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Another thing that might or might not be intended : Having a strong positive Corp cash flow can still result in the Corp locking up due to insolvency, if the player makes purchases too close to their budget at exactly the wrong time during the minute expense cycle.

It's a learning point for me, for sure. I can avoid it going forward, but I didn't anticipate having to start from scratch because my employees all unionized on me and went on strike. I guess maybe that's a win condition, given the nature of the theming...

Positive cash flow, 10:1 profit to expense ratio...

..but insolvent. I hired an Ops Coordinator too close to my budget rate. Intentional?

Not a big bug, but the Task(s) underway when incorporating get carried over to the next life. The first one to complete has its effect, but then all lanes clear.

Again, not a big deal, but allows the running of a slow, high return task to boost the follow on life a bit. Starting with a big chunk of scrap or Intel comes most readily to mind.

Thank you for that. I want to reiterate that I've been impressed with the rate of progress and turn around time on issues - it's still occuring at an impressive rate.

The game is advanced and balanced enough at this point that if you were to make an end run, a nearly impossible, "requires essentially full community backing, several megacorps of logistical support, and six hours of character buffing to achieve" difficulty Boss Fight to end the digital illuminati or whatever, I think you could step away proud. (And, hopefully, with a perpetual trickle of ad revenue!)

 Idlepunk is my favorite Groundhog-Day-Like, as is, and it just keeps getting better. Thanks for all the effort you've put into it already.

I'm unsure what the cost increase formula for incorporating is, but I think you figured it out before including the increase in earnable PB? This may not be a problem, but it occurs to me there's a non zero chance that a players entire run might be difficulty adjusted for "number of corp completions" rather than "prestige bonus strength" now that the two are not hand in hand aligned. That'd massively, permanently favor players who went deep instead of wide on their tech breakthrough choices.

Just a thought. I can't see the math on this end (at least, not without about a year of playing and recording variations!) so I'm not sure if it's a real concern or not.

Hooray! Second incorporation down.

Thank you for making deeper Tech upgrades more rewarding , PB-wise.

It's worth noting that I didn't bother becoming a Legend after incorporating, either. I got my Corp Cash this time around (didn't start at 0cr like last time) and was able to knock out the Corp side without any genuine contribution on the Runner/Classic side. I just burned time, essentially, knowing I'd lose everything when I boosted Tech again, doing some light Stamina boosting so my task rewards stuck around longer... although the way Corporation executed tasks aren't affected by Overtime degregation left me doing very long runs deep into old age, unwilling to surrender my iron grip on the company...which feels thematically appropriate.

Probably still needs more intertwining between the core gameplay loop and the corporation one. There's not much of an impetus to run the runner bit once the corps up and functional.

I did concentrate on maximizing stamina, how many seconds of life stamina buys, and Merchant efficiency. Once you're living around seven hours, there's plenty of time to exploit the counterfeit fencing loop. Lots easier than juggling everything to squeak out wins against the hegemony.

Pacing / Difficulty observation : Just a heads up, I incorporated before becoming a legend this time around. The 5 Rep bonus didn't affect the pacing of either cycle, just knocking out the first few hours to get that initial 100 Rep. I'm pretty sure I'd've done the same from an initial playthrough from scratch.

By the time I was at 1 TP earnable I had triggered the Incorporate tracker at the bottom of the screen, and it was clear I could just push through in less time than it would take to rebuild from scratch with Legendary status.

(If you tweak anything, I wouldn't aim to make Incorporation harder. Unlocking Legend took a while, even cheating via the 5 Rep life cycles - maybe the low end of the high end missions could get a hair easier?)

"Turn them on eachother" instead of "Turn them on each other". (I apologize if that's a regional shibolleth, I couldn't find reference to it in a quick web search as written dialect for a particular region.)

The Glossary explanation of Evade says that each level is worth double the effect of boosting Combat by 2. So, Evade is worth 4 Combat (double a 2 point increase, 2x2=4)? You may have rebalanced this, but I thought it was just 2.

Here's a minor one : if I have a plan that Recycles Appliances until my scrap is X, then immediately attempts to upgrade a tool via a scrap expenditure, it'll run about one second of the upgrade task before reverting back to the Recycling one. It does this a few times, until my scrap is over X plus the cost of the upgrade, at which point it lets the upgrade task run in full.

Put another way, it rechecks the completion condition for the task it finished last step about one second into the new one, then reverts if that user determined completion criteria no longer pings as True.

To correct myself : I should have written that the skill speed DISPLAYS as remaining unchanged. I'm not doing A / B testing with a stopwatch, it's possible that it is quietly implemented in the mission task rate math .

The rate of a skill in the Mission planner isn't modified by the presence of Customized equipment. I got a piece of kit up to lvl 4, so it should boost speed by +4% if I understand the writeup correctly, but the applicable skill speed in Mission planning is unadjusted, staying the same whether I have the customized item equiped or not.

Possibly intentional, but my Community education project doesn't quite hit a +2 skill bonus multiplier anymore. It seems to round up for task completion anyway (mission completion speeds are too random/opaque for me to gauge if they found there). It does look a bit odd, having hit max level but getting a partial number.

Suggestion : If the countdown timer for ZONK and FURY effects replaced the "Use ZONK/FURY" label text on the triggering buttons, you could place everything related to the two drugs on the same horizontal line. That would save a line height of potentially usable UI space.

Having played with it a bit, I somewhat regret not taking the creditpersecond boost instead. Prestige hacking doesn't solve the whole 'problem' of having to build up the community, afford your own education, pull in that ~(12x(125+707))cr and (12x20) scrap to fight your way into the mid-strength mission depth, etc. I'm not rebooting to a previous export, it has saved me time, but it wasn't the silver bullet I had anticipated.

Aww, great! Thank you so much!

Boosted my first Tech level! Feels good. Summarized play report follows.

Skunkworks didn't appeal for me, I've not messed with that whole side of the evil corpo chairman life. Boosting my own payouts to max (12/sec) was a priority, but after that my instinct was to leave the corp's stats in the toilet as much as I could for the inevitable day when I had to face off against them.

By the time I was approaching my third TP cycle I was ready to upgrade Tools to tech level 6. Once I had two warehouses full of production going and the sales force to offload it, dumping all my Corp budget into Operations Managers seemed like the Nash play. I hit a half mil a minute pretty quickly after realizing that, and could just run the inefficient research techniques that didn't get attention, never touching skunk works or raids or anything that meant boosting the corp's stats.

I picked the Patent Boost that grants 5rep bonus per life. I'm no longer actually playing the game, at least for now, just skipping generations as quickly as the game will process my retirements so I can get those first-cycle-prestiges in hopefully 15 min instead of 15 hours. 

It is unclear if there's a way to earn multiple PB at a time ala TP, or if getting that 6 point unlock will require starting and collapsing 6 corps from scratch. I'll probably try to push Tools to 7 next, since that seems like the most likely way to earn more points if such a thing is possible.

Bug : Planned upgrades of kit don't seem to actually upgrade the kit past the first level. Eg I can install a level one silencer infinite times on my pistol, rather than running the n+1 upgrade for the silencer after the initial install.

UI bug: The CORP tag and blue text color for tasks appear and disappear strangely. For example, a planned task completing in Slot A adds the tag and color, whereas an instructed task completing in Slot B removes it. 

I see the logic in having the extra info display until the player has acknowledged that they know what it's for by way of use, but it's behaving strangely ATM. I like it there, it reminds me that I've cycled up into a more advanced stage of play so seeing the blue text feels like a reward. If I were steering the ship I'd just leave the extra color and prefix tag in place in perpetuity to fix the 'flickering'.

" I believe that games work best when there's multiple valid approaches" - Preach! I like when there are a handful of invalid ones too, to allow for Player Knowledge being important. Multiple sufficiently valid approaches without the total removal of invalid ones. I think you're consistently hitting that sweet spot.

Bug:

I can't start corpo tasks like Executive Compensation, even when I have the listed prereqs. They always say I don't have a free task slot, even if I'm idle.

Potential low hanging fruit in that regard might be having a market flooded with particular types of goods reduce the price of those goods. Or, alternately, allow the player to steal from their own Corp in the form of converting goods in storage to equip able kit. That would kill two birds with one stone - it'd add distinction between the different types of factory workers, maybe compel diversification which is currently not incentivize.

Nice. A tight little gem that doesn't overstay its welcome and handles the sense of being frustrated prey to a cruel playful monster with minimalist beauty.

My only issue is that there's no downloadable version, so I can't crawl through the code and get a feel for how you pulled off some of the elements. Which is to say, no notes on the game itself qua game!

This is a typical example. 5 step UNLIMITED mission, the first of the life. I got to target almost exclusively skills I had heavily prioritized with rebirth job backgrounds and accessories and training and tools, but still ended up in combat.

First combat: 3x enemies with DMRs and Frontline Breacher Suits somewhere between levels 4 and 5 in armor value. I wailed on them with a level 3 Ripper, lvl 5 shock, for a good while while my kevlar sneak suit with lvl 5 noise reduction bought me time. They killed me in their first shot once they found me. I had managed less than ten points of damage to one of them.

I've tried the gun route too, but the noise reduction of silencers gets rapidly nerfed as ROF goes up, so the 'ambush window' is about one and a fifth attacks long... so anything short of a two stroke kill means getting perforated. With armor to soak all that (and we're getting in the 40k+ cash spent on guns and ammo point here) we're still looking at Alert levels in the hundreds even with max level silencers - I don't think you could get off three attack cycles with a high end high ROF gun and not be in the Reinforcement Death Loop.

It's rough out here, man! I'm looking at crawling up to that 2 TP tier and skipping the stamina boost in lieu of doubling my alert timer so I'm not spending 100+ Intel on looking for end run 4 stage missions. Abandon the idea of winning in combat at all. I'll do a combat focused build first to see if having something crazy high like 20 points could make these late game fights survivable, but I think it'll chew into my income potential so hard I'll end up paying for the skill boost with equipment limitations.

Plan related bug : Get Mentored can trigger if it's in a Plan before the player has hit the requirements for it to show up in the Education task list.

I was hesitant to mention this one. It's a very nice bug, that Skill Level 3 to 4 jump is my first time sink hurdle each life.

Image shows Mentor in active task bar but not yet available in task tab.

Having said all that .. it is possible to hit Legend. Took 20ish cycles, lots of luck, skin of teeth, etc.

Possible bug : 

Slot 2 in the image - is the PC supposed to be penalized for having Electronic tags in their kit like this? Intuitively it feels weird to have to mechanically defeat the lock, then spoof the handshake to get the lock to open as intended. Shouldn't the spoof hack x3 replace the lock defeat x4 instead of adding a step without removing another?

Difficulty report : This is more subjective than most of what I post, but I know you're (J Chance) working on balance, so I figured you should know.

I'm 19 retirement perks in. Some of my skills are in the mid-high teens in late game, and all are at least in the double digits. I've got a fully Shock modified, leveled Big One hammer, and fully Composited noise reduction armor, with a combat skill around 12.

It seems impossible to go through a Rep 120 or Rep 200 or Rep Infinite mission task without at least a single Security Sweep hitting. Because of cost increases, keeping player character skill over double the threat level becomes untenable at this point. Post Legacy I could probably do it - doubling my effective time, or income, could let me boost skills or tools/cyborgification up there. But on the first pre Legacy, post Incorporation cycle, it's either 20+ perks deep or borderline impossible. Occasionally I can just squeak one out if the Mercenary list has been kind and a prioritized skill is where the enemy happens to be weak.

At 5+ steps to a mission, combat seems inevitable, given the above. Again, post Legacy that might be different, and with the benefit of the Community tab it might be possible.

At Rep 200, I'm seeing multiple combatants at a time with one-shot-kill armor penetrating weapons or Frontline Breach armor, which is bulky enough to overwhelm even armor-defeating weapon builds. I'm spending multiple stamina-boosting Perks on modding my weapons and armor to perfection, and maybe a third of the cash I'm pulling in on upgrading them, and I'm barely scratching Rep 200 combatants. This is probably too hard.

Feature request - If the backalley doc is always going to heal 100% of a player's health, it should probably idle out after triggering once. No point in running it multiple sequential times.

Possible bug : If this Task has been fully removed from the Hack list, it's still in the Planning list as an option. This is probably not a bug if it still exists pre-incorporation, which is hard for me to check.

User created plan names can mess up screen width. Truncation or multi-line buttons to control the button widths might be in order.

UI issue : In the Corp tab/subtabs, I'm unable to discern either my actual goods production rate or sales (the estimate I do see doesn't account for increased production or sales by virtue of player Task completions). Additionally, I'm overproducing at the moment with extra storage purchased, but can't find anything about that surplus stock - the warehouses could be empty or full, which makes it hard to know whether I should be prioritizing sales rate or production rate increases.

That would be great! A simultaneous layer that interacts with the main might make climbing the prestige system and REP later again easier and different enough to feel engaging.

But no, I incorporated with zero dollars. I've dumped seven prestige bonuses into Corpo and done some REP/Mission free money making dives, caching 10k at a time until I could afford an office, warehouse, sales staff member, two production machines, and a pair of line workers. So I think I'm around the intended start point now!

Bug : Confirming one wants to retire, then leaving the game and returning while the prestige bonus selection is still active leads to all the tabs being unlocked on reload, with prestige management still open. I was able to dump a bunch of upgrades into Corpo background, run some Hack based money making schemes with my +7 bonus, then readjust the prestige benefits to something more realistic for a whole cycle. Presumably the same could be done for bulking up on Schmooze Intel and Tech Scrap right off the bat.

Confirming my selections reset the lifespan but not my money. I didn't do a full run to test to see what did and didn't reset.

On a positive note - still loving the word choice and tight, descriptive terms. It's fun to read over the new 'fluff' text and proper nouns, looking for references.

I think I miss most of them, but I've noticed at least one Snowcrash in the new batch.

Implicit in your question is the idea that the corporation can be active immediately or in short order. Is the corp supposed to start with some/all of the Incorporate fee? That would be enough to get off the ground. For my prestige, though, it starts with $0. (ie the Incorporate cost was all licensing fees and red tape)

Ditto tutor/training - lost most of a run to idle training, but didn't get the benefits of having run the training (no stat boost, no expenses incurred)

I lost almost 50 min to a scrap tool upgrade. Probably needs a catch for these only-fires-once tasks so they don't burn most of a run during offline time.

I must be missing something huge - it looks like to get any income from the Corporation I need real estate, a production line, a sales desk, and employees. All those are an arm and a leg, seemingly outside the pre-Legendary cycle potential. So I haven't been working on my corpo skills, since the one I did had no apparent effect (since I had no production) and the theoretical boost listed had disappeared in two lifetimes from attrition.

With no way to build a Network since I've been ostracized from the Community, I'm spending a lot more time each life Schmoozing so I can hit baseline Intel needs. It's slow going, about 1 Retirement boost every other life.