Big Ambitions

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EA 0.5 - The Rivalry Begins

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Big Ambitions EA 0.5: The Rivalry Begins

Hello and welcome back!

It's time for our next big update, EA 0.5, featuring AI competitors, a new neighborhood, lots of economic balancing and more!

Rivals

There are four Special Rivals, each dominating their own neighborhood. As you start to take up space in their neighborhood, these Special Rivals will target you with various attacks, based on your game difficulty!

Meet the Rivals

Thierry Laurent Moreau, Murray Hill
Huang Guo, Midtown
Jessica Johnson, Hell's Kitchen
Ingrid Schneider, Garment District

Rival Attacks

The rivals have several ways to hinder your progress.

Rent Refusal - If a rival owns a building, they can refuse to rent it to you
Price Manipulation - If a rival lowers their selling prices below market value, you might have to lower your prices on those items as well to avoid losing customers.
Market Manipulation - If a rival opens stores that sell similar items to you, this will lower the demand for that product and reduce your overall customer flow!
Employee Poaching - Your rivals can attempt to poach your employees. You will be forced to give them their new demands or replace that employee when they leave.

Additionally, there are 15 minor rivals scattered throughout the city who will try to steal your other employees from time to time! Usually, these employees will give you the chance to keep them if you agree to give them a raise, but you can also choose to ignore them and let them quit!

Headhunter

Your headhunter will still replace these employees who resign or get poached, but it will take a few days to find that replacement. So, you'd better not let the rivals steal them from you!

Retiring employees are still replaced instantly
This currently does not apply to Headquarters employees

There's an app for that! Check out the BizPhone Rivals App to keep track of all the rivals and their current attacks and see your ranking in the top 20 leaderboard!

Player Counterattacks

Now it's time for you to fight back! Each attack will ultimately weaken the rival and lower their weekly income. A lower weekly income will slowly reduce the valuation of their businesses, making it easier to buy them out!

Price Manipulation - If you lower your selling prices below market value, the other rivals in that neighborhood will be forced to drop their prices as well.
Market Manipulation - If you open stores that sell similar items to your rivals, this will lower the demand for that product and reduce their overall customer flow!
Employee Poaching - Each AI business now has an employee list you can access through their store's BizMan page. From here you can choose which of your rival's employees you would like to attempt to poach! If you steal an employee from the rival, they will be forced to replace them with an inferior employee, which will lower their customer satisfaction and make them lose some customers.

Candidate Negotiation

But how do you poach the employees? Through negotiation! Similar to negotiating health care prices, you can now negotiate the salary of all your employees - whether you recruit, headhunt, or poach them!

Please note: When hiring new employees, you can still choose to hire instantly and avoid the negotiation. It's up to you.

Lower Manhattan

While the rivals were busy taking over the existing four neighborhoods, we expanded the map and made a new neighborhood!

100+ new buildings
4 new warehouse layouts
Above-ground parking structure
Hudson Wholesale
Essentials Appliances
Skate park (visit this park for a new happiness boost)

With the addition of Essentials Appliances, we figured it was time to rearrange and organize the three appliance stores!

Essentials Appliances sells security and nightlife retail:

All security items
Liquor Store
Nightclub

Square Appliances now sells most food-related items:

Fast Food Restaurant
Coffee Shop
Supermarket
Fruit and Vegetable Store

AJ Pederson and Son sells most retail and customer-related items:

Customer barriers, tables, chairs, signs
Bookstore
Clothing Store
Electronics Store
Florist
Gift Shop
Hairdresser
Jewelry

Bookstore

This update also brings a new retail business type - the Bookstore

Bookstore can sell 6 types of books, found in the new Lower Manhattan wholesaler, Hudson Wholesale.

You can also find a few new decorations as well! There are 2 decorative stacks of books, and decorative bookshelves that you can interact with to read and gain happiness!

Economy Balancing

AI store income is now more accurate to the items they have in the store and employees that are assigned.

Wages Balancing:

Wages now go up with training
Reduced maximum wages at 100% skill
Base Wage Changes:
- Cleaners ($5 -> $12)
- Headquarters Employees ($15 -> $30)
- DJs ($15 -> $20)
- Hairdresser ($15 -> $18)
- Programmers / Graphic Design ($30 -> $25)

Store Balancing

Clothing nerf - expensive clothing customer flow and weekend customer flow reduced
Fast Food Restaurant buff - sale prices have increased.
Florist buff - slight boost in customers
Fruit and Vegetable Store buff - sale prices have increased
Gift Shop - expensive gift customer flow reduced
Hairdresser nerf - decrease in customer flow
Jewelry Store nerf - expensive jewelry customer flow reduced
Electronics nerf - all items' customer flow and weekend customer flow reduced

Additional

Cleaners are 2X more effective
"Off-hours" (non-typical opening hours) have fewer customers for each store
Products not listed as "Primary" or "Additional" for a store don't sell as well
Large Drinks Fridge price reduction to $2,200

UI / UX Fixes Part 1

We made a lot of UI changes, and this is only part 1 - EA 0.6 will continue to bring more UI and UX improvements!

Split Contacts into groups to more easily find specific contacts
Can toggle headhunter between searching forever and searching for a specific number of employees
Can pay the employees bonus
HR can upgrade their insurance plan without needing to set up a new contract
Improved how tooltips work, and added many more
Fixed some VoogleMap icon placements
Fixed building overlay popup wouldn't stay visible when moving the mouse
Reduced size of building overlay popup
Fixed GPS icon still visible after selling the business
Display abbreviated large numbers ($12,224,581 is now displayed as $12.2 M)
Fixed several cases where interacting with the UI can move the player
Fixed Subway map toggle in VoogleMaps couldn't be toggled off
Fixed BizPhone layering to always be on top
Fixed "Best Selling" list 4th color was incorrect
Added direct links to help pages throughout the game
UI hides and screen blurs when opening the mini-menu in-game
Better search ability, when typing in drop-down menus,
Can now use your Operating System number formatting (example: 1,000 vs 1.000)
UI pop-ups don't show when mopping
Improved number inputting
Improved UI scaling on many items for super widescreen monitors
- Main Menu
- City Map Filters
- Time Machine
- Persona App
- Contacts App
- MyEmployees App
- MarketInsiderApp
- BizMan Summary Page
- BizMan Business Info
- BizMan Building Info
- BizMan Insights
- BizMan Deliveries
- BizMan Marketing
- Notifications / Notification List
- F1 Help Menu
- Interior Installation Firm Preview Terminal
New Pricing & Inventory tooltip per item
- Shows how items were sold at different price points in the last week
- Now includes Hair Care Products that were used in different hair services (previously it only showed the items actually sold)
- Note - this is a new feature, so for the first week, these numbers might be inaccurate

Art

Upgrades

Added furniture items at stores have "for sale" tags on them
Added elevator to K1 buildings
Added more street vents
Made glass shelves on Rounded Shelves more visible.
Improved tree hider
Prevented a few furniture items from going through walls.
Improved asphalt color
Casino Upgrade - lots of new animations and now AI guests join you on the casino boat!
Can freely rotate objects before placing then on a table/desk
Computers can be used on Round Table now
Gas Station
- Upgraded fueling area to fit Freight Trucks
- Upgraded Gas station repair shop
- Improved gas station interior

New Items

Office Printer
2 new wall-mounted lights
Computer Monitor
Wooden Cocktail Bar Set
- Bar
- Bar Corner
- Bar Roof
- Bar Roof Corner
- Beer Shelf
- Drinks Counter

Audio

Radio

New, expanded tracklist of music
When using your own music, the lag issues should be fixed now!
Jingles/Ads! After a few songs, you'll hear a short radio ad/jingle for an in-game business!
Each AI business has specific radio settings
Radio music now continues to play in BizPhone Apps or while looking at VoogleMaps
Radio tracks won't restart when you enter buildings/vehicles
Fixed when fast-forwarding time, the radio station changes
Speakers placed in buildings are no longer controller by BizPhone volume
When player DJs at home, the DJ booth now plays music

New Sound Effects

Water sounds from fountains
Adding boxes to hand truck
Adding product into a shopping basket
Police Sirens (ambient sounds)
Forklift Sounds
Better "error" sound

Traffic / Vehicle

Reduce vehicle damage by 20%
Broken/sputtering vehicle engine sounds when the car is out of fuel or too broken to drive
Better vehicle crash sounds
Can enter vehicles (including taxis) from either side now
Fixed 3rd Ave / 7th St light out of sync
Fixed several issues with large trucks on 6th Ave
Fixed traffic gets stuck at 30 2nd Ave

Bugs

Fixed issues where you could get stuck in Manhattan Business School
Fixed issues making it difficult to click in some situations
Fixed left-click now grabs boxes
Fixed a couple memory leaks
Fixed issue if you click to "discard" an item while your mouse was over an employee
Fixed some issues causing the time to appear incorrectly
Fixed could exit a scooter without stopping
Fixed product backorders could overlap the same item that was already on backorder
Fixed repair UI not appearing if you leave the vehicle in the garage overnight
Fixed cash register customer queue resetting the path in some instances
Fixed issue where time could sometimes unpause in a building preview
Fixed forklift can grab items that are out of stock
Fixed scheduling display issue with two shifts, if you put the second shift in front of the first
Fixed dirt doesn't generate on tables/chairs if the player isn't in the business
Fixed dirt doesn't generate from customers in front of the cash register
Fixed MarketInsider events shouldn't include office fees
Fixed the building hider sometimes activating when it shouldn't or not activating when it should
Fixed camera doesn't lock to car in warehouses or underground parking
Fixed an issue where player could soft-lock themselves if they got a $14,999 loan instead of $15,000
Fixed employee demand exploits with scheduling: Employee now remembers how many days and hours they have worked that week, so you can't adjust their schedule in the middle of the week to make them work longer
Mouse driving has returned to "click" to accelerate (rather than based on the mouse position)
Fixed "MyEmployee" alert indicator not updating if the employee offer has expired
Fixed various collider and navigation bugs
Fixed no confirmation on mass candidate actions
Fixed changing business type while waiting for interior installation can cause soft-lock
Fixed changing the autosave timer was not updating until after the next autosave
Fixed soft-lock if hairdresser closes while player is getting a haircut
Fixed default rotation of wooden product case is wrong
Fixed health insurance wasn't listed on EconoView
Fixed some incorrect placement/navigation in Ika
Fixed incorrect Cigar Shelf capacity in help files
Fixed could interact with two activities (TV / computer / bed) at once and soft-lock yourself
Fixed blueprints don't save the hand truck location
Fixed issue where your character was trying to navigate to an object you deleted
Fixed failed furniture deliveries that were sporadically happening
Fixed that other cabinet types weren't fulfilling a tutorial objective.
Fixed LuxConcept customer queue
Fixed eating food while in business school could soft-lock you
Fixed sometimes can't discard mop
Fixed Jensen Capital front desk worker wrong uniform
Fixed hand truck makes noise while paused
Fixed Interior Designer reset some unsaved floor designs when overlapping with new floors
Fixed subway names were showing the wrong names
Fixed a few issues related to longer game sessions.
Fixed Contacts App showing wrong opening hours for businesses
Fixed some instances where MarketInsider was showing the wrong number of items
Fixed multiple speakers don't always sync up in larger buildings or after being placed
Fixed noticeable loop in Vord Tiara Vic
Fixed some issues causing players to see boxes of "undefined"
Fixed antialiasing not activating when changing settings in-game
Prevented newer blueprints from being seen in older versions of the game (doesn't apply to blueprints created prior to EA 0.5's full release)

Special thanks to everyone who tested things out on the experimental branch and gave a lot of valuable feedback! Due to all your help, we're really hoping this is the best update yet!

From the entire Big Ambitions team, we hope you enjoy this update!

~ Hovgaard Games

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