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Failed eRep maths - vol 1: welcome new players, please empty your pocket

One of the biggest critism of v2 is how it forces players to buy gold to pay for the boosters. New players who just join the game is amongst the most vunlerable group of people under the current setting.

First, they dont really have too many revenue to earn that amount of gold in game, their starting wage is typically at the minium wage of 0.1JPY/hour, some company may offer a little more, but not by much. With this setting, can a new player survive v2 under the most basic set up, such as using no booster and living on Q1 food? They can invite their friends to the game, but who will do that if the game is unplayable? Now, let's see how the math stack up.

The math

First of all, we will start with the rule and assumption:
1. According to the wiki, each type of activity except spending time in the residental area will cost 1 wellness loss, so if the new citizen worked, trained, and went to the library on the same day, that will cost him 3 wellness loss given he is working in a Q1 company, he could lose more wellness if working at a higher Q company.
2. Each hour spend in working, training or the library will cost 1 happiness, while each hour spend in the residental district will immediately boost (1+ number of hours) amount of happiness.
3. The citizen will have no house and only use Q1 food.
4. The citizen will just try to maintain 90+ wellness, and 90+ happiness, it would be even more difficult to maintain 100+w and 100+h with diminished gain wellness and happiness.
5. 30 grain is required to create a Q1 food, which gives a maxium of 3 wellness a day, or 3 happiness a day.
6. The current price of grain is 0.05JPY, with a minimum possible price of 0.001.
7. Wellness and happiness recovery from food and houses is based on this formula: h_next_day = (1.5 - (h_end_turn/100)) * (food_mod + house_mod)
8. Wellness box is not an option here, as we assume the new player dont have too many gold to spend.

Based on the setting, we need to choose the customerisation of the Q1 food, to determine which setting will optimise the wellness gained from the it, the reason we choose to optimise the food first is because there are no other wellness booster available (wellness pack is not an option here).
Based on a 3 wellness/0 happiness foo😛 It will give 1.8 wellness boost at 90 wellness
Based on a 2 wellness/1 happiness foo😛 It will give 1.2 wellness boost at 90 wellness
Based on a 1 wellness/2 happiness foo😛 It will give 0.6 wellness boost at 90 wellness

So, it is pretty obvious that a 3 wellness/0 happiness food is the optimal Q1 food for new players to maintain wellness. It will allow them to carry out 3 activities in 2 days while still maintain a wellness at 90+ level. For example. they can choose work on the first day, and work and train on the second day.

Next, let's look at happiness, remember each hour the players spend on each activities other than leisure will consume 1 wellness, and spending time for leisure give you (1 happiness each hour) + 1.

Since, we are not using food as a happiness booster, nor we are spending any gold on happiness booster. The amount of time we spend should be at most 1 less the amount of time we spend on other activities. For instance, if we spend 10 hours on the other activities, then we should spend 9 hours for leisure.

But of course, that would waste a lot of hour if you don't spend the hours you have, but also because of a restriction that you cannot spend more than 12 hours on one activity. The optimal solution we found is:

Day 1: Work or Train or Library: 12 hours, leisure: 12 hours (give +1 happiness)
Day 2: Work or Train or Library: 13 hours, leisure: 11 hours (lose 1 happiness)
Day 3: Work or Train or Library: 12 hours, leisure: 12 hours (give +1 happiness)
Day 4: Work or Train or Library: 13 hours, leisure: 11 hours (lose 1 happiness)
and so on....

That way, this new player can maximum the time spend on the activity, maintain both wellness and happiness at 90+.

This is all good, isn't it? A very restrictive strat, but at least it is viable, except it is not.

Recalling that 30 grain is required to create a Q1 food, with the current grain price of grain is 0.05JPY, that is 1.5JPY just for the material cost of a Q1 food, let alone the wage, as we recalled, this new players gets about 1.2JPY per day for working for maximum of 12 hours. Of course, they can still live on the food in those companies who have large stockpile of food from v1. But in a long term, this would not be viable in a long term, those food would be gone, then what do they live on? If new player can not play the game without spending gold on happiness booster, what chance are they going to hang around and continue?

Conclusion

There are a number of things that could be done on the players side and the admin side, for example, the players could create more grain companies to push down price, but it is to be seen how profitable they are operating at a lower price, and if we have enough skilled workers to do that at the wage level offered in such scenario. Ultimately, if the game is broken, there isn't anything they can do.

On the admin side, they could reduce the amount of grain required to produce food, because the game is really broken and the number clearly doesn't add up, one thing for sure, if you want people to use those boosters, please make the game interesting to those who aren't or can't afford to use the booster options. At the moment, the game is unplayable if they are not using them and try to do the very basic of maintaining wellness and happiness, and that is quiet unacceptable.