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Author Topic: General Balancing / Mods  (Read 18916 times)

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Offline sgb

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #15 on: January 06, 2011, 10:07:30 PM »
I don't really see how you could discourage the player from spamming End Turn, and never expanding further once they're comfortably in the black though.  There's literally no reason to have more money once you have a few 100 fame whores, and the gang situation is under control.
Uber items?  Whores will hit maxiumum gold per customer without item assistance.  There's no reason to further improve their stats once they hit that threshold.
More brothels?  Just leads to more money, which you already don't need.
More slaves?  See above.  You can also just wait on the weekly walks to get them for free, or take them off deadbeat customers/businesses.

This problem is more related to the gang issue.  Since there is no threat of losing after your gangs get high enough stats, the player never has to worry about unexpected losses.  If you never lose money to raids and never have to replace your girls/gangs, why do I need more money?

Your post raises another issue though; why buy more brothels, the game's one big money sink, when you can just keep adding on to your first one?  There needs to be a customer cap at some point.

Offline ShiningRadiance

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #16 on: January 07, 2011, 02:09:25 AM »
I hate how you're all trying to turn this into an all-encompassing game.


It's highly a torture prostitution business sim.


I suggest you all expand on the torture aspects of it, and that'll lead to more skills, especially ones that damage the girl and the character, which will lead to a way to balance the business.


The problem with a business sim like this one is that they start out hard, then get insanely easy.


Expand the late-game if you want to expand the business directly.


Stocks. Turn it into a free-market system, and business gets a lot more interesting.


Set crossgate as a world that's hyper-capitalist, with revolutionaries trying to turn it into a big-goverment world that's just as evil.


It allows for strong plot to go along with it, as well.


I suggest you all play Recettear, and tell me how good half of those things would be in this game.
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Offline DocClox

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #17 on: January 07, 2011, 03:07:55 AM »
I hate how you're all trying to turn this into an all-encompassing game.

Is that what we're doing? I thought this discussion was about how to sustain the challenge of the game past the first twenty turns or so.

It's highly a torture prostitution business sim.

If there's one thing that has become clear, it's that the game is different things things to different players.

The problem with a business sim like this one is that they start out hard, then get insanely easy.

mmm... we're talking about ways to delay the onset of "insanely easy".


I suggest you all play Recettear, and tell me how good half of those things would be in this game.

Done that. What was good about Reccetear?
  • The dungeon delving. OK, a graphical dungeon interface would be nice, if a fair chunk of work.
  • The fairy loan-shark with the increasingly insane repayment schedule? That does sustain the challenge in Reccetear, although I can't see the WM MC putting up with Tear the way Reccette does.
  • Customer interaction. Have a set of regular faces come into the brothel and a bit chat from each of them. "Hallo sonny!" says the smiling little old lady. "I need to get my cunt licked by three identical redheads with Irish accents and I need it by next Wednesday? Can you help me out?" I confess, I'm having difficulty with this one.
  • Adding vending machines? I'm running out of good things from Reccettear
So as I see it, the things we could use are the diablo style dungeon, and the money sink. The dungeon has always been a good idea. It wouldn't do much to extend the challenge, although it would slow down game progression if we made it the central point of the game, which would have a similar effect. Of course we'd need to force people to go down the dungeon, and I expect we'd get complaints about that. So that probably isn't going to solve the problem at hand.

As for a money sink, leaving aside the likely fate of Tear in Crossgate, I'm not sure of the justification for demanding a repayment that rises that sharply. I mean it only works in Reccettear because Tear is insane and Reccette is a pushover. In Whoremaster it would be less painful to go to war against the loan sharks.I guess we could have the rivals throwing more money at the mayor, meaning that the player needs to pay more bribes to keep the watch from raiding the premises. Needs tougher rivals with more money but it could be done.
« Last Edit: January 07, 2011, 03:20:33 AM by DocClox »

Offline ShiningRadiance

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #18 on: January 07, 2011, 03:25:31 AM »
Is that what we're doing? I thought this discussion was about how to sustain the challenge of the game past the first twenty turns or so.

If there's one thing that has become clear, it's that the game is different things things to different players.

mmm... we're talking about ways to delay the onset of "insanely easy".


Done that. What was good about Reccetear?
  • The dungeon delving. OK, a graphical dungeon interface would be nice, if a fair chunk of work.
  • The fairly loan-shark with the increasingly insane repayment schedule? That does sustain the challenge in Reccetear, although I can't see the WM MC putting up with Tear the way Reccette does.
  • Customer interaction. Have a set of regular faces come into the brothel and a bit chat from each of them. "Hallo sonny!" says the smiling little old lady. "I need to get my cunt licked by three identical redheads with Irish accents and I need it by next wednesday? Can you help me out?" I confess, I'm having difficulty with this one.
  • Adding vending machines? I'm running out of good things from Reccettear
So as I see it, the things we could use are the diablo style dungeon, and the money sink. The dungeon has always been a good idea. It wouldn't do much to extend the challenge, although it would slow down game progression if we made it the central point of the game, which would have a similar effect. Of course we'd need to force people to go down the dungeon, and I expect we'd get complaints about that. So that probably isn't going to solve the problem at hand.

As for a money sink, leaving aside the likely fate of Tear in Crossgate, I'm not sure of the justification for demanding a repayment that rises that sharply. I mean it only works in Reccettear because Tear is insane and Reccette is a pushover. In Whoremaster it would be less painful to go to war against the loan sharks.I guess we could have the rivals throwing more money at the mayor, meaning that the player needs to pay more bribes to keep the watch from raiding the premises. Needs tougher rivals with more money but it could be done.


That's an easy fix, but here's what I mean.


In the first month, make it so the girls you can get are one-eyed, hook-handed, old 60 year old whores with AIDS. (exaggerating) Make the area you start out in complete shit, and make it impossible to visit the slave market, since you owe them money from your father.


When you fill up your brothel with the ugly whores, have that be the first gang attack, and have them kidnap a large number of them.


Then with only the remaining ones, make it so no one will join you for a few days due to your bad reputation.


Then, have a mysterious man hand you a card to a secret meeting spot for your father's old gang members. The ones that are still loyal.


Put together a gang, and have them start kidnapping. Have higher-level gangs protecting girls in better areas for themselves to kidnap.


Make it so instead of just recruiting more people in a gang by selecting something, you have to personally hire groups of people to add to a gang, and meld the stats in relation to how much damage it took. Example, if it's 5 left, and you want to add 5: Original group's strength is 100. New 5 are 50. New stats are at 75.


Now, in the higher-level areas, make it so that enemy gangs can attack in much larger numbers, or have them have stats that go above 100.


Now, in the early-game, make it so you can take out loans from a loan shark. High-interest, you can pay when you want. But if you start to go in the black, then they'll take 80% of what you made that day and use it to pay off your debt. Have them have extremely high-level gang members in large that are hard, but possible, to overcome with your own. You can just borrow more money when hard times hit.


You can even make it so you can refuse to pay them at some point, to force a battle. Sorta like fucking with the King of England in Civilization IV.


This is what I meant by Recettear-like. Put in a progressing story, and have an optional sandbox mode after you finish the story once. Now, I understand some people won't like that, and all I can say is... Fuck 'em.


The problem is that I don't TRUST you with a story. You're likely to put in corny, overly realistic characters. I don't know why. I just get that vibe from you.
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Offline d31r3x

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #19 on: January 07, 2011, 05:37:33 AM »
Hi, guys.

Lots of good ideas here, so I feel like I should contribute. Gang warfare and resource gathering seems to suffer the big initial hump, then go piece of cake when cash start flowing. How this can be solved? In one word: gladiatrix. Why not using gladiatrix system? Just think of it: replace gangs for "monsters" (provided gladiatrix "monsters" can be just males), and let girls do gang assignments.

I mean, now you can hire two buffed gangs in turn one, and train them for 20 turns without fearing enemy attacks while you slowly buy +4 weapon upgrades (wich apply to every gang, instead just one!!!). Pair that with chosing well your first two buyed slaves and some luck walking town and you've just almost beat the game.

But, if you have to buy "gang" monsters besides girls and the quality and quantity of gang monsters/girls is limited by prestige (wich is derived from things like number of brothels you control, number of bars, number of casinos, stronger monster/girl stats, etc.), then we have a curve instead a hump.

Now, in the opponents side, having a uber buffed gang monster / girl guarding, and smaller "adjusted" ones perfoming other assignments could do the job. And, in gladiatrix fashion, if you manage to destroy the gang monster / girl you keep it for yourself (with high rebelliousness and zero obedience, of course). It works the other way around, though, so be careful with your own...

With "adjusted", I mean player balanced gang monsters -with stats like the average player owned gang / girls. Buying increasely better equipment (rarer articles available if player has X prestige or better) for girls and individual gang monsters plus meeting requirements (number of brothels, working bars and casinos, etc.) could be the money sink for midgame.

P.D. As you people have seen, I haven't said a word about the "closed vs. open game" eternal struggle (wich I would like to avoid) because I think this changes could work with the current game as it is (and of course with the more complete and ambitious "catacomb crawler-story event based-town ward limited-strategic sim")

Offline sgb

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #20 on: January 07, 2011, 11:41:37 PM »
Quote
That's an easy fix, but here's what I mean.


In the first month, make it so the girls you can get are one-eyed, hook-handed, old 60 year old whores with AIDS. (exaggerating) Make the area you start out in complete shit, and make it impossible to visit the slave market, since you owe them money from your father.


When you fill up your brothel with the ugly whores, have that be the first gang attack, and have them kidnap a large number of them.


Then with only the remaining ones, make it so no one will join you for a few days due to your bad reputation.


Then, have a mysterious man hand you a card to a secret meeting spot for your father's old gang members. The ones that are still loyal.


Put together a gang, and have them start kidnapping. Have higher-level gangs protecting girls in better areas for themselves to kidnap.


Make it so instead of just recruiting more people in a gang by selecting something, you have to personally hire groups of people to add to a gang, and meld the stats in relation to how much damage it took. Example, if it's 5 left, and you want to add 5: Original group's strength is 100. New 5 are 50. New stats are at 75.


Now, in the higher-level areas, make it so that enemy gangs can attack in much larger numbers, or have them have stats that go above 100.


Now, in the early-game, make it so you can take out loans from a loan shark. High-interest, you can pay when you want. But if you start to go in the black, then they'll take 80% of what you made that day and use it to pay off your debt. Have them have extremely high-level gang members in large that are hard, but possible, to overcome with your own. You can just borrow more money when hard times hit.


You can even make it so you can refuse to pay them at some point, to force a battle. Sorta like fucking with the King of England in Civilization IV.


This is what I meant by Recettear-like. Put in a progressing story, and have an optional sandbox mode after you finish the story once. Now, I understand some people won't like that, and all I can say is... Fuck 'em.


The problem is that I don't TRUST you with a story. You're likely to put in corny, overly realistic characters. I don't know why. I just get that vibe from you.


Offline Flowersteel

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #21 on: January 08, 2011, 02:03:22 PM »
Really good thoughts guys, I think its been said pretty clearly all around, if we want to increase the value of the game, it has to have something that makes it challenging in all phases, not just the initial one, and then it becomes easy. As I see it there are 3 parts to the game:

1. The initial phase: where you struggle, and establish
2. The midgame phase where you are in the black, and dealing with opposition etc, but have a steady gameplay
3. The endphase where your empire is established

There are two things that can be done to prolong gameplay: Increase difficulty to get through a phase, or introduce more element (open ended).

A third thing that can be done to a game like this is introduce story elements that are time/resource driven putting pressure on the player to do them in a specific timefram (closed ended gameplay). Im not very much for this kind of game, since it often precents the 3rd phase - which is the one I prefer to play.

Different players like to play different phases, and with different focus. I think that much is clear from the above posts. Ive been playing a bit with the config, and its relatively easy to increase the difficulty in phase 1 and to some degree in phase 2.

Thats why Im a big fan of introducing more resources that are needed as you progress in the game. Its very clear from the above posts (and from playing) that just gathering gold cannot sustain the gameplay once you hit 3rd phase, as it is too easy - and in a sense a moot gaming point.

Again coming back to the monopoly allegory: You want to keep playing once you own all the lots and have all the hotels. But if the other players leave, then there is not much satisfaction in going round the board.
---
 
Ive added a basic config to show an example of a more difficult phase 1 and 2. It basically increases the price of using gangs by 10, buying girls by 10, and increasing taxation. To give a different kind of gameplay, you can breed girls more easily, and itll only take 31 weeks before they become available.
 
In order to do better balancing, youd need to be able to set the price of the extra rooms, as well as the brothels to x10 in the config.
« Last Edit: January 09, 2011, 07:30:07 AM by Flowersteel »

Offline ShiningRadiance

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #22 on: January 09, 2011, 03:29:31 AM »



Who'd wanna work for someone with little money, operating in the shittiest part of town, without any realistic chance of success?


Make it harder, give the MC a reason for getting into debt, and it'll elongate the early-game and mid-game.


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Offline bob361

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #23 on: March 16, 2011, 01:02:50 AM »
well, so far we've identify 2 separate problems: too hard early and too easy once cash flow is positive.

the solution to "too hard early" is simple: give the player a free tutorial whore at the beginning of game that has 0 upkeep.  Thus, the player automatically starts out with positive cash flow, making the beginning easier and more accessible.

of course, this leads to the "too easy with cash flow" problem.  This can be solve in a multiple of ways but let's consider the the simple solutions.

There's two simple ways to make the difficulty of the game scale: the obstacles scale as the player grow or a defined goal increase in difficulty.

since there are no defined goals in the game, that just leaves scaling obstacles.  Here are the current obstacles in the game and suggestion:
1.  Opposing gangs
2.  Girl's Upkeep
3.  City guard raids

currently in the game, the obstacles are powerful early and becomes a non-issue fast.
the solution is to make the obstacles weak early for new players and have the obstacles increase in difficulty as the game goes on.

for example, let's take obstacle 3).  In the beginning, guard raids takes out a lot of your gold and is pretty hard.  However, once you start bribing mayor (with something like a 200 gold per turn and even less once you start crushing gangs), the guard raids stop taking your money, making the game easier as the game goes on.  While this  feature is neat from a lore standpoint, it's terrible from the design standpoint.

One way of fixing this is that as the game turn goes on, drastically increase required bribe to overlook your crime and increase the frequency of raids. (what i'm suggesting is have the required bribe and raid frequency drastically increase with game turn and reputation, instead of just reputation)

i have a couple more suggestions but all my suggestions are all in regards to turning WM into a game instead of a toy, which it is currently.

Offline trex

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #24 on: March 16, 2011, 05:14:22 AM »
The problem with a lot of these suggestions are that they are already in the game. Alter your config file to make gangs and upkeep costs rise, and also just start bribing the guard more to up your overheads. Items are also a good way to blow through cash. Alter/completely make your own set of items and up the prices. It's up to you if you actually ever buy anything.


But forcing these changes on everyone isn't great. It'd be nice to have more scripted events. Perhaps the transition to xml will take too long? With otherworld, clonemaster and that gladiator online game, there's plenty of work in the pipes. Adding functionality to whats already here but incomplete (fame levels, brothel setup (shift+U screen) satisfaction, jobs and scripts) would give everyone more to do in the game. And they themselves are a significant amount of work.




Offline Ctwo

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #25 on: March 16, 2011, 05:45:38 AM »
i have a couple more suggestions but all my suggestions are all in regards to turning WM into a game instead of a toy, which it is currently.

Grandstanding and trying to make yourself look good instead of actually presenting your ideas in a fair and ballanced light just makes you look petty and alienates the people your trying to influence. If you have something to say, just say it.
 
Gangs and money are early game blocks that take care of themselves in about 6 turns. Hiring a decent gang each turn and putting most of them on sabotage makes you enough money that you don't really have to bother doing much of anything else while you build your harem up to the point it brings in all the cash you need. Cash becomes trivial very rapidly.
 
I can see two ways to fix this. The easy fix is to get rid of the cash reward for Sabotage. Roberies and muggings seem to have a very high rate of failure. Highly trained gangs can still fail miserably at both and be very badly damaged or completely lost. Also they don't directly benifit you other than providing cash. This will force people to focus on the other aspects of the game. If this was done, I'd suggest lowering the difficulty of both muggings and kidnapping. With less free gold going around in the early game, kidnapping would become more popular if it succeeded at least half the time. Muggings should be an automatic success. If 6 guys can't find a lone person and follow them to a safe location to overpower them and take chump change...seriously. Muggings should also have appropriately low rewards. In some cases it should net less than what you spent sending the gang to mug people!
 
The second more difficult way to fix this is to alter the game to where early game your starved for cash as a limiter, but as the game develops cash become a non factor and you have other goals where having unlimited cash isn't going to help. That is already being done with the brothels but the unlimited expansion of a single brothel causes this to be a trivial issue. Maybe if girls were seperated into ranks and only available to brothel owners of a similar rank? Or if the market had grades of equipment and you were only able to purchase items that matched your rank? These don't make the game more difficult, but it does reward you for actually advancing in the game instead of just huddling in your first brothel.
 
It would be more intersting if the number of attacks done on your brothel increased as the game progressed and the more girls you had at each brothel the greater the chance that girls would be kidnapped from your brothel in raids. Something along the lines of:( # girls at brothel - # gang members on guard duty x 1% = chance of each girl being kidnapped) with the chance recalculated for each girl checked (otherwise 115 girls with 15 guards would be a 100% chance of all of them being kidnapped!). Or maybe limiting the number of girls kidnapped to the number of surviving gang members in the assult force? Half that number would probably be more realistic. So out of the assulting force of 15 say 10 gang members survive so they cart away 5 girls?
 
The kidnapped girls would go in the runaway category and could be rescued by successfull sabotage runs against enemy gangs (its assumed you always target brothels that hold your girls first). Your chance at freeing captured girls should be very high. I'd say automatically 1/2 the surviving gang members number +1 as your girls should be willing to go with your gangs. This could also be a way for you to get new girls without receiving cash. Say using a formula like (surviving gang members x 1% to get 1 girls, checked (surviving gang members/2) times) so you have a good chance of getting a few new girls, but a very poor chance of getting lots of girls from sabotage.

Offline bob361

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #26 on: March 16, 2011, 07:07:08 AM »

Grandstanding and trying to make yourself look good instead of actually presenting your ideas in a fair and ballanced light just makes you look petty and alienates the people your trying to influence. If you have something to say, just say it.
Trying to offer game balancing suggestions for a toy is rather pointless when WM indecisive about whether it's a toy or a game.

Current foundation of WM is a toy and everyone seems to enjoy it so far since a large number of balancing suggestions in this threads are actually more toy feature or just changes in feature to play with. I stop in my post because I realize I was making the wrong kind of suggestions.

I'm not about to make more feature suggestions when there's already a ton of non-functioning features in the game and I'm not about to make arbitrary formula suggestions because that's just stupid.

Offline trex

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #27 on: March 16, 2011, 08:50:03 AM »
Kidnapping would be a nice feature, although unlikely to be implemented, it would


A. Make sense, enemies actually damaging your income stream is quite logical,


B. If your attached to a particular girl/one of your best earners, and then she is kidnapped then your somewhat invested in her rescue


You could also argue that girls are a dime a dozen, especially tied to the easy to obtain unlimited money, and if you have scores of women, the game only seems to satisfy 5-8 of them with max.customer flows, many who also work on those shifts don't get a look in. So while not a magic bullet, a nifty feature for some to be sure. Similar to the 'Hero comes to save a girl' thing (probably in this thread somewhere)


Actually I'd like to see max.customers bumped up, and from what I see, massage girls can only get 1 customer/week per shift? Don't know how difficult that would be to change.




Offline necrodrool

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #28 on: March 16, 2011, 08:33:12 PM »
just sum ideas

1. make costs of whatever (matron, torturer, beast carer, room expansion, advertising?, gangs etc.) scale with whatever they are intended to do ( number of girls cared of = more money for matron, more girls/customers tortured = more money for her, more beasts to care..., the more rooms you buy... , the more customers attracted..., the better the gangs are/the more they achieved in one round... etc.)

2. add something like quests, while making it attractive to actually do them or even needed to do, if you want to do something
(similiar to those events (like get 7 girls get something that wont help you anyways) but more... hm... strict?... is that the word.... whatever...
ie.: if you want to aquire the #'d brothel, you have to:
* aquire a certain customaer satisfaction in brothel #-1
* get a level X girl
* upgrade brothel #-? to a certain point... and the like.
the quest will show up when you buy brothel #-1)

3. increase complexity
for example: add some more supportive jobs that will be needed at a certain point of the game, while can be completly ignored in the beginning stage
or: in order to defeat later gangs you need some new technology or special weapons or you need to get rid of some authorities etc.



well
the probleml of 2 and 3 is that those (probably) need shitloads of work on new features
the first one is (i think) rather a change/adding of formulas

Offline Zanfib

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Re: General Balancing / Mods
« Reply #29 on: March 17, 2011, 02:19:15 AM »
The player needs more feedback about what their opposition is doing.  They need a way to see how many gangs and brothels each enemy syndicate has, as well as more information about what effects these syndicates are having on the players own buisness. The way the player improves and maintains their own gangs could also use more detail.