The Associate Handbook

Everything else in this handbook is detail on top of one repeating cycle.

Each branch — Hometown, and eventually up to seven more cities — runs its own Client Board, its own staff, and up to three contracts at once. Cash and Research Points are shared across the whole firm; reputation is shared per practice area (Tech, Management, Strategy) rather than per branch. Two things move a contract forward: consultants you've assigned to it (automatic, continuous) and clicking the card yourself (a manual burst on top). Later systems — research, star hires, automation — change how much of the loop you have to run by hand, but they never remove the loop itself.

Three resources, three different rhythms.

Cash is the firm's operating account — hiring, research, marketing, city unlocks, and star hires all draw from the same global pool. It's the only resource that can be strictly infinite in supply and strictly finite in your possession at any given moment; salaries drain it continuously, so it's entirely possible to run a branch cash-negative if you over-hire relative to what's assigned to paying work.

Reputation is tracked separately for each of the three practice areas, 0–100 on the displayed scale (internally it can bank up to 600 in reserve). Rep is what a contract checks before it'll even appear on your board or let you accept it — see §8 for the gates and the slow decay that keeps a completely idle practice from just coasting.

Research Points are the only resource with no per-practice split — one global pool spent in the tree at §9. You earn 3 RP per point of contract difficulty on completion (a difficulty-3 contract pays 9 RP regardless of outcome quality), plus whatever passive RP/sec your R&D Lab upgrades, R&D star hires, or city bonuses add.

Where contracts come from, and what a difficulty rating actually promises.

Every branch has its own board of 3–6 open contracts (more slots come from research), generated from that city's client mix and refreshed on a timer. A contract carries a practice area, one or more tags (Cloud, M&A, Cybersecurity…), a payout range, a work requirement, a real-time deadline once accepted, a minimum rep to accept, and a difficulty rating — bands 1–5 below, and potentially higher once a practice is well-staffed (next section).

Once accepted, a contract has two independent ways to gain work toward its requirement: every consultant you've assigned to it contributes their work rate continuously, and every click on the card adds a burst of clickPower on top (base 1, raised by upgrades and research). Repeated clicks on the same contract also build Momentum, a short-lived buff covered in §7. A branch can run up to 3 contracts concurrently — you start at 1, and research plus the Open Plan Office upgrade raise the cap, but 3 is a hard ceiling no matter how many bonus sources you stack. Miss the deadline and the contract auto-resolves as Botched, the worst outcome — see §4.

Past band 5 — the everyday ceiling climbs with you

The five-band table above is a fixed set of rows, but the ceiling on ordinary board content isn't. Once a practice's reputation clears 90 (band 5's own gate), the biggest contract that practice's board can generate stops being permanently capped at band 5 and instead tracks that branch's own current effective tier for the practice — the same whole-roster staff-quality number Flagship difficulty uses below. A thin roster still tops out at band 5 exactly as before; a well-staffed one keeps generating bigger, better-paying contracts as it grows, so a mature firm's throughput doesn't permanently outrun what the board has to offer.

Bands past 5 extrapolate the table's own band-5 row the same way a Flagship band does (below): roughly ×1.7 on work and payout, +90s on the deadline, per band past 5. Referral and Golden Ticket events (§12) roll against this same ceiling too, not a separate one.

Flagship Engagements — an extra roll on top

Reputation itself keeps banking in an internal reserve up to 600 even though the header bar displays a 0–100 scale (§2). Once a practice fills that entire reserve, every branch running that practice starts occasionally rolling a Flagship Engagement instead of an ordinary contract — a distinct badge, no star rating, and a difficulty that tracks the branch's own current effective tier rather than a fixed number.

That's what makes it endless rather than a sixth band: as staff experience, Founder Level, and Managing Partner headcount keep climbing, the target climbs with them. It's an occasional extra roll (a 12% chance per board slot, once unlocked), layered on top of the normal board rather than replacing it — the regular book of business keeps arriving exactly as before.

Finishing a contract is only half the question — how well you staffed it decides the rest.

At completion, the game compares your effective tier against the contract's difficulty. Effective tier is not just "what staff did I assign" — it's a sum of up to four separate things, each rewarding a different kind of investment:

• Weighted staff average — each assigned consultant contributes their tier value (Junior 1, Consultant 2, Senior 3, Partner 4, Managing Partner 5) plus their experience bonus (§6) and any quality-boosting perks, averaged across everyone assigned. Nobody assigned at all falls back to a baseline of 1 — enough to clear a difficulty-1 contract solo, which is exactly how the tutorial project stays completable before you've hired anyone.
• Team-size bonus — 0.3 × ln(headcount). A second or third same-tier hire on one contract used to be invisible to quality (only the mix of tiers moved the average); this rewards raw headcount too, with real diminishing returns. A solo hire gets zero bonus.
• Founder level bonus — 0.05 × your Founder Level, uncapped, and it applies to every contract firm-wide regardless of staffing. See §7.
• Momentum bonus — up to +0.25 at 5 stacks, specific to whichever contract you're actively clicking. See §7.

The result is compared against difficulty on a simple ladder:

Two consequences worth internalizing: understaffing a hard contract doesn't just slow it down, it actively costs you rep on delivery. And a missed deadline is scored as an automatic Botch regardless of how well-staffed the contract was — there's no partial credit for a contract that was going well but ran out the clock.

Four tiers, hired per branch and per practice, each a different bet on cost vs. output.

Hire cost scales ×1.15 per unit you already own of that tier in that branch — Cookie Clicker–style, so the 10th Junior costs noticeably more than the 1st. Salary is deducted every second for every unit you own, assigned or not — which is why net income can and does go negative if you hire ahead of what you can actually put to work.

Staff not currently assigned to a contract aren't dead weight: idle headcount earns retainer income at 10% of that unit's work rate as $/sec, scaled by the same work-rate upgrades and research that boost active output. An idle Junior nets a small positive $/s doing nothing; the point is that "I have nowhere to put this hire right now" is never actively punishing.

Managing Partner doesn't just cost more — it's gated behind a capstone. The hire row stays hidden until you own the Executive Search research node ($300,000 RP, chained after both Star Network nodes) and New York, both required before the tier appears anywhere. Past that gate it hires and scales exactly like the other four: same ×1.15 cost curve, same idle retainer.

A third progression axis, alongside hiring and research: staying deployed.

Every (branch, practice, tier) bucket — "Hometown's Tech Seniors," for instance — has its own experience level, 0 through 10. It rises only while at least one unit of that bucket is actively assigned to an in-progress contract; idle headcount and manual clicks don't feed it. Each level adds +5% work rate and +0.1 effective-tier value to that bucket, so a well-seasoned Junior crew gradually starts performing — and scoring — like a fresher, more expensive tier without ever changing what they're called on the roster.

This is deliberately separate from Founder Level (§7): staff XP is bounded (level 10 is the ceiling) and specific to one bucket in one branch, while Founder Level is global, uncapped, and yours alone.

You're consultant #1 at your own firm — not hireable, not assignable, and the one progression track with no ceiling.

The founder does two distinct jobs, and it's worth keeping them separate in your head — one is throughput, the other is quality (and, past a point, payout too).

Founder Level exists specifically because staff alone eventually hits a ceiling: even a maxed-out Partner (level-10 XP, plus the best quality perk available) tops out around effective tier 5.75 — short of what the hardest, difficulty-4/5 contracts need for their best outcomes. Founder Level is the "difficult to achieve way of exceeding Partner" — a slow, click-driven track that stacks on top of everything else rather than replacing it, closing that gap for staffed and unstaffed branches alike, and, past Legendary, paying for itself in cash on top.

What rep unlocks, and what happens if you let a practice go quiet.

Reputation gates four things: which difficulty contracts can even appear/be accepted on a board, which star hires become available, which cities you can unlock, and — via research — whether Management and Strategy exist as practices at all (Operations Practice needs Tech rep ≥ 40; Strategy Practice needs Management rep ≥ 40 and a second city).

If a practice goes 20 minutes with no contract completed anywhere in it — Botched completions count, since they still mean the practice was being worked — its rep starts decaying toward a floor of 25, losing 0.25 rep/minute until it settles there. It never decays below the floor, and a practice that's actually being worked (including by an automated background branch) resets this timer on every single completion, so decay in practice only bites a practice with genuinely no activity anywhere in the firm.

One global RP pool, four families of nodes.

Automation is the one group worth calling out specifically: owning both nodes is what makes a branch keep working while you're not looking at it — see §11 for exactly what that does and doesn't cover.

Service offerings aren't quite finite, either. Once a practice's full tag chain is bought out in order — Tech's Cloud → DevOps → Cybersecurity → Data → AI/ML, or the equivalent Management/Strategy chain — a final node called Thought Leadership appears and never leaves the tree. Unlike everything else here, it's repeatable: each purchase permanently adds +0.5% payout in that one practice, at a cost that rises 1.6× every time you buy it. It's where RP goes once the rest of this roughly 25-node tree has nowhere left to send it.

Twelve named specialists, each a single always-on perk.

Unlike the generic tiers, a star hire is a one-time hire cost plus an ongoing (high) salary for one fixed effect — no leveling, no experience curve. Each is globally unique: hiring Priya Raman into Austin means she isn't available to any other branch until you let her go. Unlock conditions are spread across all three gates the game uses elsewhere — a rep threshold, owning a specific city, or owning a specific research node — and the base cap is 1 star hire per branch, raised by Berlin's city bonus and two Capacity research nodes.

A Release button on a hired star hire's card lets a branch let them go for free at any time — but releasing starts a 6-hour real-time cooldown before that hire can be recruited anywhere again, so it's a real branch-composition decision, not a per-board-refresh reshuffle.

Eight cities, one shared bank account, and one important asterisk on "self-sufficient."

Cash, RP, and reputation are shared firm-wide; everything else — staff, contracts, upgrades, the board — belongs to one specific branch. Each city has its own unlock cost, rep requirement, client mix (which practices/tags it tends to roll), and a standing modifier:

What "automated" actually means

Owning both Account Managers and Resource Planner (§9) doesn't just speed up whichever branch is on screen — it lets every other unlocked branch keep ticking while you're looking elsewhere: salaries, retainer, R&D, staff work, and contract completions all continue for a background branch, silently (no toasts, no popups) but fully recorded in its history. The branch you're currently viewing always ticks live regardless of automation, exactly as if the background systems didn't exist.

Two toggle buttons above the current branch's board — Auto-Accept and Auto-Assign, one appearing per node once you own it — let you switch either behavior off for that one branch without losing the research. Useful for a branch you want to hand-staff yourself (a Flagship in progress, say) while the rest of the firm keeps running on autopilot.

Random events are the one system that stays deliberately current-branch-only — a city you're not looking at never rolls a Scandal or a Golden Ticket behind your back.

A global, per-practice spend slider with one diminishing-returns curve, spent three ways.

Raise a practice's $/sec spend (global, not per-branch — it reaches whichever branch is currently active) and that strength number feeds three effects at once: a faster board-refresh interval, a rep/sec trickle, and — past a strength threshold — a better chance the board favors bigger clients. A separate one-shot purchase, the PR Campaign, is repeatable but scales in cost 1.6× per purchase (steeper than hiring's 1.15×) so it can't become a pure cash-to-rep converter — each buy grants a flat rep bump roughly equal to one Exceptional outcome.

A roll every 90–180 seconds, on the branch you're currently viewing.

Fifteen events, three shapes: buffs/debuffs apply instantly for a fixed duration (Recession's payout hit, Tech Boom's payout bonus, Burnout's work-rate hit); instants fire once and resolve immediately (Referral and the rare Golden Ticket both drop a guaranteed strong contract onto the board; Windfall pays out flat cash); and choice events pause on a real decision — Scandal asks whether to fire a staff member or cover it up at a rep cost, Poaching Attempt asks whether to match a star hire's doubled salary offer or let them go. No event is allowed to take cash below zero or remove your last consultant in a practice.

What happens between sessions.

The game autosaves every 15 seconds and on close. On reload, it simulates whatever time passed — capped at 8 hours — for the branch you were last viewing: retainer income, staff-driven contract progress (completed contracts during that gap always score a flat Adequate, no deadline penalty for time you weren't there to manage), salaries, and R&D RP. A contract that didn't finish during the gap gets its deadline pushed forward by the same span, rather than being penalized for a clock it had no way to beat. A "While You Were Away" summary reports the gains; saves also export/import as a portable base64 string.