[Update] Beta 9: Friendship, romance, and blackmail


Features

Reworked relationship system

Previously, there was just one "relationship" meter that governed your relationship with each idol. This has been split into three separate stats: "friendship," "influence," and "romance." Each starts at level 0, and can level up to level 5, or down to level -5.

Friendship is a measure of how much an idol generally likes you, similar to how the old relationship stat worked. Romance is a measure of romantic interest, and determines how willing an idol is to date or enter a relationship with you; it's affected by actions like flirting.

Influence

It's nice to be both liked and respected, but the two don't always go hand in hand. Influence is a separate meter which measures how indebted an idol feels to you: generally speaking, you gain influence with idols by doing favors for them, and you lose influence by asking idols to do favors for you. Similarly, uncovering compromising information about idols (and agreeing to keep it secret) will cause you to gain influence over them, but if they learn compromising information about you, it may cause you to lose influence over them.

If your influence level with an idol is positive, it means that you have influence over her; a negative value indicates that she has influence over you (and you probably owe her a favor if you want to get things back to normal).  If an idol has influence over you, she cannot be fired!

The following events affect influence:

  • You will lose influence with an idol if she becomes injured
  • Fulfilling an idol's wish will cause you to gain influence with her
  • You gain a small amount of influence with any "pushed" idols each month

Your choices in certain substories and random events can also gain or lose influence (depending on the story or event) and affect other relationship stats.

Spending influence on favors

One of the benefits of gaining influence with an idol is the opportunity to spend that influence to ask her for favors. All of the following requests can be made of an idol if you have enough influence over her:

  • Forced breakup: You can tell an idol to dump her current boyfriend or girlfriend. The amount of influence required depends on several factors: if she's unhappy in her current relationship, she may be more willing to break up than if she likes her current partner. Additionally, if you have a "no restrictions" dating policy, it'll be harder to force an idol to break up. However, if you have a group policy which forbids dating, you can take this action without spending any influence.
  • Stop bullying: If you know that an idol is bullying another member of the group, you can use influence to force her to stop. If an idol is being bullied by a clique, telling the clique leader to stop the bullying will cause most of the other clique members to stop bullying as well (but you might still have a hanger-on who has to be persuaded separately from the clique leader).  If you don't have enough influence with the clique leader to tell her to stop the bullying, you can tell the clique members individually to stop bullying: if you can separately influence half the group to stop bullying, the rest of the group will fall into line and stop bullying as well (regardless of how the clique leader feels).
  • Spying and blackmail: You can tell an idol to try to dig up dirt on another idol by rooting through her belongings or casually stalking her. If the spy is successful (random chance), you may gain influence over the idol she was spying on by uncovering evidence of misconduct, depending on how severe and potentially scandalous her misconduct is. An idol's willingness to spy for you is based on certain factors, such as her relationship with the target: idols will be less willing to spy on friends, and more willing to spy on their enemies. Idols who like you (either as a friend or as a romantic partner) will also be more willing to spy for you.

Improvements

New hairstyles and accessories

Three new accessories and 19 new hairstyles have been added. (More hairstyles will be added in future updates.) For the next update, we're planning on adding an option to change hairstyles and accessories. 

Reworked salary system

The game now tracks how much money each idol earns for you. You can check this number in their profile or in the salaries popup. The bottom-right corner of the default view now also has a button to bring up the salaries popup.

An idol's desired salary is based on their current fame level, how much money they're currently earning for you, and how much you're paying other idols. (If an idol sees that her peers have high salaries, she may start to feel underpaid.)

Under the old system, idols with 9 or 10 fame would sometimes demand absurdly high salaries. The new system (which factors in how much money she's actually making for the company) should help to alleviate this problem.

Changes to single creation

Selecting a marketing strategy for your single is now optional. Choosing to produce a single with no marketing strategy removes the need to have a business manager work on the project before it can be released.

Marketing strategies that are tied to a ticket or other physical item bundled with the CD (e.g. handshake events) have a scaling cost that is based on the number of CDs being produced, while marketing strategies that aren't tied to the physical product (e.g. fake scandal) have a fixed cost. (This was always the intended behavior, but small changes have been made to make this more consistent.)

Miscellaneous

  • You can now drag and drop tasks into an office when the staffer is working on a business proposal. The staffer will resume working on it after completing the task.
  • Checkbox buttons in context menus are now green when selected
  • Separate checkboxes for auto physical and mental stamina recovery
  • Separate checkboxes for auto injury and depression treatment 
  • Added "Info" button with a tooltip that shows related active tasks when creating a new single, show, or special event, and during elections
  • "Details" widget now also shows how many special events are waiting for your action
  • You can now sort idols in the "Formation" popup
  • You can now change the cast, host and title of a running show
  • You can now reorder songs in the New Concert popup
  • You can now edit the set list of a concert in production
  • Added a warning icon with a tooltip on singles, shows and concerts in production where a participating idol was automatically removed or replaced due to injury or graduation
  • Updated Unity to the latest version, which should improve performance for some players

Bug fixes

  • Fixed: Idols on hiatus were still getting into conflicts
  • Fixed: Pressing 1, 2 or 3 in the New Concert popup unpaused the game
  • Fixed: Wrong position of one of the portraits in the birthday event
  • Fixed: Wrong word order in dialogue for Single wishes
  • Fixed: Graduation could cause a time freeze
  • Fixed: Tasks widget showed tasks of graduated idols
  • Fixed: Settings popup only worked in the main menu
  • Fixed: No more 9,999/10,000 sales
  • Fixed: Issues with mentorship dialogue
  • Localization: Auto resized text in a few places where overflowing was an issue
  • Localization: Fixed text that was untranslatable (some buttons, tooltips, context menus, etc)

As always, we look forward to seeing your feedback on the latest update in the beta community forum. If you have a feature request, or find a bug, be sure to drop by and let us know about it.

Files

Idol Manager 1.0.6 - Windows 64 bit 2 GB
Version 21 Aug 17, 2019
Idol Manager 1.0.6 - Windows 32 bit 2 GB
Version 4 Aug 17, 2019
Idol Manager 1.0.6 - Mac 2 GB
Version 21 Aug 17, 2019
Idol Manager 1.0.6 - Linux 2 GB
Version 16 Aug 17, 2019

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Comments

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I feel silly, but since I just got the game at beta 8.1 about a week ago, I cannot figure out how to update it to 9. I do not see a link or something similar within the list of files/attachments, so I am at a loss. Forgive me for the ignorance. 

You can download the app that can update the game automatically: https://itch.io/app

Or you can just delete the game folder and download the new version, there should be a "Download" button at the top of this page https://sadambober.itch.io/idol-manager

Your save files are in a different folder, so you should be safe