian speakers.
Here is the full list of changes in the patch:
Added Spanish language option
Added Cyrillic/pan-European character support
Added an extra speed button. 5x speed used to be hidden behind 2x. Now it has its own button.
Added scenario title to objective window
Lowered process time of UV Curer, Sequencer, Sachet Maker and Centrifuge to 2
Analyzer now has a zero process cost and upgrading it increases the speed of analysis
Daily profit calculation is now more even and less prone to fluctuation
Two of the same effect in a single drug now get their strengths added together for cure rating purposes
Fixed a few display issues in German language version
Fixed a few animation glitches
I'm especially interested to see the effects of the balance changes on the game. Reducing the process times of big bulky machines like the Centrifuge and Sequencer should hopefully give them more utility, where previously they got little or no use.
The change to the Analyzer is good too I think. By making the process cost zero, it is now a free way to discard unwanted drugs (such as those created by the Centrifuge) and the increased analysis rate from upgrading should significant gains because it reduces the number of drugs you need to sacrifice to the analyzer - which was always the most expensive part anyway.
Let me know what you think below.
Enjoy!
Big Pharma - New features added!
Hello all, Big Pharma v1.03.00 is now live, with it come a number cool new features included a new type of belt, improved UI and balance/bug fixes.
In response to requests from users for a way to fine-tune the flow of their production lines, I have now added Fixed Belts. These are accessed from the Auxiliary toolbar and allow you to convert any normal belt (not a T-Belt or Crossroad) into a fixed belt. At the time of creation, you can choose the direction by rotating the tool, but once created, the direction is fixed.
This can be helpful for creating more complicated layouts where the default belt logic is not sufficient. Here are a couple of examples of things you can do with fixed belts:
There is now a new column under the Company Tab which lists the average cure saturation of a product at a glance. This allows you to easily identify under-saturated markets which you can supply additional products into, as well as over-saturated ones which you might want to maneuver your company out of.
Another recent UI improvement is the additional of an indicator on the Cures Tab which shows the starting concentration of a particular cure.
This is nice, because it allows you to plan an entire product route from a single tab so it will hopefully reduce the amount of time spent switching between them. This was added in response to a number of people requesting the feature via the Steam forums.
Another highly requested feature was a machine count on the Research Tab to make it easier to optimise your choice of upgrades.This has now been added!
Reduced Randomness
An important but subtle balance change is that cures which form part of a challenge's objectives now occur in the same position(s) each game.
This removes the advantage that could be gained by restarting a challenge multiple times until you started with the required cure.
As far as I am aware, there is now no reason to restart a challenge looking for favourable conditions. While there are still random elements e.g. starting cure demands, these are all carefully balanced so that the overall difficulty between playthroughs remains constant.
Full list of changes:
Added fixed belts
Added cure saturation column to company tab
Added starting concentration indicator to cures tab
Sockets now "suck" by default
Challenge cures position predetermined
Paint now costs $1
Increased refund on equipment sell in Beginner scenario to 90%
Increased effect of plot cost reduction research
Market size increased slightly on Intermediate, Advanced and Room to Maneuver scenarios
Changed some company colors
Fixed 'sticky' issue with delete tool
Stopped loan dialog being dismissed incorrectly on some scenarios
Fixed bug where messages did not slide down
Fixed bugs to do with upgrade accumulator bars
Big Pharma vlog #25 - Full Unlock pt 2
Hey all, I've just published the latest Big Pharma video blog.
In this one I continue my go at a Full Unlock scenario. I also talk about another update planned for the end of the month which will include a few new features.
One of these is 'fixed belts' which I talk about during the video while demonstrating some of the use-cases (9:12)
This should answer the discussion topic here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/344850/discussions/0/483366528899144214/
Enjoy!
https://youtu.be/NXRweOQWQ1c
New patch v1.02.00 brings additional bug fixes and optimisations.
Hey all, v1.02.00 is now officially live on Steam. This patch mostly focussed on optimising the game so that it runs at a better framerate with very large factories.
To coincide with the update I also recorded a new vlog where I take on a challenge from the Full Unlock.
https://youtu.be/Z6bObHtDGbo
I'm only just getting started in this video so I'm going to continue the game in another vlog next week.
Full patch notes: - General CPU optimisation.
- Stopped memory leak occurring when starting many separate games within a single session.
- Rebalanced some challenges to make the master levels more attainable "Even mo' money", "Quick draw", "An end to the pill", "Money spinners", "Big bucks" and "Endless possibilities".
- Made "Alleviating Alzheimer's" challenge a little harder.
- Fixed sync issue with belt junctions between save and load.
- Fixed issue when you send the same drug through a crossroad twice in a row.
- Fixed graphical issue on renaming dialog on lower resolutions.
- Raw costs added up correctly in multimixer.
- Stopped game resuming after product patent message is brought up manually.
- Fixed graphical issues with various patent dialogs at some resolutions.
- Increased diversification leaning of AIs at lower difficulties so they do not flood the markets so much.
