Whore Master Patch

[Number76]

Thanks. 

I'll probably have more to say about balancing the game, the girls and changes in general once I've completed my review of the game mechanics and have a useful grasp on how they work. It's a slow process, so I doubt I'll be done anytime soon, but I'll share my documentation with anyone who's interested once I've finished.

That said, I wasn't actually testing WM when I found these issues. I was trying to understand why I couldn't get any customers past the bar stage. Unlocking the more...interesting...jobs is an important part of WM, so I think both of these issues are pretty severe, but that's just my opinion.

[Xela]

Thanks. 

I'll probably have more to say about balancing the game, the girls and changes in general once I've completed my review of the game mechanics and have a useful grasp on how they work. It's a slow process, so I doubt I'll be done anytime soon, but I'll share my documentation with anyone who's interested once I've finished.

That said, I wasn't actually testing WM when I found these issues. I was trying to understand why I couldn't get any customers past the bar stage. Unlocking the more...interesting...jobs is an important part of WM, so I think both of these issues are pretty severe, but that's just my opinion.

I though that was WM:EX issue? I haven't tried Aika's patch yet... do you have to send girls to work in bar before unlocking other jobs? I played one of the earlier Aika's versions, that was not the case.

[Number76]

I though that was WM:EX issue? I haven't tried Aika's patch yet... do you have to send girls to work in bar before unlocking other jobs? I played one of the earlier Aika's versions, that was not the case.

Yes that is correct. I'm playing with 2.10 of akia's mod, not WM EX. The way unlocking jobs works as I understand it is as follows:

1. You must increase your brothel happiness by serving most of the customers you attract. You can get a poor view of this stat by watching your brothel reputation. Low means last turns happiness was less than 25, Medium means happiness was 26 - 74, and High means it was 75 - 100. This variable resists change somewhat, so it shouldn't fluctuate wildly from turn to turn. Customer service should reduce the penalty for unserviced customers, but I don't think it is doing that correctly.

2. After brothel happiness is >75, brothel fame will begin to increase. If I understand these mechanics correctly, then fame will increase by 1 per turn, unless brothel happiness is 100, which will get you 2 per turn.

3. You must then maintain brothel happiness until you reach the landmark fame values. Which are 20 (gambling hall available), 60 (sleazy bar available) and 90 (brothel available). You can get a poor view of how much fame your brothel has by watching the number of additional customers it attracts, which increases by 1 for every 4 fame.

The general rule of thumb is that if brothel reputation is high, you are gaining fame. So by keeping reputation high for long enough, and you can go from Barmaster to Whoremaster.

[b00marrows]

do you have to send girls to work in bar before unlocking other jobs? I played one of the earlier Aika's versions, that was not the case.

yes, what you have to do is increase the reputation of your "brothel" by having the bar used. tham add more girls for the new "attractions" that your customers demand. when you do well in the bar you "unlock the sleezy bar BUT its not an upgrade! you still need to keep the bar going to continue. after that you unlock the brothel, i have NEVER managed to do this i end up fucking up somewhere and everything falling into itself because my "reputation" SUDDENLY drops to 0.

i look at it like pyramid, brothel at the top, sleezy in the middle and bar at the bottom. when 1 thing goes wrong below everything above suffers.

hah! i completly forgot about the casino!

aikas reason for this is

You're not publically running a brothel. You don't want the authorities to really know what you're doing in the back rooms. When the authorities get suspicious that something shady is going on in that bar of yours, they raid the place. So you want to keep the place as low-key as possible. The bar acts as a front, and as a screen. The Average Joes that come in to get drunk never know there's more than a bar, that there's a casino, sleazy bar, and brothel in the back, but those people that know to ask the right kind of questions will start to figure it out, and as your reputation increases you'll start to attract those kind of people. Advertising isn't so much telling everyone that you have a brothel, but rather greasing the right palms to get the word around to the right people.

[Xela]

Well, it's a matter of choice...

I reject all games made in that manner but noone can make a game everyone will like so it's a good thing that there are other options out there.

[Number76]

After careful playing I've confirmed that it is possible to get past the bar stage in v2.10. To do this you need to play without loading (saving is okay, if you want to open the save file and check the brothel stats) and never use the customer service job. Then it's simply a matter of assigning your girls in a way that guarantees that most of your customers will get what they came for. Without the customer service job, keeping your girls properly staffed in the right job on the right shifts requires that you play close attention to the end of turn reports.

As a side note, with things the way they are, the advertising job is actually actively bad for you. Unless I've misunderstood the math, perfectly serving 10 customers will update your brothel happiness/fame by the same amount as perfectly serving 100 customers. Furthermore, advertising attracts more customers without increasing your numbers of girls, which in turn increases the average number of customers that each girl must serve in order to maintain high brothel happiness.

I do admit that more customers means more income, so advertising isn't all bad. But selling off excess items/monster girls from the catacombs makes such a huge amount of gold that any other income is irrelevant.

Fortunately brothel fame isn't normalized when loading a game. So, depending upon how strict you are about cheating, you can edit the brothel fame in the save file to 100, which will unlock all jobs. I haven't tested if brothel fame will decrease if you do an abysmal job at meeting your customers demands, so you may need to make sure your brothel doesn't faceplant to keep your new found fame...

[b00marrows]

well its been a whole month since the last update...

nice testing number76, i always thought it was my failure at managing 50+ girls that fucked up my plays. but now i know its saving and loading that dose it, i now have a fully working brothel withe over 50 working girls day and night (over 100 girls now...the management has gotten out of hand there is no way to handle the equipment of all these girls)

i have recently been playing around with the "house" slider and relying on girls to buy there own equipment. so far i noticed girls like to sell equipment they dont use(i dont know if they sell or if they just vanish) BUT i dont know how to check if they are getting anything for them without opening the save file... my next issue is limited sock in the shops.

if there is one thing broken about this game it is the items, there are waaaayyyy too many items that are pointless, i went through and deleted over 30 items due to me thinking they are pointless. i have recently gone through again and removed over 15 more because i think they are useless. the main reason for this is because most items are "balanced" by only giving low stats, but than there's items that are just STUPIDLY BROKEN, like the one that makes all sex stats max, and the one that breaks will instantly and is in the shop almost every week.

i am going to go more "indepth" by forcing girls to buy there own items by giving them more gold too see what happens..

[Aika]

I guess it's time to give an update on what happened to me and where I've been.

As some of you may know, I'm a college student. This summer, I was taking summer classes and working to make ends meet. This did not leave me any time to work on any of my projects, this being one of them.

Once I started to come back to this project and work on it again, my main computer, which I had tens of hours of work on that I hadn't uploaded to my svn yet, had a hard drive failure, and all that work is unrecoverable. My backup computer was only updated to my svn's version, which hadn't been updated. So I set this on the back burner for a while even after summer classes ended and I was able to scale back my job from full time to part time when fall classes started.

So right now I'm looking through threads, reading about the bugs in my version, and trying to set up my main computer's programming environments again after replacing the hard drive.

Crazy, if you're still working on the combined mod, I apologize for disappearing. I just suddenly didn't have any time. :/

[Aika]

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but as I've been trying to get a better understanding of the game I came across the following code in WorkBarSinger.cpp:

Code: [Select]

int customers = 0;
    if (g_Girls.GetStat(girl, STAT_CONFIDENCE) > 0)
        customers += (g_Girls.GetStat(girl, STAT_CONFIDENCE)/25);
    if (g_Girls.GetStat(girl, STAT_INTELLIGENCE) > 0)
        customers += (g_Girls.GetStat(girl, STAT_SPIRIT)/25);
    customers++;

Shouldn't the fifth line read "customers += (g_Girls.GetStat(girl, STAT_INTELLIGENCE)/25);" instead?

It looks to me like the second if statement will check if a girl's intelligence greater than 0, and then measure how many customers she can handle based off her spirit. Is this correct, or am I not understanding something about how this should work?

I think I fixed that disparity, you're looking at outdated source.

[Aika]

@xela

I agree that it's not a game breaking issue. Also spirit makes sense as a leading stat for singers.


That aside I've noticed a few other things:

Loading a game sets the brothel happiness value to about 50. An easy way to test this is to create a new game (brothel happiness =0) and then save and load. The brothel reputation will update to medium, and if you open the save file and look at the brothel happiness stat it will be 48.

This means that to make any progress on increasing brothel fame (increasing brothel fame requires brothel happiness to be > 75) you must do so by playing without loading. A good way to discourage save scamming I suppose.


Another issue is that having a girl work the customer service job appears to prevent brothel happiness from increasing, or allow only very small changes. To test this I created a brothel with 11 (edited to be very overpowered) girls, and set the following for both shifts:

3 barmaids
2 singers
2 waitresses
1 matron
1 security
1 cleaning

The starting brothel happiness was 53, and it was virtually guaranteed that all customers on both shifts would be served. If the 11th girl had free time for both shifts, then after about 11 turns brothel happiness would be >75 (reputation = high). If the 11th girl was assigned to customer service, then the brothel happiness would still be 53 after 11 turns.

I didn't do exhaustive testing of this. So I don't know if this has to do with a customer service girl getting no unhappy customers, or if this will also prevent brothel happiness from decreasing.

Both of these tests were performed in v2.10 of Akia's mod.

Has anyone else seen either of these issues?

I can't figure out what's going wrong here. The customer service job doesn't do /anything/ to the brothel happiness stats if it doesn't handle any customers. Customers that aren't handled by anyone count as a 0 when the brothel's average happiness is calculated, customer service takes those customers that would have been a 0 and applies a bonus based on the girl's skills, and right now is bugged so that it's possible to get the average well over 100.

[b00marrows]

glad to see you back aika. i kinda stopped playing as soon as you stopped updating. im ready to start "testing" when you are 

[genemaxwell4]

Is there still a chance for this to continue?

[raven1989]

A quick question. Were the game and patch files on Mediafire taken down by the creator or the domain moderators?