Alpha 1.9 has been released with the new supervisor role for your freelance business and 3 new business types.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU9jHsL2sC4
Your Business Supervisor
Now you can promote one of your employees to supervisor. A supervisor auto-assigns jobs to workers, improves productivity by motivating others and alerts you of any issues.
You need to take care in deciding who becomes supervisor. Firstly, they will demand a higher wage for the added responsibilities. Secondly, if you promote someone with low diligence, they will have a negative effect on the productivity of other workers. You have to decide whether it's worth the monetary savings to run a cut-price establishment with a dodgy supervisor.
You still have to decide which jobs to take and when to buy materials, the supervisor will not take on those responsibilities. However if you don't have enough materials to complete current jobs or you have idle workers, the supervisor will inform you.
More Business Types
There are three new business types in this update - Gardening Services, Private Security and Law Firm. Each type of business has different characteristics that affect how they are run.
The Gardening Business has low entry requirements, but doesn't pay much and the work is dirty (affects hygiene). The low pay means you will probably do most of the work yourself and have a hard time affording employees.
The Security Business has boring work, which reduces your fun a lot when doing jobs. In this case you might want to hire employees to do the hard work instead of doing it yourself.
The Law Firm has urgent jobs, so you will have less time to complete them than usual. The pay is great, but have some employees on standby and don't take on more than you can handle.
Other Changes
There are some other smaller changes like guerrilla marketing, "phoenix" corporations and balance adjustments. You can find the full list below (or leave it as a surprise).
Also, someone made a good point about the Real Estate Index being too smooth compared to the actual changes in home prices. The index was actually showing the underlying growth rate, not including the effect of current economic conditions. Now I've included the economic growth impact so you can see how overall home prices are really changing.
What's next?
I will be working on improvements to the education system to make it easier to start a diploma or degree. There is also one more location I want to add before I consider the "default" map with 20 unique locations complete. Once that is done, I can start work on a new city map.
Changelog
Here is the full list of changes from 1.84 to 1.9:
- Added supervisor role in Freelance Business
- Implemented supervisor productivity effect on other workers
- Implemented supervisor reporting of missing materials and lack of jobs
- Added supervisor refusal to be demoted
- Implemented supervisor assigning workers to jobs
- Lowered payout from the best Design and Plumbing jobs
- Added Groundskeeper job to Park, University, Trade School
- Added Gardening Business and related products
- Added Law Firm Business and related products
- Added Security Business and related products
- Implemented guerilla marketing marketing tactic
- Added guerilla marketing to Graphic Design
- Implemented discount promotion marketing tactic
- Added discount promotion to Gardening and Plumbing businesses
- Removed check for employee brand when hiring workers
- Increased chance of Serve Dinner Party for Catering Business
- Starting plumbing business now requires Plumber's Toolkit
- Fixed freelance business recommended capital not showing inflation-adjusted price
- Reduced maximum number of employees per brand from 5 to 4
- Freelance hide take and reject job buttons when no job
- Recategorised Employees as Business Expense in personal income statement
- Amount of moping around is proportional to level of happiness
- Added corporations coming back to life eventually after bankruptcy (phoenix corporations)
- Changed some tooltip displays
- Changed health expense to vary depending on severity of health need
- Slightly lowered fun loss from Kitchen Hand and Fast Food Cook
- Lowered base price of buying a home
- Added variable leverage amounts for mortgage based on economic conditions
- Added economic growth impact to real estate index
- Drinking alcohol in public increases fun slightly
- Added Quit Smoking course at Town Hall
- Added Movie Marathon to TV
- Removed first debt payment when renting new place and consider initial payment as prepayment
- Added stock market index to economic indices chart
- Suppressed earnings of larger corporations to prevent trillion dollar companies
- Reduced chance of corporation going bankrupt