Balancing Lab Rats 2

Lab Rats 2 v0.3.0 will be released March 13th to patrons, which means I've only got a couple of days left to make any changes or additions. Now that most of the new content is in (Mainly random events and business policies) I can take a good look at the game as a whole and start to balance the different serum traits.

The following is me working through the math of serum value. Skip to the end for a tl;dr.

Balancing the business side of the game is going to be my main goal. The first step to accomplishing that is to establish a baseline for what is considered fair and balanced, and measure everything else off of that. For serum production by the main character that baseline will be:

$1 = 1 Supply Purchased = 1 Production Point to make = $1 in serum value.

At that baseline ratio the main character could produce and sell serum and break even. If a serum is worth more than $1 per production point (PP), you will make a profit. If a serum is worth less than $1/PP, you are creating it at a loss. At every step in the equality there is a chance to improve your profitability; if you are able to purchase supply for less than $1 you will be more profitable, for example.

With that baseline established we then need to consider how your other employees will figure into the process. R&D and HR are mostly unrelated to the serum production loop, so we will put them aside for now. Marketing limits the total number of doses of serum you can sell, but they can currently shift enough stock that their impact is minimal until you are producing huge volumes of cheap serum. For simplicity we will ignore them for now as well.

That leaves us with Supply Procurement and Production as our main profitability factors. For each serum will require 1 supply, which is turned into 1 production point, which is then turned into serum value. Employees currently expect a salary equal to 2*STAT + 1*SKILL, while producing 3*STAT(main)+1*STAT(secondary)+2*SKILL supply or production. That works out to expecting $1 per 2 base production at best. Actual efficiency will be lower because unused skills and stats are still included in salary calculations. Returning to our baseline, any serum will need to earn at least $0.5/PP above the $1/PP base to be profitable for employee creation.

All this means that when I am pricing serum traits they should add at least $1.5/PP to break even when being produced for sale. Traits that earn less than this number should have some sort of important use to the player other than being sold for sale, otherwise they will be completely useless. Examples of useful effects might be breast growth serums, serums with higher than normal suggestion gains, or extremely long duration serums.

As the player goes farther and farther through the game, they should also gain access to traits that improve on this ratio - the better the ratio, the more extra cash they will be generating to spend on other aspects of the game. To close the gameplay loop these other aspects should increase the ratio of serum value to production points to supply required. As an example, in v0.3 you can assign uniforms once you have purchased specific business policies with your company funds. For the marketing department, these uniforms increase serum value based on the sluttiness of the outfit. In this way the player earns even more money, and can purchase even more expensive business policies. This pushes the gameplay forward.

tl;dr - Serum traits must be worth at least $1.5 per production point they add to serum creation to be worth including at the start of the game. Serum traits that don't meet this threshold must have some sort of useful trait to be worth including in the game at all. Many existing traits will be changed to follow this general guideline.

The extra profit generated by serum production will let the player purchase new business policies, which help them corrupt their employees and earn more money. By earning more money, they can support more R&D and buy more expensive policies, closing the gameplay loop and pushing the gameplay forward.