More metagames

[Flowersteel]

Ive been playing the game for a bit, and it gets to a point where you break the system. Kinda expected that from any macroeconomic game - and I must say I enjoyed the ride. And there is replayability.
 
I havent yet seen the events, but Im guessing that would add a good layer to the gameplay. Still, if I can get any wishes in edgewise before you start new developments, Id love to see added some more metagames (but metagames, I mean gameplay within the actual game). Here are a few ideas:
 
Rooms:
Each brothel has 5 different room-types. The default room type is bare, and generates -30% income, and a few minusses on a few stats. Up to 20% of the girls in the brothel can share one room-type (chosen instead of very poor/adequate etc). Depending on what items you furnish the You can then furnish your brothel in different ways, each roomtype giving different bonusses to stats/money generated/health regained.
 
You could, ofc, give each girl her own room - but I could foresee that it would add a very lage complexity to the game that might slow it down a bit too much.
 
You could either make it so you could buy a room-type (nice accomodation/dojo/spa/hospital/summoning chamber etc), or you could buy room-fittings (omnious candles/pentagram/chains/incense) which each give specific benefits, and when you have 4 of a specific type, they will define the roomtype which gives an added benefit (like all benefits get +60% effectiveness).
 
Either way, adding rooms to the brothel would add another money-sink, and a way to go into even more micro management. You could set up a "craftsmens circle" where you could hire the craftsmen to buy the type of room you want - in the same mechanics as the store.
 
Council of Crossgate
If you ever played Master of Orion, you know what Im aiming at Basically, every 10 days or so, the player would be summoned to participate in the Council of Crossgate. When you are there, you are presented with a number of options (make alliances, declare feud, spy, appease, bribe etc) with the most important one being - Call for Election. If you call for election, and you control enough of Crossgate, and have enough personal prestige (being evil could be a negative factor etc), you could win and become the lord of Crossgate (e.g. ending the game). If you loose the election, you loose prestige, money, and your girls become unhappy.
 
Introduce alternative currency:
Gems that can only be acquired in a certain way (see below for examples), and used on special things (see below for examples). This will further increase the complexity of the game.
 
Slice the map in two (diagonally) and show a picture of the catacombs below Crossgate. Have a 7th brothel here, named the Undercroft, and a Shop (that only accepts gems). The undercroft is a special brothel in the sense that it can only take 1-2 girls for each brothel you have, and you cant expand it. In the undercroft you can do all the things you can do in a normal brothel, but you will only earn 1-3% income, and the damage and risk of taking damage is increased 100-200%. The income is generated in gems (expenses is still in gold).
 
Add a new series of work that can only be taken in the Undercroft, e.g. Gem Miner, Scavenger (look for a specific type of item, or item with certain bonusesses for x2 the price), Sexual Gladiator (a sex/fight staged combat like wrestling that uses all the girls stats).
 
Add "GemValue" to the price of equipment - if something has a gemvalue, it can only be bought from the Undercroft Shop.
 
Give the Gems a "Magical nature" so they can be sacrificed to "enchant" the girls, to give them new traits (e.g. you choose a trait, and there is a 90% chance you get it, a 30% chance you get another positive trait, and a 10% chance you also get a negative trait). If nothing else, this can be setup as consumable equipment in the Undercroft Shop (a potion for instance).
 
These are just a few of the ideas you could start with to increase the number of metagames in Whoremaster.
 
I can easily go into more detail, and also give you design documents on this stuff, if you would want it. Right now, its just to voice my oppinion. If I didnt say already, I love the game, and am very impressed by the effort input into it.
 
- Flowersteel

[DocClox]

Ive been playing the game for a bit, and it gets to a point where you break the system. Kinda expected that from any macroeconomic game - and I must say I enjoyed the ride. And there is replayability.

Yeah, I kow what you mean

Rooms:
Each brothel has 5 different room-types. The default room type is bare, and generates -30% income, and a few minusses on a few stats. Up to 20% of the girls in the brothel can share one room-type (chosen instead of very poor/adequate etc). Depending on what items you furnish the You can then furnish your brothel in different ways, each roomtype giving different bonusses to stats/money generated/health regained.

Something a lot like this is in the pipeline, if I ever get back to WM coding. Try shift+U on the main screen for a preview. Be warned however that although the screen lets you spend money, it doesn't do anything else.

Council of Crossgate
If you ever played Master of Orion, you know what Im aiming at Basically, every 10 days or so, the player would be summoned to participate in the Council of Crossgate. 

It's a good idea. I always wanted to expand the crossgate civil service, myself.

I can easily go into more detail, and also give you design documents on this stuff, if you would want it. Right now, its just to voice my oppinion. If I didnt say already, I love the game, and am very impressed by the effort input into it.

Nice ideas. The trouble is (and I truly hate to dampen so much enthusiasm) that we're pretty much on an indefinite feature freeze, at least once I clear my todo list.

Scripting is going to allow some expansion, of course, so there's possibilities for further evolution in the game. By and large though, the game is not going to get any new features.

[Orden]

You are right, too many features kills the game and we have to clear all thoses things that are not working yet.

I advocate also the need to make the characters deeper: less girls but all with good description and personal scripts. Theses small scripts can create little adventures by themselves.

[ShadowMage]

Council of Crossgate
If you ever played Master of Orion, you know what Im aiming at Basically, every 10 days or so, the player would be summoned to participate in the Council of Crossgate. When you are there, you are presented with a number of options (make alliances, declare feud, spy, appease, bribe etc) with the most important one being - Call for Election. If you call for election, and you control enough of Crossgate, and have enough personal prestige (being evil could be a negative factor etc), you could win and become the lord of Crossgate (e.g. ending the game). If you loose the election, you loose prestige, money, and your girls become unhappy.

It's a good idea. I always wanted to expand the crossgate civil service, myself.

Perhaps we might get to see something similar in CloneMaster DocClox? (As long as it fits into the story line of course)

[DocClox]

Perhaps we might get to see something similar in CloneMaster DocClox? (As long as it fits into the story line of course)

That's a good question.  As it stands, I think there's going to be a lot of extra-curricular activities that the player can get involved in, if desired. Most of them are part of the plot, though. I'll need to think about that a bit. Certainly it's something that I'd want, and this sort of thing is going to be a lot easier to mod into CM that WM.

Hmmm...

[Flowersteel]

Understandable that you are snowed under with the size of the project. Nice to see youve already been thinking of the roooms/layouts. I guess the Council of Crossgate can be implemented as a series of events, with a few simple new variables if need be.

If I can help with rules, statistical calculations of economic impact of variables or anything in that area, Id be happy to throw a few numbers around.

Incidentially Ive been trying to figure out what the vale of the gambling part of the game is. I realise that you can get extra customers whoring to gamers without using additional advertising, but apart from that, it seems a lot of hassle, for very little reward. If you explain the rules and the premises, maybe I can come up with a more playable set of scenarios for you ?

Also a feature that I would love to see, is a "manager" for the matron and the torturer. So you can decide when she takes girls off duty (and if theres girls she shouldnt take off duty), when they should send people to the dungeon etc. It would alleviate a lot of the micromanagement I do, and make for a more interesting game.

[DocClox]

It's just taken me longer than I expected to get back up to speed after hospital. Just as I was starting to feel up to the task, I started work again, which used up all available resources for a while. Fallout New Vegas didn't help either

Still, I'm not giving up just yet. I'm still picking away at Crossgate Gladiatrix League (got to find a snappier name than than) and Clonemaster is still very much on my mind.

I just need to take a run at getting these Lua events finished, really.  I've got some free time coming up shortly, so i might get it done before too much longer.

[edit]

In particular, I think I just cracked the problem stopping me getting a windows compile for Clonemaster. (OK, so it would be easier if I would just use studio rather than hacking around with mingw- but I won't have to fanny around with VC redistributables, so it's going to be worth it. Plus I hate Visual Studio)