Sunday, August 15th, 2010
Issue: 41   Editor: HowlingMadMika


Re-doing Bootlegger; Establishments GeePeeNRG
Establishments, in my eyes the most underappreciated part of the game, so much potential and nothing is done with it. In this article I’ll cover some basic structures that could be added to the establishments. In next week’s article a few more structures will be mentioned that will go with next week’s subject, risk.

When establishments re-appeared on the game last round the main reason to have them was because they gave 3% increase of value without the need for a manual action and they didn’t show as wealth. But with the removal of the 3% increase to a sliding scale (1% increase on any normal day if I’m right) they became quite useless as the buildings are hardly worth having thus making the establishments a dead feature of BL.

Before starting out with the new structures, first a change in the establishment page itself, now it show who owns what piece of land and what kind of structure is on there, if any. For my suggestions it should only show who owns what piece of land, not the structure that’s on it. This also means that access to the different buildings has to be changed, garages for example could be accessed by the Auto Burglary page, safe houses via the kill page and things like that. Also the rule that you can hold only 1 establishment needs to return.

So now the new structures:
Booze Distillery
The booze distillery structure is available for any rank and will cost $250,000 to construct with a 1 day building time. After it’s done you have a small distillery, which you can upgrade for another $1,000,000 and another 1 day construction to a large distillery.
In the small distillery you can make up to 30 crates of moonshine, beer, gin, whiskey or rum per day. The large distillery can produce any type of booze and can create 45 crates per day.
Production costs will be $10 per crate of moonshine and then go up with $10 for every other booze on the small distillery, so rum will cost $50 per crate to produce. On the large distillery the production costs for moonshine to rum will be the same as on the small distillery, vodka will cost $75 per crate, going up $25 for the more expensive booze types so cognac will cost $150 per crate.

The booze distillery won’t produce automatically, you need to start production manually at your distillery, after 24 hours it will have your supply of crates ready. On the booze page of the state where you have your distillery you will have a management screen to order booze and it will also show the booze in your inventory, you can transfer it from inventory to ‘on hand’ so you can travel with it or simply sell it.

With the current booze prices you can make back the investment of a large distillery in about 2 weeks, after that its pure profit, nice as an extra source of income for the new player.

Private Bullet Factory
The private bullet factory will work similar as the private BF of a state don but will produce far less bullets, instead of the 28,800 bullets a state don can produce per day, the private BF establishment building won’t produce more than 1,500 a day. Bullets will cost the same as you would buy them at the Louisiana bullet factory, thus the same price as the Elite Guard charges. Unlike the private BF’s of state dons you can’t just order 300,000 bullets and sit back for them to complete, you have to order your bullets manually every day.

This building would cost say $3,000,000 to construct with 5 days construction time and will only be available once you reach boss. With a establishment structure like this every player has a chance to get some cheap bullets every day, making killing more accessible for the less wealthy players.

Crew establishments
Another idea is that if the owner of an establishment is in a crew he or she has the option to make certain establishment structures a crew structures instead of a private structures.
  • Garage structure (limit to 1 per state):
    would mean that crewmembers can enter a car in it and that anyone in the crew can take it out for a kill or a OC or whatever. The establishment owner can of course see who enters what cars and who takes cars out of the garage.
  • Safe house structure (limit to 1 per state):
    would make it possible for crew members to hide in safe houses at reduced prices and without the need to be invited, they can check themselves in.
  • Private bullet factory (limit to 1):
    Would mean that the factory will produce 2,500 bullets instead of 1500, however, they will be given to the crew, not the player


As always, comments are welcome and as stated before, next week I’ll introducing features that would bring back some risk in to the game.