Going to dinner at my sister's place, will be back to more fully comment... but wanted to point out here that the 3 Vets to the Northeast also come with a territory that supports 5 Meguca. So it's actually +2 to the surplus.
Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
Going to dinner at my sister's place, will be back to more fully comment... but wanted to point out here that the 3 Vets to the Northeast also come with a territory that supports 5 Meguca. So it's actually +2 to the surplus.
I am actually against Fun with magic now that the demon hunting algorithm has been revealed. Every 3 GCs we spend is an extra +2% to casualty rate. Every single turn. It's quite simply too much. Especially since if we can somehow get to a low demon strength we get a nearly 2x bonus to our collection rate per girl which will open us up a TON.
Also, if we recruit girls who already have houses we don't need to bring them into our apartments, right?
Also, if we recruit girls who already have houses we don't need to bring them into our apartments, right?
I'm pretty much decided on abstracting it. In the sense that it's an average value. So it's not 25 living in the apartments, but those without homes out of 25. It's surprisingly difficult to convey what I mean but I think that should make sense?
Chimeraguard
We do deserve to exist.
Adding to diplomacy options, couldn't we also bribe with Grief Cubes. I think that's how Mami got a lot of the girls of the original group to join.
Yeah, the promise of a good supply of GC's should help a lot imo. We've got enough for an entire month if no one hunts. That's gotta be reasuring.
Still not sure what plan to make yet though. Gonna have to sleep on it before deciding to go Research or Cash/Expand.
Logic on it doesn't really follow. Joining includes providing them with the grief cubes they need to get by, and you keep them as a mutual pool. The promise of a steady supply of grief cubes is already part and parcel of the recruitment pitch.
[X] Upkeep - 7 Vets and 3 Greens
[X] Pack Hunting: Magical Girls will hunt in groups vastly reducing the danger, but because they are not covering as much area their efficiency is reduced. Death is significantly less likely. 10 Veterans = expected Grief Cubes ~28
Cost: Variable, specify number of Meguca dedicated; Reward 1.25 Grief Cubes per Meguca assigned; 10% base casualty chance
[X] Stipend: Giving your magical girls a small amount of money to spend on themselves. At their current level of lifestyle this no longer really further boosts their morale, but will help prevent its decay.
Cost: $50 per Meguca; Reward: Maintained morale. Chance of success: 100%
-[X] When delivering the Stipend, Mami takes time to compliment each girl on how well she has been doing at her assigned task each month.
[X] Expand territory NorthEast, by diplomacy: If you can convince them to join your group you may be able to safely incorporate others' territories. (Replaces normal recruitment option). 1 Green and 1 Mami, 30% + 10% (Mami)
- [X] Addon, Bribery: Giving the girls some money might help them realize just how good for them cooperation could be.
Cost: $150 per girl in the territory; Reward: +1d10% success chance. Cost $450 in this case.
Come on dice! Keiko, torture extra kittens this month!
[X] Scout Area Southwest (purple area in the southern city): You can deploy a veteran to scout out one of the territories around you stealthily. They should be able to gauge the demon strength there and the magical girls status there without tipping them off, hopefully.
Cost: 1 Veteran; Chance of success: 70%; Reward: information on demon strength, support capacity of the territory, and status of current magical girls in the territory, bonus to diplomatic efforts.
[X] Scout Area West by Southwest (green area on outskirts of the southern city): You can deploy a veteran to scout out one of the territories around you stealthily. They should be able to gauge the demon strength there and the magical girls status there without tipping them off, hopefully.
Cost: 1 Veteran; Chance of success: 70%; Reward: information on demon strength, support capacity of the territory, and status of current magical girls in the territory, bonus to diplomatic efforts.
diplomacy: $450, 30+10+(5.5)=45.5% chance of success
It seems worth it to me. It's not a great chance of success, but that territory is crucial and the +5 sustainability is huge (even if it's only net +2).
edit: dropped intimidation (+5%) in exchange for +1 hunting action
[X] Pack Hunting: Magical Girls will hunt in groups vastly reducing the danger, but because they are not covering as much area their efficiency is reduced. Death is significantly less likely. 10 Veterans = expected Grief Cubes ~28
Cost: Variable, specify number of Meguca dedicated; Reward 1.25 Grief Cubes per Meguca assigned; 10% base casualty chance
[X] Stipend: Giving your magical girls a small amount of money to spend on themselves. At their current level of lifestyle this no longer really further boosts their morale, but will help prevent its decay.
Cost: $50 per Meguca; Reward: Maintained morale. Chance of success: 100%
-[X] When delivering the Stipend, Mami takes time to compliment each girl on how well she has been doing at her assigned task each month.
[X] Expand territory NorthEast, by diplomacy: If you can convince them to join your group you may be able to safely incorporate others' territories. (Replaces normal recruitment option). 1 Green and 1 Mami, 30% + 10% (Mami)
- [X] Addon, Bribery: Giving the girls some money might help them realize just how good for them cooperation could be.
Cost: $150 per girl in the territory; Reward: +1d10% success chance. Cost $450 in this case.
Come on dice! Keiko, torture extra kittens this month!
[X] Scout Area Southwest (purple area in the southern city): You can deploy a veteran to scout out one of the territories around you stealthily. They should be able to gauge the demon strength there and the magical girls status there without tipping them off, hopefully.
Cost: 1 Veteran; Chance of success: 70%; Reward: information on demon strength, support capacity of the territory, and status of current magical girls in the territory, bonus to diplomatic efforts.
[X] Scout Area West by Southwest (green area on outskirts of the southern city): You can deploy a veteran to scout out one of the territories around you stealthily. They should be able to gauge the demon strength there and the magical girls status there without tipping them off, hopefully.
Cost: 1 Veteran; Chance of success: 70%; Reward: information on demon strength, support capacity of the territory, and status of current magical girls in the territory, bonus to diplomatic efforts.
diplomacy: $450, 30+10+(5.5)=45.5% chance of success
It seems worth it to me. It's not a great chance of success, but that territory is crucial and the +5 sustainability is huge (even if it's only net +2).
edit: dropped intimidation (+5%) in exchange for +1 hunting action
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Not bad. Potential for some investments from the parents of our greens. Too bad about Hitomi, I hope Kyousuke and Sayaka are handling it okay. Did we get any reduction in Demon Strength from adding the West territory?
Ah well...
What might have been....
Those extra vets would have been great to help us expand operations. Oh well, we are now at a point were we can harvest below the sustainable level and still meet our expected grief cube upkeep. So that's good. We just need to expand a bit more so that we can dedicate more girls to working.
Plan for next month:
[X] Upkeep - 7 Vets and 3 Greens
[X] Pack Hunting: Magical Girls will hunt in groups vastly reducing the danger, but because they are not covering as much area their efficiency is reduced. Death is significantly less likely. 10 Veterans = expected Grief Cubes ~28
Cost: Variable, specify number of Meguca dedicated; Reward 1.25 Grief Cubes per Meguca assigned; 10% base casualty chance
[X] Stipend: Giving your magical girls a small amount of money to spend on themselves. At their current level of lifestyle this no longer really further boosts their morale, but will help prevent its decay.
Cost: $50 per Meguca; Reward: Maintained morale. Chance of success: 100%
-[X] When delivering the Stipend, Mami takes time to compliment each girl on how well she has been doing at her assigned task each month.
[X] Expand territory NorthEast, by diplomacy: If you can convince them to join your group you may be able to safely incorporate others' territories. (Replaces normal recruitment option). 1 Green and 1 Mami, 30% + 10% (Mami)
- [X] Addon, Bribery: Giving the girls some money might help them realize just how good for them cooperation could be.
Cost: $150 per girl in the territory; Reward: +1d10% success chance. Cost $450 in this case.
Come on dice! Keiko, torture extra kittens this month!
[X] Scout Area Southwest (purple area in the southern city): You can deploy a veteran to scout out one of the territories around you stealthily. They should be able to gauge the demon strength there and the magical girls status there without tipping them off, hopefully.
Cost: 1 Veteran; Chance of success: 70%; Reward: information on demon strength, support capacity of the territory, and status of current magical girls in the territory, bonus to diplomatic efforts.
[X] Scout Area West by Southwest (green area on outskirts of the southern city): You can deploy a veteran to scout out one of the territories around you stealthily. They should be able to gauge the demon strength there and the magical girls status there without tipping them off, hopefully.
Cost: 1 Veteran; Chance of success: 70%; Reward: information on demon strength, support capacity of the territory, and status of current magical girls in the territory, bonus to diplomatic efforts.
EDIT:
Dropped the sports day and doing more scouting. If we get those vets to the Northeast it will make a huge difference in opening up opportunities to do interesting things with Enchantment research and getting more jobs and more income.
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So three very different votes over the course of the day. There's not even a real solid trend between the three of them. I usually like to wait for 3 votes for one at least.
I find it kind of funny that Hitomi came up, it was just a coincidental name given by a random name generator. She didn't even have the potential to be a magical girl in canon. I'm kind of disappointed no one commented on the other details thrown into this update though.
Kind of surprising no one came up with an idea to pitch for the loan though, it could let you afford to start the business this turn if you wanted. Though maybe since I didn't write it up as an option it was unclear that it was. Just looking for a sort of write in business plan as well as how you'd present it. It's not something that takes a full month of time and it doesn't have any real costs to compose, likewise it's not a dice roll though.
I find it kind of funny that Hitomi came up, it was just a coincidental name given by a random name generator. She didn't even have the potential to be a magical girl in canon. I'm kind of disappointed no one commented on the other details thrown into this update though.
Kind of surprising no one came up with an idea to pitch for the loan though, it could let you afford to start the business this turn if you wanted. Though maybe since I didn't write it up as an option it was unclear that it was. Just looking for a sort of write in business plan as well as how you'd present it. It's not something that takes a full month of time and it doesn't have any real costs to compose, likewise it's not a dice roll though.
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Well... I just felt this was something we needed a lot more thought on. Coming up with a convincing business plan is not an easy thing. Plus we need some more girls and expansion so we have the man power to do it right.
So far we have three main ideas:
Courier Business: Advantage is we already have girls with a reputation as couriers.
Pizza Delivery: Advantage is is simplicity, and again fast delivery. We might want to poll our girls to find those with cooking ability and maybe send some out to try and get jobs in those industries.
Healing Business: Advantage is we could use healing magic to make us the best in the business, and eventually raise our prices to very high margins. Disadvantage is that it will cost more grief cubes, it might attract unwanted attention, we need a convincing cover story, and I doubt we can get a loan for this. Probably a later investment after our first business is successful.
What else could we do?
Make Teddy Bears and Plushies? Maybe even give them a small enchantment charge to do something before wearing out?
Other traditional jobs for low-skilled workers (we don't have the education to be engineers):
Cleaning and other housework. Essentially a maid business.
Dry Cleaning and laundry.
Open a restaurant.
Hmmm... possibly translation work, especially if we have someone with wish magic that allows this (someone who wished for being able to understand someone, or be understood might get a power like this).
Maybe if we research the properties of other objects exposed to magic we might get even more ideas.
EDIT: Okay, after going away and doing other stuff while thinking about this I think we need some research before we can present a business plan. We need to know expected costs and expected income, that sort of thing.
Couriers: I have no idea because I don't know what it's used for. I've heard they have them in New York and Japan, but none of the place I live ever used such a thing. So... lets start with the basics:
1: Who are the primary customers of a courier service? Companies that want to send memos to each other but not use the mail? Seems sketchy. Personal delivery service for people inside the same city? I guess it's possible, but seems like a niche market. Small businesses that don't have an in-house delivery service but a customer wants delivery? Like the local flower shop? They out source it a courier delivery service? That seems the most plausible.
2: How does the courier service attract those customers? Advertisements? The Yellow Pages? Word of Mouth? The Internet? (Side note: do any of our girls know HTML? Can they set up a web page for us?)
3: How much does the courier service charge a customer? Is it by package? Package weight? Distance for delivery?
4: What other positions do they have besides the actual courier. A dispatcher of course. Anything else?
5: How many deliveries per a day are expected of a courier? I assume their pay is connected to this. Speed is of the essence. Are there certain times of day when business picks up?
6: What are the business regulations we will have to deal with?
7: Anything else that the couriers think is important for us to know?
-----> Fortunately we have experienced couriers we can question to learn the truth. Mami asks the couriers who their typical customers are, and everything else on the list.
Food Delivery: (Making this more generic):
1: What are the common delivery foods in demand in Mitakihara? Is there an open niche anywhere of underserved customers? Pizza, Noodles, Raman, etc.
2: What are the ingredient costs for the various foods?
3: What kind of cooking expertise do we have among our girls? Are any of them possible options?
4: What are the business regulations? Can we run this out of Mami's apartment and use her kitchen? Do we need to purchase/rent a commercial kitchen?
5: What is the typical employee structure for competitors? The wages paid to the various employees?
6: What is the expected speed of delivery for each food type? The length of time it takes to cook?
7: Typical methods of advertisement?
8: Anything else we need to know?
Restaurant:
Same questions as for the Food Delviery, but instead of asking about food delivery times we need to ask about locations, cost of renting a place, ect.
Healing Business:
1: How much cost in grief cubes per a customer?
2: What is our cover story? Do we go after a particular subset of incurable diseases? Cancer?
3: Do we have a central location setup? Or do we send the girls out to customer homes to deliver the miracle cure?
4: Business regulations?
5: What percentage of our girls are healers? What are they focused on right now?
6: Anything else we haven't thought of?
We need to ask similar questions about the other ideas, but I'm starting to burn out a little. Someone else want to write those up?
I think these questions will take a month's worth of time of Mami investigating them all. Then we will have a better idea of what kind of business plan to present. Additionally, we should probably ask the girls what they are interested in. Maybe they will have some ideas that we haven't thought of, or maybe they are much more excited about one of the ideas we already have.
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Let's be fair, it's a quest not a real one. I'm not asking for a real world grade business plan (that would be absurd, though the Shepard Quest discussion has sometimes gotten hilariously intense on the subject), just a simple idea with a pitch like you did a few turns back to mitigate your grief cube shortage will do. I'd have asked for the idea at least when you tried to make a business either way.
These ideas are reasonable, though how you intend to organize it might also be good. That is to say, do you intend to go full up illusions and pose the whole business as if you were adults? Or try to do it as adolescents with just a couple "adults" in the main view.
You'd need more research into enchanting for that.
That's such a good idea on a possible wish (magic) that I'll give you one of those (as a bonus for the good idea). One of your vets now has the ability to use all languages perfectly.
That may actually be one of the more powerful types of magic in general, probably more useful than teleportation or telepathy or barriers. Though telepathy actually fills the same role somewhat, and probably results from only slightly different wishes.
Not quite sure what you're going for here.
Edit: And in the space of me replying you post a massive intense edit barrage, lol. A lot of these questions are much more in depth than I'd intended this to be. I'm not planning to require you to monitor specific business regulations and such.
I think you're overestimating the specificity a quest can really reach. I mean I do a fair bit of thinking to maintain the mechanics and balance, but values are always based on approximation and feel. Researching all that is a bit much.
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Awesome!
Did I over do it again?I am an Economics major so...
Business plans are serious business.My rudimentary research into the matter is that it's largely used in place of the mail for a higher speed delivery of parcels and documents. Some sites suggest that the use of couriers for documents is due to a mistrust in the security of electronic transmission, so it sees use in carrying financial and legal documents. Though delivery of gifts or individual items to customers is also the case. Material samples for designers of all sorts. They use smartphones linked to a web page to get their orders.
Charges seem to be mostly bracketed. A base price for a short distance and most weights. Extra charge for longer distance in the form of brackets of distance, and extra charge for heavy packages. Some charge extra for extra fast delivery.
There's no way I'm tracking down the cost of tomatoes and what not, lol. You can safely assume in a moderately large city like Mitakihara that all the usual niche have someone. You will need a commercial kitchen and occasional food inspectors will come by.
I think this is quite overthinking it though. I was just intending to give you a cost and then a number of workers needed to operate it at usual level and then an income from that with some rng variability and some diminished return from additional workers and occasional expansion if you roll well. (Well that was my most recent thought on it, it's a bit more sophisticated than when I first threw it up as an option based on people wanting to do it.)
Most of this stuff is actually more up to how you want to run it. Though for grief cube use it's somewhat depends on the level of injury. Minor injuries are .25, normally lethal injuries are .5; for full body affecting diseases it can climb higher, though magical girls don't typically get diseases themselves. You have 3 Healer type meguca right now, all of them now vets from your original group of greens, one currently a courier. The other two are in your general assignment pool. Also no idea what business regulations you think would encompass magical miracle healing.
Also I suppose I should clarify at this point that "Grief Cubes" as a stat is itself an abstraction based on each unit being equivalent to a normal month's supply for a magical girl with typical use. It's not actually one cube (in my head a unit is like 15-30 individual cubes). Similar to the way it worked in the quest I based this off of. I feel like I should clarify that as it might be confusing.
I'll draw up some basic stats on the returns and investments for individual businesses today I guess. Though given the complexity of the underlying issues I'm abstracting I'll be open to adjusting them.
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There business in York PA where you order food from the website of a courier service and they then go purchase the food from various takeout restaurants and deliver it to your home, for the price the restaurants charge plus a standard delivery fee. That shouldn't require much resources to start up.
Diomedea
A piece of the continent
- Location
- The interblag
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Interesting, Interesting. I've been ill, so I've been a bit behind on my questing, but I'll revise my vote in a bit. I agree that fun with magic is a bit expensive at the moment, so I'll drop that. Also, with the revelation that we're not hard capped at 25 for housing means recruiting those three veterans is an option. So, the real decision is between a business proposal (can we start the business this month contingent on success there, or would we need to wait till next month?) and getting the Mami bonus for recruiting those three veterans. Thoughts on what our priority should be between the two? Also, how many MGs would we need for the proposal?
We probably need to wait and see what inverted_helix has to say.
That said we currently need 10 vets to hunt each turn to met our expected grief cube needs.
We currently have 6 girls working (3 couriers, 1 in a maid cafe, and 2 in the mail rooms of their parent's company).
I'm guessing the courier option will require a minimum of 4 girls (1 dispatcher, 3 couriers).
Food delivery will probably require a minimum of 5 or 6 girls (2 cooks/order takers, 3 delivery girls)
Healing option might require as few as 2 or 3 girls (2 or 3 healers). Of course the amount of extra work to keep up the ruse might require another girl.
That said we currently need 10 vets to hunt each turn to met our expected grief cube needs.
We currently have 6 girls working (3 couriers, 1 in a maid cafe, and 2 in the mail rooms of their parent's company).
I'm guessing the courier option will require a minimum of 4 girls (1 dispatcher, 3 couriers).
Food delivery will probably require a minimum of 5 or 6 girls (2 cooks/order takers, 3 delivery girls)
Healing option might require as few as 2 or 3 girls (2 or 3 healers). Of course the amount of extra work to keep up the ruse might require another girl.
Diomedea
A piece of the continent
- Location
- The interblag
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Healing could be possibly done...not illegally per say, but extra-legally. In a nice foil to Kyubey, we could mysteriously appear and offer a bargain of healing of for money. Let word of mouth spread our reputation a bit, and people would be coming to us. If we wanted to go with the current front company idea, we could set up an "alternative" clinic specializing in chronic illnesses/people who the current health services are unable to help. Probably around 5 girls, the 3 healers and 2 'nurses'/receptionists. People in power would dismiss the people we cure, since most often, people already are prone to dismiss when alternative medicine actually has a positive outcome. The down side would be the grief cubes this would use up in the healing process, but it probably has the biggest $$$ reward of all the current options.
Hmm... yes... mysterious healers who show up and heal the impossible cases... pretend we are deities or spirits or something?
Maybe a phone number for people to call that is passed around on the internet... only the really desperate will call... which is fine because they will pay the most.
If we could get a shrine or something, and set some of our girls up as a mikos... a shrine that is particularly effective at healing? Make a sizable donation and you can be healed?
Maybe we stick with just a phone number you call, and then a "miko" shows up to evaluate the patient, and ask for a suitable donation before shooing everyone out to preform a "ceremony" during which she heals the patient?
In other items that occurred last month. What is up with this veteran who can't find a job? She needs a new persona? What exactly happened to her? Is it just fluff, or is that a tease to something interesting?
Maybe a phone number for people to call that is passed around on the internet... only the really desperate will call... which is fine because they will pay the most.
If we could get a shrine or something, and set some of our girls up as a mikos... a shrine that is particularly effective at healing? Make a sizable donation and you can be healed?
Maybe we stick with just a phone number you call, and then a "miko" shows up to evaluate the patient, and ask for a suitable donation before shooing everyone out to preform a "ceremony" during which she heals the patient?
In other items that occurred last month. What is up with this veteran who can't find a job? She needs a new persona? What exactly happened to her? Is it just fluff, or is that a tease to something interesting?
wtdtd
slow thinker, with crippling abundance of time
- Location
- The Netherlands
I heard that translators can make lots of money... can we let her work as one?
I am an Economics major so...
Awesome!
Can't it be both? Anyways she just rolled awfully. I give a +5 each month they keep trying (it isn't all that much, but it is something), she rolled low enough to warrant resetting that. Sort of the person she was playing did so badly she was blacklisted so next time she'd have to change her appearance and give a different name.
This was about what I was thinking. Last one depending on how you intended to do it. An actual clinic would take more than just random phantom, but probably be more consistent.
Probably leaning towards a little higher than you expect on each of these because you're probably going to want to keep your service open longer than one shift. So probably around 50% higher on each of these except the clinic. Though I suppose if you want you could start it out with only one shift worth of hours, it might make more sense considering your workforce, though it doesn't really make business sense. Starting your own business is meant to be quite the investment, and risk. Also be aware that if you do something that magical girl status doesn't give you an edge in, like just a normal restaurant, the odds of it turning out poorly will be significantly increased.
My tentative thoughts are (feel free to comment if they seem low or high):
6 girls for courier service, with a 9k return per month. Initial startup cost around 10k worth of buying bicycles, setting up a website, advertising a bit. getting insurance. This is actually a substantially lower than the values I've seen for American bike courier services, but I can't seem to find solid data on Japanese ones besides it being worse. Plus I figure it's something you'd gradually be scaling up in as you gain more sense of reliability.
6 girls for a small restaurant (2 groups of 1 chef + 2 delivery makes sense). Return scaling up to 10k a month after a few months. Keeping in mind that this would be including loan repayments for around 5 years. After that profit would be higher (though I expect that by then you'll probably have moved on to bigger and better things). I actually looked this up a bit to figure out values and it works out nicely, since you'd be looking at around 40% of your gross sales as returning to you since that's about the combined value of owner profit and wages. So with a 500k loan repayment over 5 years at 5% (normal would be 6-7% so this is discounted) and a gross revenue of 600k a year it works out to about 10k each month for you after the loan payment.
Healing option is too variable on how you want to do it. I mean theoretically if you're just some random person wandering the streets that's no start up costs, and the value of the service is really high. I mean even granting how you do it there's no way for me to even guess how much people would be willing to pay in return for a "miracle cure", keeping in mind how skeptical people would be but also how desperate they can be. There's no statistics for me to fall back on.
Interesting, very interesting.
Well our own courier business is very interesting. We actually have close to enough saved up to do it ourselves. We also have experienced girls who can probably help us out, both in reputation and pointing needs out to us. We might even just buy everyone bicycles as we scale up. The main disadvantage of course is that we will be pulling our highest earners off to do this. So I figure we do want to use the loan, that way we can fall back on our savings for a couple turns if it fails at first. I also think we need to increase in size by at least 3 additional girls before doing this. Of course, this only an increase of about $2,000 over our current 6 girls working. So not a lot of payoff...
The Food Delivery idea is dependent on the loan. I'm a little hesitant to get into debt on something that we don't have as much confidence in. On the other hand, the income is a bit better, even when paying off the loan.
The Healing option is actually pretty attractive. Really variable, but low start up costs. Probably $300 for a computer and $100 a month for internet access and a payment processing. Start trolling for desperate people looking for a miracle cure. Promise a healing ceremony that calls forth the benevolent healing spirits. When we find someone, dispatch one of our healers in a miko outfit to perform a "ceremony" of healing. So maybe another $100 for 3 miko uniforms. Maybe something like 1d3 - 1 for the first months, 1d4 - 1 for the next month, and so on. Just guessing at the odds, the GM might want to use a different method with more variation. As word of mouth spreads that we are the real thing we would get more customers. We can probably charge pretty high... $2,000 should be easy to get out of people, even at the start. More depending on the customer...
The main problem is that each customer will probably cost .5 to 1 grief cubes to heal. Otherwise they would have gone elsewhere. 1 Vet hunting = ~2.8 grief cubes. So that would mean we need an extra Veteran for every 3 people we heal. Also, how do we deal with saying no? I mean, we won't be able to heal everyone that wants it. We just aren't enough. I guess we could claim that our healers can only access the spirits so many times a month, so put a max limit on it.
How do we deal with people who can't pay though? That might have negative moral effects. I think we have to separate the healers from that decision. People pay up front before we ever dispatch a healer. Otherwise we'll have people who can't pay and then hit poor Yuma with a sob story.
What we would really like to do is be able to price discriminate. The millionaire whose daughter is dying? Charge him $100,000. The poor working grandmother trying to save her grandson? Charge her $1,000. If we can just figure out a way...
Well... I guess we could demand an upfront "visit fee" of $1,000 for us to come look at the patient. Then after we see him ask for a larger donation after the healing... at least some of the millionaires will be willing to pay more.
Well our own courier business is very interesting. We actually have close to enough saved up to do it ourselves. We also have experienced girls who can probably help us out, both in reputation and pointing needs out to us. We might even just buy everyone bicycles as we scale up. The main disadvantage of course is that we will be pulling our highest earners off to do this. So I figure we do want to use the loan, that way we can fall back on our savings for a couple turns if it fails at first. I also think we need to increase in size by at least 3 additional girls before doing this. Of course, this only an increase of about $2,000 over our current 6 girls working. So not a lot of payoff...
The Food Delivery idea is dependent on the loan. I'm a little hesitant to get into debt on something that we don't have as much confidence in. On the other hand, the income is a bit better, even when paying off the loan.
The Healing option is actually pretty attractive. Really variable, but low start up costs. Probably $300 for a computer and $100 a month for internet access and a payment processing. Start trolling for desperate people looking for a miracle cure. Promise a healing ceremony that calls forth the benevolent healing spirits. When we find someone, dispatch one of our healers in a miko outfit to perform a "ceremony" of healing. So maybe another $100 for 3 miko uniforms. Maybe something like 1d3 - 1 for the first months, 1d4 - 1 for the next month, and so on. Just guessing at the odds, the GM might want to use a different method with more variation. As word of mouth spreads that we are the real thing we would get more customers. We can probably charge pretty high... $2,000 should be easy to get out of people, even at the start. More depending on the customer...
The main problem is that each customer will probably cost .5 to 1 grief cubes to heal. Otherwise they would have gone elsewhere. 1 Vet hunting = ~2.8 grief cubes. So that would mean we need an extra Veteran for every 3 people we heal. Also, how do we deal with saying no? I mean, we won't be able to heal everyone that wants it. We just aren't enough. I guess we could claim that our healers can only access the spirits so many times a month, so put a max limit on it.
How do we deal with people who can't pay though? That might have negative moral effects. I think we have to separate the healers from that decision. People pay up front before we ever dispatch a healer. Otherwise we'll have people who can't pay and then hit poor Yuma with a sob story.
What we would really like to do is be able to price discriminate. The millionaire whose daughter is dying? Charge him $100,000. The poor working grandmother trying to save her grandson? Charge her $1,000. If we can just figure out a way...
Well... I guess we could demand an upfront "visit fee" of $1,000 for us to come look at the patient. Then after we see him ask for a larger donation after the healing... at least some of the millionaires will be willing to pay more.
Crow
Falling is a Pleasure. Regardless of its Fate
Shrewd, very shrewd, you a businessman Haman? i may need to pick up on some tips there, my bleeding heart feels a little bad about discriminating but this is a dog eat dog world so its understandable.
We might want to have more territory and vets before really starting tough, don't want the demon´s strength to shoot trough the roof and lose more of our Girls.
Well... I'm an Economist by training. We are basically trained to turn off our morals and emotions during the modeling stage so as to create an accurate model of how the world works, and then turn the morals back on when the time comes to decide what to do. Hence the ability for us to write things like "Time On The Cross" which is about the economics of slavery, proving that slavery was in fact an extremely profitable enterprise, while at the same time being utterly opposed to it.
Of course, you all may think that it's obvious that slavery was profitable, but back before Fogel and Engleman published Time On The Cross the actual accepted belief among historians was that slavery was a marginal economic system, and that it would have eventually collapsed of it's own weight.
Now I was always more of a macro guy, and price discrimination is micro economics, but the idea is pretty clear. There are people that are willing to pay a lot of money, and people that are willing to pay only a little money for the same thing. If you charge the cost of marginal production (the standard in classical free market economics) there there is a huge surplus that is going to the consumer that is paying the market price, despite the product being worth much more to him.
However, if supplier were to raise prices he would first of all lose the customers who can only afford the lower price, and he would also face competition under cutting the new prices. A good example of companies attempting to get around this are the game consoles. Playstations, and so forth, are almost always initially sold at below cost prices. Why? Because if they establish dominance in the market place, then they are able to charge a premium on the games. It's a form of imperfect price discrimination, in that consumers who can afford less just buy less games, while those who can afford more buy more games. The cost of the game console is the hook that catches people into the future payment of large rents when purchasing games.
Really, price discrimination requires a monopoly to pull off, and preferably a very inelastic demand. In this instance we actually do have an almost perfect monopoly on something with extremely inelastic demand. Actually the demand is so inelastic and our supply so limited that price discrimination is actually more of a generous charitable action. As it would be far easier to just keep increasing our prices as we gain reputation to keep the demand at the levels we can supply. Eventually we would reach the point that we are only healing millionaires.
That's actually probably what we should do at first, but we are going to face some morale problems if we keep going that route. Thus my suggestion that at some point we begin using price discrimination. A standard initial donation for the hook, then a second fee based on assessment of the person's wealth.
Ah well... you got me going on econ stuff. I ended up in a different industry from my major so I don't get to use my econ training very often. I tend to get excited when someone shows the least bit of interest. At least you didn't ask me how the Great Depression started.
The fact that there's a tradeoff in each is what I'm going for. Though keep in mind that the long run growth will be different as well. I mean the total market size for courier service is fairly small, though you're likely to be able to take over the entire market in relatively short order. A city's demand for food is far larger, but you'll probably have to work more and risk more expanding in that market.
That being said the issues you've raised about healing as a business make it less of a balance black hole for me. Though I still don't think I buy that you can get that much money out of people with no reputation, but I suppose con artists manage similarly. Also if you try to set it up as being miko, aren't you going to need a shrine? I'm pretty sure that would be pretty costly to acquire.
Also I feel like I should mention your math is a bit sketchy on grief cubes. A vet hunting produces 2.8, if you count the upkeep on the hunting vet though you only have 1.8 to spare. Then you count the upkeep on the healing vet (though that's more of a fixed cost depending).
Also it's been a day with only 3 separate votes. Kind of troublesome.
Another thing I've been wondering is if it's time for a name for your group.
Yeah I'm well aware of this issue. It's why I called it a bit of a balance black hole. Beyond a nightmare.
I find economics really interesting myself so I don't mind, though it's hard to keep it at a level that functions in this format.
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