Alpha 19

After a long playthrough of the game, we concluded that the Finance system was most in need of some development love this month. It has become common practice to cheat your way to $1,000,000 in the bank because there is simply no other way to raise that kind of capital, and the game becomes boring when you have to wait for it to roll in. There are many mods that filled the gap by adding more grants to the game. Furthermore, if you use all the official grants up (all four of them) and still have a negative cashflow, you have literally no way to recover other than cheating, because your bank balance will be decreasing every day and you won’t be able to afford to build new facilities. It was clear that Finance needed looking at. Urgently.

Financial system improvements[]

Cashflow is now visible from the very start, without needing an Accountant to unlock it

Cashflow is now paid hourly, instead of at midnight as before

The starting bank balance has been increased from $10,000 to $30,000

The daily federal grant has been increased from $1,500 to $2,000

You now receive more daily money for the max security prisoners

Cash Bonus : Days without Incident[]

You now receive a bonus to your cashflow based on the number of days without incident.
The bonus accumulates at a rate of $1,000 per day without incident
So after 1 day you get a $1,000 bonus, but after 2 days you get a $2,000 bonus
The maximum daily bonus is $10,000 for 10 days straight without incident
The amount received resets immediately to zero after a death, serious injury, or escape

Corporation Taxes[]

You must now pay tax - 30% of all profits, directly out of your daily cashflow.

Once you have a profitable prison you can use your accountant to reduce this to 15%

You can also unlock an offshore tax haven for a whopping $50,000, that reduces your Corporation Taxes to 1%. (This is only recommended for prisons with massive daily profits)

Bank Loans[]

You can now borrow lump sums of money from the bank, and pay interest on the amount borrowed.

Interest payments are made hourly, and each successful payment increases your credit rating.

As your credit rating increases, so does the amount you can borrow, up to a max of $100,000

Prison Share Scheme[]

You can choose to sell shares in your prison to private investors and venture capitalists.

They will pay you 10% of the current prison value, in exchange for 10% ownership of your prison.

You can sell up to 50% of your prison this way, and you can buy back at any time (although the price may have gone up)

However if you've sold 30% of your prison to investors, you will only receive 70% of the price when you come to sell the entire prison

Game rebalancing[]

The prison 'temperature' now increases quite a bit slower, taking much longer to reach dangerous levels

The temperature falls much quicker once the causes of frustration have been resolved

A prisoner's "time served" now counts up much more slowly, meaning they will spend longer in your jail before release

Previously one year sentence = 36 game hours (1.5 days)

Now one year sentence = 120 game hours (5 days)
The Workshop Safety Induction can now be taught to 10 prisoners at once (up from 5 previously), and prisoners can use a workshop saw OR a workshop press whilst learning

New room/zone : Exports[]

Finished items are taken from the workshop to the new exports zone. Workmen will do the hauling.

If the exports zone is 'secure' then your prisoners will also do the hauling.

Items in the Exports zone will be loaded onto passing delivery trucks and taken away.

You will be paid as they leave the prison site N

NOTE: Logs will be auto-sold if there are no workshop Saws on site

NOTE: Wood will be auto-sold if there are no carpenters tables, or no qualified carpenters on site

SDL 2.0[]

The game is now using SDL 2.0 for windowing, mouse/keyboard input, and sound. (Previously SDL 1.2) This should help with hardware compatibility and reliability. Also provides better support for high dpi displays, joypads, tablets etc

Other[]

High DPI mode is now supported on certain displays - eg the Macbook Pro Retina display.

Enable it from the Graphics menu. This will make the game look significantly sharper on high DPI displays. (Eg Retina Mac previously ran the game at 1280x800 - now runs at 2560x1600 on a 13" screen!)
Greatly improved the display of Jobs in the deployment screen

You must now keep your Administrators employed if you wish to continue using the facilities they have unlocked

Prisoners with 'Qualifications' gained from reform programs will now strongly prefer to work in jobs that use those qualifications. This fixes a problem where all your qualified workshop prisoners went off to do the cleaning

Tazers are no longer flagged as 'Metal', so wont set off metal detectors

Trees will no longer leave a stump if they are felled indoors, eg after building new foundations over forest

The Emergency Services toolbar now shows tooltips for each service type, including the cost of callout

The Rooms toolbar now highlights rooms you are likely to want to build, due to grants/objectives

The Bureaucracy screen has been laid out in a new arrangement to make room for all the new unlocks

The Lawyer has been removed from the game, as he currently serves no purpose. He may return at a later date.

New graphics for the Teacher

Fixes[]

Fixed : The reform program 'Scheduler' now ensures there will be a teacher available when picking a time slot.

This fixes a bug with the foreman being expected to teach multiple workshop induction classes at once. NOTE: You may need to manually click "Reschedule" if your prison has this problem after loading
Fixed : Prisoners working as janitors would stand around in the cleaning cupboard doing nothing, unless you had at least one janitor hired (or if you had very few janitors in a large jail)
Fixed : Cutting down a tree near a wall square will no longer demolish that wall square

Fixed : Experience will no longer tick up on dead prisoners

Fixed : You can no longer place rooms over lakes
Fixed : Stolen contraband would still be counted if the prisoner responsible had left the jail.
This counted towards the overall 'Supply' level, but could never be found by searching.