Stats Concept

[Xela]

Hi!The correct term would be digital.
Yes, I am aware that digital also has a technical meaning, but I'm quite certain that nobody will confuse the two.
Have fun!

Best I could find it means using fingers/toes but it's a lot closer to definition (footjob becomes a much better fit for example and we already have footjobs). "digital" it is unless someone comes up with something better.

Still no comments on other skills? We could use more specific skills like "dancing"/"cooking"/"cleaning" and etc. to supplement skills like "strip"/"service" for example. Would also make good inter-jobs options possibly meaning more interesting gameplay.

We need to come up with some strategy that balances out "every move character makes in the game == skill (coding nightmare)" and "too linear/simple gameplay due to generic, purely job oriented skills"...

[DarkTl]

mod_skills: {"strip": [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]}

Ok, you should clarify this. Action counter = performance,  training counter = learning rate, right?
If action counter is performance, then what skill value does?
Does 0.01 training multiplie means 100 times slower training?

I've made the list of old stats in one of the front posts with explanation on how I understand them. What do we keep/add/get rid of?

I still don't understand how the game, or even players themselves, will track slave progression without usual for such games stats like obedience. It's not like I want to add it badly, but I simply don't have other ideas.

Cherry had an interesting idea about libido. Its max level shows how dissolute character is.
Basically, even if character has max libido level, she shouldn't become a nymphomaniac unless this max level is high enough.

Joy and mood... Do we need a stat for that? You wanted to use flags for various emotions, and happiness/sadness are emotions too.

Many games have (usually hidden) loyalty stat. As long as girl is happy, it gradually grows, and vice versa. So, some new girl that didn't work for you long enough will leave quickly if she didn't like something. While a girl with high loyality will not until loyality become low enough. 0 loyality doesn't mean that girl is unhappy, it just means that she will not tolerate sh#t from your side. I think it's a decent idea. Maybe we should replace joy and/or mood with it.

Even though we don't limit stats, we could try to add diminishing returns, when every next stat point does a bit less than previous one. It will solve some problems with balance that I already have. We already have something like this with AP and constitution, so let's take another step.
It probably should be handled centrally to avoid manually changing all ingame formulas. I thought about limiting some stats at first (you can't be infinitely enduring for example), but this is a much more elegant solution, I think.

Current skills: SKILLS = set(["vaginal", "anal", "oral", "strip", "service"]) I just added those for testing purposes. We need to come up with a list of skills and how we're going to use them.

Attack, defence, magic, magic defence?
Or, rather, melee weapon mastery, ranged weapon mastery, magic mastery for every single element, magic resistance? We can afford many skills now, I guess
Also slave training or something for trainers.

I suppose bdsm and group are not really skills, more like readiness to do something, er, unusual. So we skip them here.

The problem is, I wanted things like cooking to be the most useful for MC house. But you don't want to expand it yet, so I don't think they will be very useful without it.

I proposed Ranks for all occupations (like we have for Prostitutes atm.), do you agree with this?

Yeah, I wanted to propose it at some point too.

[Xela]

Ok, you should clarify this. Action counter = performance,  training counter = learning rate, right?
If action counter is performance, then what skill value does?

I've clarified it in an update to the second post in this thread, possibly not clear enough:

Action Counter: Increases every time a character performs an action that increases it. (Jobs/Actions are the main source of this, could theoretically happen during training as well).
Leaning Counter: Increases every time a character is being though or otherwise learning an action (schools, slavetraining, NPCs, could happen during Jobs/Actions)
Skill: Is being calculated by adding up both counters with some conditions (explained in second post) and this is being used during jobs and actions (possibly paired with skills/traits when that's sensible).

*So Actions Multi will increase the rate at which girl is learning from practice, Training Multi will increase a rate at which a girls is learning from lessons and skill mupti will ensure that a total skill that is returned is higher.

I think it's best to limit possible skill increase per of 1 per AP spent (before muplies) if more than once skill is being increased, that 1 should be divided in fractions. Will be simpler to work with.

Does 0.01 training multiplie means 100 times slower training?

No, that is being added (or subtracted) from default multiplier (which is 1). So 0.01 to Training Multi basically means that teaching the character becomes 1% more efficient.

I still don't understand how the game, or even players themselves, will track slave progression without usual for such games stats like obedience. It's not like I want to add it badly, but I simply don't have other ideas.

I've explained my vision for this many times before... there should be no "tracking" of progression of obedience, but it's a whole different discussion, lets focus on what's at hand.

Cherry had an interesting idea about libido. Its max level shows how dissolute character is.
Basically, even if character has max libido level, she shouldn't become a nymphomaniac unless this max level is high enough.

How is this beneficial for actual game play? Sounds like a lot of work and checks during the jobs/actions without any significant added benefit. I actually wanted to get rid of libido and use relevant traits whenever required.

Joy and mood... Do we need a stat for that? You wanted to use flags for various emotions, and happiness/sadness are emotions too.

Mood as a stat is idiotic, I don't even remember why we have that as stat and don't believe that we used it in the game once. So unless someone objects, we'll throw it out.

On the other hand, I cannot see the game without joy or similarly called stat. Flags should be used to override joy after a significant event (beating/great date/drug use and etc. until it's sensible to reset the flag), not completely substitute it. "Joy" needs to serve as a scale on "default" mood for the characters.

*This is wide open for a discussion btw... It's just that we've been using joy all over already and it's seems to be working out so far.

Many games have (usually hidden) loyalty stat. As long as girl is happy, it gradually grows, and vice versa. So, some new girl that didn't work for you long enough will leave quickly if she didn't like something. While a girl with high loyality will not until loyality become low enough. 0 loyality doesn't mean that girl is unhappy, it just means that she will not tolerate sh#t from your side. I think it's a decent idea. Maybe we should replace joy and/or mood with it.

That's far too much like disposition... One thing we should not tolerate in the game are two stats that do a very similar thing, that would be a development nightmare in a project of our scale.

I am trying to digest some thoughts about turning disposition into a system of flags and counters in relation between characters (not just between every girl and MC). Or track disposition between different characters as a stat, same as we do now and not just for MC. This is prolly for the future... (maybe distant future).

Even though we don't limit stats, we could try to add diminishing returns, when every next stat point does a bit less than previous one. It will solve some problems with balance that I already have. We already have something like this with AP and constitution, so let's take another step.
It probably should be handled centrally to avoid manually changing all ingame formulas. I thought about limiting some stats at first (you can't be infinitely enduring for example), but this is a much more elegant solution, I think.

I am against this as we already have:

- Slowing down the experience gains as levels increase.
- Have two max levels for each stat.

One of the worst traps in development is constantly trying to introduce deeper and deeper mechanics. Lets try to make it simpler by removing stuff and making stats/skills easier to work with and understand and use tools that we already have at our disposal. You can't claim to having issues with balancing that cannot be resolved while never changing or even asking how/where to change experience per level modifiers or by how much max/lvl_max are being increased per level gained or even what percentage of trait mod value is being applied per level... The first two are beyond important to gameplay, traits thing less so but is still pretty damn powerful for characters with loads of traits... Not mentioning changing the formula for AP increases (all things in the game are centered around AP).

Attack, defence, magic, magic defence?
Or, rather, melee weapon mastery, ranged weapon mastery, magic mastery for every single element, magic resistance? We can afford many skills now, I guess
Also slave training or something for trainers.

Former are stats, latter we don't really need at the moment. We use defence for magical defence right now. We'll come back to this when we talks BE/Exploration for real, we can't work on that and everything else we have on the plate atm.

I suppose bdsm and group are not really skills, more like readiness to do something, er, unusual. So we skip them here.

Traits then? We can divide between "sex" skills in this case paired with a trait (something similar would have to be done for lesbian). I or Thewlis will try to automate this somehow (prolly a method for pytcharacter class) or a function.

The problem is, I wanted things like cooking to be the most useful for MC house. But you don't want to expand it yet, so I don't think they will be very useful without it.

Requests for slaves trained in them?

Yeah, I wanted to propose it at some point too.

Ok, every rank should have a requirement for skills, stats and possibly traits. In some cases, pricetag as well.

*We can also use these ranks during training/slave training.

[DarkTl]

Btw, you forgot agility.
I think we use it outside of BE too.

I've explained my vision for this many times before...

Every time it sounded like something vague and purely theoretical to me. Almost like our discussions about EE 

I actually wanted to get rid of libido and use relevant traits whenever required.

Hm? Nymphomaniac and Frigid? Isn't it a bit too few to work with?
It will kill a lot of items that have something to do with libido too. Though I'm not against it, just warning.

Mood as a stat is idiotic, I don't even remember why we have that as stat and don't believe that we used it in the game once.

I remember. You asked how can we use it, and I proposed a system when a girl wants to do something specific (shopping, date, sex, fighting, etc) ie she is in a mood to do it. You approved. It cannot be a simple stat, of course. But it still could be implemented and used.

Traits then? We can divide between "sex" skills in this case paired with a trait (something similar would have to be done for lesbian). I or Thewlis will try to automate this somehow (prolly a method for pytcharacter class) or a function.

I think lesbian should be a separate skill, because both lesbians and straight ones could master and use it, but it should be harder for latter ones. Same for "usual" sex, of course.
As for bdsm and group, I see them as a combination of flags (= ready to do, depending on some things like occupation, traits, etc) and multiple stats (group = sex+anal+oral, bdsm = required sex skill + constitution + character or something).

Requests for slaves trained in them?

You mean cooking and so on? I don't think we can use it without MC house yet. And it's not like the file with skills code will become read-only tomorrow, so we always can add more later 

[Xela]

Btw, you forgot agility.
I think we use it outside of BE too.

Yeap, I did...

Every time it sounded like something vague and purely theoretical to me. Almost like our discussions about EE 

I thought that I went into great detail at least once, but I could be mistaken... nm for now.

Hm? Nymphomaniac and Frigid? Isn't it a bit too few to work with?
It will kill a lot of items that have something to do with libido too. Though I'm not against it, just warning.

Lets see if others have something to say. We could keep it but it just mean more work and I cannot see any significant added benefit.

I remember. You asked how can we use it, and I proposed a system when a girl wants to do something specific (shopping, date, sex, fighting, etc) ie she is in a mood to do it. You approved. It cannot be a simple stat, of course. But it still could be implemented and used.

I don't remember this at all. This sounds too advanced even for late stages of the game, girls can simply decide based on traits/joy/other stats (healing on low health) for example.

I think lesbian should be a separate skill, because both lesbians and straight ones could master and use it, but it should be harder for latter ones. Same for "usual" sex, of course.

We could prolly use a better name than lesbian, like "gay" or something and use that paired with other sex skills. This would make sense and we could use traits to boost/penalize this skill!. Actually this sounds like a decent plan... +(we may add male/futa characters if someone comes along who's willing to work with that sort of content).

As for bdsm and group, I see them as a combination of flags (= ready to do, depending on some things like occupation, traits, etc) and multiple stats (group = sex+anal+oral, bdsm = required sex skill + constitution + character or something).

Ok, that's why we're discussing this, to find a good balance of the skills we require. We can condition them as you describe.

You mean cooking and so on? I don't think we can use it without MC house yet. And it's not like the file with skills code will become read-only tomorrow, so we always can add more later 

We can use them in the ST. It can be added later, sure.

[DarkTl]

Now I wonder if we need more narrow skills. Like in SM3, where they have skills from kissing to tribadism.

[CherryWood]

Do we need intelligence?  I think "clever" traits could just give learning bonuses directly to skills with this new system.
Or if we want keep it, maybe make some learning bonus derived from that stat itself, so it's actually useful for something 
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Actually, what you want to do with the old stats (charisma, refinement..etc)? Looks to me that anything that is not a state (HP, MP, Vitality, Joy, Disposition, Reputation?) could be somehow converted to a skill or just trait bonus.

[livingforever]

Hi!

Best I could find it means using fingers/toes but it's a lot closer to definition (footjob becomes a much better fit for example and we already have footjobs). "digital" it is unless someone comes up with something better.

You're absolutely right that digital sex also includes footjobs and the likes, but I thought it was intentional to unify some skills to get rid of some unnecessary ones.

Either way, I don't really have an opinion on skills other than the ones relevant for sex, but about those I have one thing to say:
Please stop mixing up body parts, sexual orientation and sex types.
I asked for that before (maybe even twice), but I was pretty much ignored.

Vaginal, anal, oral and digital are body parts. Having a skill based on them makes sense, it basically is an indicator for how well the girl can pleasure others with it.
Lesbian (or gay) is a sexual orientation. A skill based on that doesn't make much sense to me, but if you want it in the game then you need a skill for straight sex as well.
Group or BDSM (in this case) are specific sex types or sexual activities. An own skill for every of those does make sense - how well does the character perform in a specific situation - but it would basically mean that you need to have a skill for almost every sex related tag there is. That's a lot of skills.

It doesn't really matter how many of those categories you want to cover with skills (although I think one is enough), but including a few from each category and ignoring the rest is definitely not good.
Have fun!

[Xela]

Do we need intelligence?  I think "clever" traits could just give learning bonuses directly to skills with this new system.
Or if we want keep it, maybe make some learning bonus derived from that stat itself, so it's actually useful for something 

It should supplement skills and jobs in the future that would be rooted in intelligence. I think we cannot loose this stat... we need something that defines girls intelect better than traits do (at least imo).

In my mind, stats that we absolutely should have and reasons for having them:

charisma (beauty/ability to use good looks in jobs/daily life, required due to a nature of the game to supplement a LOT of the jobs that we have)
health (obvious reasons, game can hardly function without it)
vitality (characters need to rest. This is the best way of determining when as counters/skills or anything else for that matter is a lot harder to work in our game with than a simple hardcapped stat (I gave this a good deal of thought)).
intelligence (may not be apparent right now, but this will serve us greatly in the future)
constitution: Closest thing we have to strength/endurance.
luck (just because it's a lot of great fun)

Basically I think that our game requires three "MUST have stats that describe the character": Beauty, Strength, Intelligence. Health, Vitality and Luck are there to make game play more fun/coherent.

Others:

character: (if only to serve as "inverted obedience"). We can do without it as it can be handle through flags.
disposition: May not be the best way to handle this, a system of flags/counters may serve us far better but is also likely to mean a lot more work.
fame: This is tricky... and not a clear stat as cannot mean "fame" through out the game world due to being very easy to achieve. This made sense when we only had brothels and before the expansion of game concept took place. Right now I cannot justify this stat as a girl that gained fame as a whore or a stripper should not carry it over if she changes profession to "maid" or "warrior" for example. In fact former "fame" may actually hurt in some cases. This is one stat we may get rid of.
reputation: Same as above... reputation as what? Decent human being (than it should be called alignment/dark or light side or something like that), otherwise wtf reputation is cannot really be determined. Another stat we may get rid of...
joy: I think this is actually working out for us but as Dark said, it may work better as flags/counters (but prolly more work too).
libido: Discussed a bit already, I fail to see the value of this other than adding another level of "checks". I can't really tell if we should keep it or not...
refinement: I believe this to be quite useless. This should be removed as a stat and turned into a skill or skills, at least I cannot clearly see how this is important enough to the game to be a stat or how we're going to use it to make the game fun or game play significantly better.
Mood we will kill.

Battle Skills:
agility (Speed). We don't really need, it's a requirement for BE that we currently have. This could be of limited use during events and if we ever create something like a Thief Guild/Crime Guild to supplement skills during jobs.
attack: This should be a skill (logically) and be supplemented by constitution (it's what passes for Strength in the game) but that would be a bit awkward to work with I expect.
defence: Same as above, also should be a skill and supplemented by constitution.
magic: Same thing but supplemented by intelligence.
mp: Also just for fun/better game play. We could use health/vitality for this (but not gonna ).
===============================================

You're absolutely right that digital sex also includes footjobs and the likes, but I thought it was intentional to unify some skills to get rid of some unnecessary ones.

Yeap, I meant it as a clear point towards naming it "digital".

Either way, I don't really have an opinion on skills other than the ones relevant for sex, but about those I have one thing to say:
Please stop mixing up body parts, sexual orientation and sex types.
I asked for that before (maybe even twice), but I was pretty much ignored.

Vaginal, anal, oral and digital are body parts. Having a skill based on them makes sense, it basically is an indicator for how well the girl can pleasure others with it.
Lesbian (or gay) is a sexual orientation. A skill based on that doesn't make much sense to me, but if you want it in the game then you need a skill for straight sex as well.
Group or BDSM (in this case) are specific sex types or sexual activities. An own skill for every of those does make sense - how well does the character perform in a specific situation - but it would basically mean that you need to have a skill for almost every sex related tag there is. That's a lot of skills.

Try to remember that we've been thinking about this topic in "WM" pattern for two years. Thought patterns are hard to break...

It might make sense to add gay/straight as skills but we could simply check for corresponding traits and using the sex skills that we have.

BDSM I believe should be a separate skill. Otherwise I have no idea how our body parts skills are relevant to bondage at all. Anything in between, we can just use multiple skills.

Group we can use traits + body parts skills (like proposed above for orientations).

It doesn't really matter how many of those categories you want to cover with skills (although I think one is enough), but including a few from each category and ignoring the rest is definitely not good.

Whatever we go with, I agree that consistency in this case is very important.

Now I wonder if we need more narrow skills. Like in SM3, where they have skills from kissing to tribadism.

I am against this... Kissing can be generalized into oral and tribadism into vaginal. It's easier to work with, narrow skills are obviously more precise but prolly also costly in terms of dev time and balancing.

[CherryWood]

Well... I agree with any simplification. Even with the recent additions, the gameplay is still very straightforward so I don't think there is a need for complex stats.

[DarkTl]

Character as personality/stubbornness is not needed because we describe it via traits like tsundere, meek, iron will, etc. Used widely in the game, but traits can do it much more accurately. If you want to remove it, I don't mind. Though it probably won't be easy.

Intelligence... We do have 4 traits for it (and absence of them is the fifth trait). I think that we should divide Intelligence and knowledge here. Irl your IQ doesn't usually increase over time, at least not indefinitely. While you always can obtain more knowledge.
So I propose to use traits to determine the level of intelligence (when needed), and rename Intelligence stat to knowledge or something like that. Retarded and genius characters both can obtain more knowledge about the world over time, but at different rates. By knowledge we can mean anything, from ability to write (let's say, 10) to quantum physics (let's say, 1000).

You right about fame, famous warrior and famous whore are different things. Flags will be much better here.

Disposition... In case of relationships between characters simple flags is the way to go. But we need more clear and complex concept if you want to replace disposition to MC. If you have one, let's hear it.

I see refinement as a knowledge about society, manners, fashion, conversation, rules of behavior, etiquette, etc. I guess it could be a skill as well, it's not as deep and important as general Knowledge stat.

Agility is used in some formulas that calculate income during job. And it makes sense, speed and dexterity do matter sometimes. I'm not sure if it should be stat or skill though. Because of BE we cannot change it to traits.

Joy and mood. You see, joy implies two sides, happiness and sadness. While mood is a more general concept.
If you prefer to use flags, it's more logical to remove joy and use mood as a general base value.

Libido as a stat that decreases after sex acts as not too useful. Maybe we can use it as a bit more constant stat that works like virtue in AA, if you know what I mean. And even then traits will be better.

Reputation. We have traits for alignment btw, and I don't think we should change it (maybe add more traits later).
Reputation of a social entity is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria according to wiki. So it's opinion about the character depending on her actions. Probably too complex for our game.

[Xela]

Character as personality/stubbornness is not needed because we describe it via traits like tsundere, meek, iron will, etc. Used widely in the game, but traits can do it much more accurately. If you want to remove it, I don't mind. Though it probably won't be easy.

I can't tell how difficult it is to remove as well. We'll make this decision after we figure out how slaves are "broken".

Intelligence... We do have 4 traits for it (and absence of them is the fifth trait). I think that we should divide Intelligence and knowledge here. Irl your IQ doesn't usually increase over time, at least not indefinitely. While you always can obtain more knowledge.
So I propose to use traits to determine the level of intelligence (when needed), and rename Intelligence stat to knowledge or something like that. Retarded and genius characters both can obtain more knowledge about the world over time, but at different rates. By knowledge we can mean anything, from ability to write (let's say, 10) to quantum physics (let's say, 1000).

Try not to translate it to rl so precisely. We're not going to rename the stat as intelligence is more wide used in the game and knowledge is too close to skills.

Wisdom is an option... but renaming from int to wis is prolly not very sensible.

You right about fame, famous warrior and famous whore are different things. Flags will be much better here.

I'll look into getting rid of it.

Disposition... In case of relationships between characters simple flags is the way to go. But we need more clear and complex concept if you want to replace disposition to MC. If you have one, let's hear it.

I don't. Never thought about it in any detail, it will not be easy to come up with one either.

I see refinement as a knowledge about society, manners, fashion, conversation, rules of behavior, etiquette, etc. I guess it could be a skill as well, it's not as deep and important as general Knowledge stat.

That's right, do we keep it or not? It's a fairly straight forward stat that is not used very widely so it shouldn't hurt the development...

Agility is used in some formulas that calculate income during job. And it makes sense, speed and dexterity do matter sometimes. I'm not sure if it should be stat or skill though. Because of BE we cannot change it to traits.

Joy and mood. You see, joy implies two sides, happiness and sadness. While mood is a more general concept.
If you prefer to use flags, it's more logical to remove joy and use mood as a general base value.

Screw mood, we didn't use it and will not use it.

I think that we need to keep joy as a stat and come up with descriptions for mood states, displaying them instead of a number. Same goes for disposition. I am not good at picking names when obfuscating stats...

Libido as a stat that decreases after sex acts as not too useful. Maybe we can use it as a bit more constant stat that works like virtue in AA, if you know what I mean. And even then traits will be better.

So we get rid of it?

Reputation. We have traits for alignment btw, and I don't think we should change it (maybe add more traits later).
Reputation of a social entity is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria according to wiki. So it's opinion about the character depending on her actions. Probably too complex for our game.

Yeah, lets get rid of it as well. It comes with all the issues fame does. Simple flags will do.

[DarkTl]

Try not to translate it to rl so precisely. We're not going to rename the stat as intelligence is more wide used in the game and knowledge is too close to skills.

Oh? I believe we should use common logic rather than try to come up with a new one only to justify something useless.

It's barely used so far, it's best to rename it while we can. And even though we changed the system a bit, it's still totally possible to have retarded character with more intelligence than genius, which is ridiculous.
We could call it education, scholarship, erudition. Even wisdom, though it's a much more vague name.

Make refinement a skill, remove libido.

[Xela]

Oh? I believe we should use common logic rather than try to come up with a new one only to justify something useless.

You know that I think in the same way but you're getting carried away. When players see int stat in the game, they will not think iq and try to compare it to Einstein and Hawking. My point is that we need the stat and it is not sensible to rename it (like it was sensible to rename the fatigue due to being the only inverted stat in the game).

It's barely used so far, it's best to rename it while we can. And even though we changed the system a bit, it's still totally possible to have retarded character with more intelligence than genius, which is ridiculous.
We could call it education, scholarship, erudition. Even wisdom, though it's a much more vague name.

Renaming it does not fix the problem (an educated scholar with a retard trait is just as much of a game breaker), traits is a WM concept that is far from perfect. When we were talking stats with Rudi still being here for the first time, I investigated how traits and stats worked in WM and it has none of the precautionary measures that PyTFall has (stats on removal of items, "True" traits vs traits induced by equipped items and etc.)

It would make more sense to condition specific traits with hardcode, like limiting intelligence to 50 if the character has a retarded trait (lots of work) or simply remove all traits that simply double the stats we have in the game.

* IMO: We need to get rid of traits that plainly set stat levels (because we already have stats).

Big Boobs/Great Figure are good traits because girls with great figure and big boobs can still be butt ugly and repulsive while those are always a good advantage to have none the less. Genius is a bad trait because it plainly means that a stat value of the girl needs to be higher (or one of the highest) out of any characters in the game. The problem here is NOT the stat, it's a trait...

Make refinement a skill, remove libido.

Right so we at this point:

We keep:
charisma
health
vitality
intelligence
constitution
luck
character
disposition
joy
agility
Battle Skills *Still under question of if we should turn this into skills... but we keep them none the less.

We kill:

fame * Will become simple flags required for gameplay/events.
mood * Just removed.
reputation * Will become simple flags required for gameplay/events.
refinement *Will be split into skills.

Not decided:

libido

[DarkTl]

In that case we should also remove traits from fragile to athletic because we have constitution. Probably some other traits, like broken and iron will (character), dawdler and energetic (agility).

However, stats are not nearly as good in describing character as traits. While it's difficult to do with charisma part, levels of constitution and intelligence are usually obvious for any character. How are we supposed to describe genius character with the current leveling system? Set int to max? There won't be any difference after a couple of levels.