Potion tycoon
This is a first look in early access at Potion Tycoon. It’s a little buggy at times, and can freeze occasionally, (especially on the marsh setting, I find), but it’s more than stable enough to play. Plus it autosaves regularly, so you never loose much if it happens.
It does takes a bit of getting used to and it’s surprisingly detailed, convoluted even, and you can bankrupt easily if you are not careful. Still, it’s interesting once you learn the rules and you get creative.
As a basic background, you start with 2,200 credit (barely enough) to built your store, research lab, staff room, and underground production areas. From there, you basically wing it!
Set up herb gardens, prepare production, prepare display cases for stock, hire staff and wait for the money to roll in. Well, trickle. Before long you get into VIP orders, marketing, and the odd moster incursion.
They are 8 herbs and 8 mushrooms to acquire seeds for. The alchemy involved mixes a primary component (beast, bone, cat, and soul) with a secondary (earth, fire, air (aether) and water) to create one of 16 available potions.
Each herb or potion has 4 attributes, the others relating to taste, purity (or impurity) as a stimulent, and toxicity.
From here it’s a balancing act between what’s available, what’s best, what competitors are offering and what VIPs ask for. For instance, toxin (or antidote) can be good for one potion, but bad for another. Taste can be sweet or foul and if the VIP wants foul medicine, that’s what they want!
From here they are sorted into fields – sorcery, health, and provisions.
Top tips:
If you can’t afford it – even at the start – don’t buy it. Wait until you have enough funds to comfortably buy items and only buy the bare minimum.
Do not buy herbs or artefacts! Wait for them to be rewards from VIPs.
Research early!
Do not upgrade staff until you need to. Upgrading staff too early will probably bankrupt you!
So, using the example of a veteran alchemist to research new products, don’t upgrade to veteran when this research is unlocked – wait until you have 100+ points to spent.
Anything that can make production easier – like water tanks – is a good investment.
Focus on one discipline for the first 50+ days. So, perhaps provisions, for example.
It’s not a race, around day 100+ you can probably add more workers, more machines, another floor for sorcery, later do the same again for health.
As long as your money is going up month by month, you are winning :)
Later, when you have lots of cash built up, double up on machines and heavily used ingedients to keep the shelves full.
Don’t go overboard on premium products, have a mix of cheap (fast and easy to produce) potions alongside the premium ones. And experiment with bottling and pricing. For instance, soda bottles are half the cost of clay one, but look better and add more value.
Sometimes monsters and undead will turn up and harass your customers. You can use up a potion or two from your stock to dispell them!
Keep your workers happy!
Below is a brief look at the first ten minutes of play in Potion Tycoon, setting up a running emporium – without getting into debt!
As the game progresses, as long as you keep an eye on costs, more and more options open up, as seen below.
More spellcasting…
If you like the sound of this you might also like Spellcaster University
