Version Change Update: A.D. 1549
Practical information on the transfer; Restaurant Subgame is ready!
The subgame-alization progresses as follows. The NPC's are in Char DB /1SERV tab, listed according to "businesses". A business is a new concept, which means a place where servants can transform their yearly salary to 1) moneretos, 2) stone, 3) culture points, 4) science points, or a combination of the above. A lone servant can seldom achieve a high conversion ratio - typically a building and organization is required.
Both the NPCs and the businesses now reside in the Char DB /1SERV tab.
As you want to manage your characters, please do only what you feel 100% comfortable of doing. The whole DB is - unlike before - now heavily interlinked and massive damage can be done by replacing a formula in a cell with a number, let alone adding or removing rows or columns, or changing the id_codes that act as linking keys. Changing anything except what is specifically allowed is best not to be done.
What is allowed to be done? Let's go trough it subgame by subgame:
Businesses are coded with numbers, the foremost being 1. Household, 1001-1074. Every Noble and wannabe has a household filled with quality butlers, cooks, other staff, perhaps even specialists. If the business empire is large, managers are needed to manage it and they need assistants, etc. Some nobles have slipped from having a decent Household until now, but they will need to start gathering the resources and living up to their level, unless the labor pool payout plunges.
The Household subgame is initialized but its grading and payment formulas are not yet ready. By "initialized" I mean that there's a row for every character's Household in the /1SERV. Some have already servants assigned to their household.
Now the important thing to remember about servants is that
most of them cannot be hired directly, but must be trained (typically by working). Therefore keep a keen eye on the talent in your organization and make the best use of them.
It is possible:
- to change servants between the same owner's different businesses, for example from your household to a restaurant you own.
- to contract servants from and to other players, in which case the servant is transferred to the buyer. Transfer fee may be involved.
- to fire servants. Firing does not cost you anything. If the servant fired is one that it says "unlim avail", it means that you just remove him from you and there is no limit, how many new ones of the same type can always be had.
- if you fire a servant that is not unlim avail, you must transfer him to the "labor market" (uppermost row in the /1SERV). Anyone can hire him by transferring him to himself.
- to hire servants, but only the ones that say "unlim avail" or if there are free experienced servants in the labor market.
3. Hotel includes all hotels. Only apartments are excluded because they do generate revenue as rental income, but they do not have any cost nor any staff associated. Hotels require a wide range of staff to achieve a high rating and function well.
The subgame is not available yet. Until it is, in a few days max, it is possible that hotels don't receive any pool dividends. This is not as terrible as it may sound, because hotels collectively "own" a certain share of the pool and it just accrues larger while the other pools empty themselves.
4. Restaurant likewise includes all eateries (excluding private ones such as Households). The quality is dependent on food, service and surroundings. If the restaurant is rated high, a higher price can be charged.
Restaurant subgame is available in /3RESTA. To transform your restaurant to the new subgame,
you must do exactly the following:
1. Go down the rows in /1SERV and find the first available row that has the code 30XX in it and does not have anybody's information. Mark is as yours in column "B" by entering your Char code. If it is correct, your name appears next to it.
2. Write the name of the restaurant in column "E".
3. Go up the rows in /1SERV and locate the row that contains the listing of the existing servants of this restaurant, or - as is often the case - all the servants of some larger entity such as a hotel conglomerate. Decide which of them you want to transfer to the new restaurant, and remove them from their previous row and add to the new row you started. Be sure not to "create" those kind of NPC's that cannot be hired.
4. Go to /3RESTA, which should neatly show your restaurant and some tentative grading. Enter the basic information concerning the place in columns "M" to "R". Do not add the values in "I" to "L", it is very difficult to receive these extra points. You can write in column "I" if you feel that the "windows & views" is worth +1 or +2 (typically +1 is granted for nice views from high with 1:6 window ratio, and +2 is granted if you have a wall of window and can see all the esteemed buildings at the same time through it). Location gets 1 point for having street access to a main street.
5. The restaurant game is about trying to position your restaurant to a most profitable segment. It is based on "#_of_tables" * "level_based_payout". You can self choose the number of tables as long as they physically fit in the restaurant. A very low-level place might have 7 sqm per table, and El Bulli is rumored to have only one table per room. The level_based_payout can be seen in /R_SH. The values are not final, and will never be as the relative profitability of having a different class of restaurant, changes constantly.
6. The level is a sum of main factors: food quality and service quality, and auxiliary factors that are many. There is no limit to the maximum points, at least service can always be made better. In the below part of the /3RESTA there is a sandbox for experimenting what would happen by adding or removing staff for example. The part above the yellow line is linked information and not to be changed once entered.
7. Column "BJ" is the space credit, meaning that if your restaurant has offices for the managers, you can credit the office rent back to you. 1 million rent equals about 10 sqm of offices, and managers do not work in bad conditions.
8. We cannot estimate how much 1 pool share is worth. This pool will receive about 50% of all service pool though, meaning that nearly 200 million per year in total is shared. The town had about 50 restaurants of different kinds when last checked, but only the ones that continue here are obviously part of the pool in the future.
9. If the restaurant does not have a kitchen, it cannot participate in this pool and goes to Commercial instead. Places serving just drinks go there.
10. The restaurant may receive 0 or even negative value in any of the other categories except Food, which must be nonnegative. In addition, the total must be at least 1, otherwise the restaurant is so bad it does not qualify to pool shares worth anything.
11. In the future, changes to inputs can always be done, and there is no need to update any poolparticipation%s, because getting rid of their manual updating is one of the great benefits of this massive update effort labeled V.3.
5. Commercial is a wide category having commercial and office space rentals, conference and event rentals, and all small businesses and industries whose idea is to produce money (not stone/science/culture).
As hotel, this is not yet ready and may experience a delay and then correspondingly larger payouts. It seems that I can code about one subgame per day.
6. Quarry produces stone. Quarries have at times employed more workforce than all the other businesses combined.
/QUARRY-2 hosts this subgame. The tab includes the information of all the 5 quarries under production. In addition it lists the essential rules of the revamped subgame, and shows the geology and layering of both the producing sites and the ones soon to be auctioned. The rules are not repeated here.
The auction for 3 more quarry sites starts now. It is a reverse "dutch" auction but with quite limited range, because the town does not anyway sell any land below 1,000 mil / chapelry. By purchasing in the auction you are not encumbered by extra taxes, and may decide to take the land in quarrying or in development.
7. Army produces income because the soldiers guard the streets, and there is a rumor that some uncivilized tribes nearby are making jest about our Obelisk, and it this is indeed confirmed, we might need to burn their palaces and bring the gold to adorn the base of the obelisk (no need to re-gild it, it's in good condition now as the gilding is 99 years old).
You are not allowed to fire any Army personnel. If you feel some of them have spun off as specialists, inform me and I'll throw dice. If successful, you will get specialists, and need to commission a new rookie officer in place.
Contact Lord Paulson or the Prince of New Liberty for the subgame where we show off to the neighbors that our obelisk is not to be messed with.
8. Other category is bluntly named, but has all the special buildings and parts thereof, which have their main function as providing science or culture.
Also this is coming soon.