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.
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Fixed Belts
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:
UI Improvements
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