Idea's for difficulty

[ker]

Was trying to think of a few ways to increase difficulty, but keep it scalar.  Game starts off ok, but as soon as you get your first really productive unique girl, profit becomes automatic.  Trying to think of a few new ways of increasing the difficulty, without making the early game too hard, so want most of them to scale with the size of the brothel/quality of the girls.
What a few of them will be based on is an idea of reputation/fame.  Where you have a certain level of fame, and that opens new options as the game goes on.
 
1.  Make high profit girls a bit harder to find.
Slaves
 -Either scale the costs of the girls more, where the ones that make alot more costs far more (could be dramatic) or have several differnt tiers of markets.  The first market are your fairly cheap girls (20-40g per customer) and whatever uniques might fall into that category.  Once your fame is high enough, you get invitations to more and more select markets, with better (and more expensive girls).  Probably have an cost to join those markets as well, either large first time payment or a set amount of gold for every visit.
Free girls, both walks and kidnapping. 
 -For girls you meet during a walk or your gang tries to convince.  The girls stats are averaged, and that number is compared to your fame score.  If it is too low, she thinks that she's above you, and won't work directly for you.  Potentially you could give options at the time.  Like she won't join you intially, but if you give her a large sum, she'll work for you.  Or that she has a fixed house percentage when she starts to work, agreed on by contract. 
 -For girls that your gang is trying to kidnap, I might weight the combat skills higher, where the number that your fame compares to is something like (combat x 2 + magic x 2 + average score)/5.  If she's a good fighter, she'll be harder to capture, and more likely to kill the gang trying.  You could make it so that if your gang fails to kidnap, you have the ability to hunt her.  Use the recapture job, and every week that you hunt her, her number goes down steadily.  So in time you can capture her, but it might take a few weeks and gangs to do it.  Also, initial obedience/hate should recieve a high temp modifier for every kidnapped girl.
Catacomb girls
-Similiar to kidnapping.  But if you are sending your own girl down there, there's a chance that the monster girl will kidnap yours.  Or if her rebellion is too high, be convinced to stay in the catacombs.
 
 
Level-based script events. 
Right now it doesn't feel like the level stat does a huge amount, but with the LUA scripting coming online, this could be a great time for the girl to present a 'challenge' to you.  Ideas for scripts.
-Demand better living conditions or a higher cut of the take.
-A slave girl could demand her freedom for the work she's done for you.  You could accept or decline, but there would be negatives for declining.  Also, if she's managed to save enough gold, she can try to buy her freedom.  You can still decline (or even take the gold and not free her) but there would be legal rammifications for doing so.
-A slave's family could try to rescue her.  A fight ensues, with the potential to capture family members.  If the girl wasn't legally enslaved, they could also go the authorities.
-A customer could fall in love with a slave and try to buy her from you.  Again accept/decline, but if you decline, he could attack or try other ways to get her from you.
-A noble falls in love with a slave and tries to buy, or blackmail her from you.  Declining could get you in trouble with the authorities, or have the noble put his house at war with yours.  And if the noble is a lady... well, you might have a chance to add to your brothel (but face alot more heat in the future)
-A girl gets injured badly.  Would require medical care.  How much you pay defines how long it'll take for her to heal.
-A free girl wants to retire.  You could either let her, agree to higher pay, or enslave her.
-A free girl falls in love and wants to stop whoring and start a family with the customer.  Again accept/pay/enslave, or you could kill/enslave the customer.
-A noble falls in love with a free girl, and she loves the noble as well.  If you allow them to marry, you'd have a powerful ally.
-A noble falls in love with a free girl, but she doesn't love the noble.  Do you protect the girl, facing the nobles wrath, or create an alliance.
 
 
Increasing the interactions with the authorities in Crossgate.  Right now it's just bribe and forget, or just pay the fines and forget.  They could do more things, such as increase your taxation rate, free all the girls in the dungeon, free individual girls, etc.  Would take a bit of work, but you could also try to fight off the authorities with your own gangs.  Expect to see alot of raids/attacks, but you wouldn't have to pay taxes anymore, and be free to do whatever you want.  Pay enough money in the future and you can make peace with them.  Maybe even have an end-game where you fight the police, and win =).
 
 
The matron could try to stand up to you for the girls sake.  Increasing rebellion or better living conditions.  Or make a less on the matron in the dungeon.
 
 
Attacks from the monsters in the catacombs.  Fights, thefts, kidnapping in both ways.
 
 
Just a few ideas, chip in any you might have.

[DocClox]

Some interesting ideas here.

1.  Make high profit girls a bit harder to find.

Hmmm... It occurrs to me that the core problem is probably that some girls are so much more profitable than others. In some ways it woud be better to give all the girls more of the less the same number of clients (and let that ramp up with training) and and use the fetishes and so forth as a modifier to training. That way a good girl might bring in twice as much as a bad one, as opposed seven or eight times as much. I'm not quite sure how we'd measure the rate at which a girl attracted more customers . It might be a good use for the level stat.

That said, I do like the idea of setting the chance of encountering a girl in inverse proportion to their profitability. We coud use a weigted lookup to manage the odds, probably use a two tier lookup list to save constantly recalculating it. It would also give girl designers some motivation not to make the girls too good, but without imposing artificial limits.

I'd also like to reduce the girl supply generally. Make the player make the most of what he can find.

  Slaves
 -Either scale the costs of the girls more, where the ones that make alot more costs far more (could be dramatic) or have several differnt tiers of markets.  The first market are your fairly cheap girls (20-40g per customer) and whatever uniques might fall into that category. 

   
I'd like to see multiple slave markets anyway, but I agree that the better slaves should cost more. In some cases a lot more. Get people to scrimp and save a bit so they can afford the better ones.

     -For girls you meet during a walk or your gang tries to convince.  The girls stats are averaged, and that number is compared to your fame score.  If it is too low, she thinks that she's above you, and won't work directly for you.  Potentially you could give options at the time.  Like she won't join you intially, but if you give her a large sum, she'll work for you.  Or that she has a fixed house percentage when she starts to work, agreed on by contract. 

     
Interesting idea. It's a bit at odds with the notion of the PC basically playing chickenhawk in Crossgate Market, but I like the idea that there might be some element of negotiation involved. Possibly scripted.

Again, we could solve a lot of the problem here by just weighting the encounter tables.

-Demand better living conditions or a higher cut of the take.

       
I think they already expect better conditions as they go up levels, but it would be nice to wrap a bit of interaction around it, so long as it doesn't get too intrusive. We' d need to try it out and see how it worked.

  -A slave girl could demand her freedom for the work she's done for you.  You could accept or decline, but there would be negatives for declining.  Also, if she's managed to save enough gold, she can try to buy her freedom.  You can still decline (or even take the gold and not free her) but there would be legal rammifications for doing so.

         
Maybe give her a chance of losing the level if you decline. Lack of motivation, and all that. Although I think any decent slaver ought to be skilled at motivating his girls. One to ponder...

Decent ideas for scripts in general.

Increasing the interactions with the authorities in Crossgate. 

Elaborating the Crossgate civil service is something else I've been keen to do for a while.
 

Attacks from the monsters in the catacombs.  Fights, thefts, kidnapping in both ways.

Yeah, there's a few events you can do along those lines. The catacombs are a weak point in the player's defences in many ways. If you had a slave from a high-tech or magical background, I can imagine her friends using the catacombs as a portal for a rescue attempt. Or an enemy gang magically hacking into the extradimensional space and launching a raid, maybe abducting one or two of your better girls. Or you send girls down on a raid, and some giant tentacled slime beast tracks the scent of pussy back to your door...

[Lorde]

This was a lot to go through but I agree on one point.

The price of girls needs to be increased across the board.  When I hit "endgame" I was swimming in money. So it's not like it will ramp up overall difficulty. It will however put a lot of that gold to use.


Also, make non slave girls fine with typical jobs like Bartender or Game dealer. But extremely apposed to being whores. (or even catacomb runners. Monster rape ain't fun. ) This gives players incentive to try and get that slave tattoo on or shower them with gifts till rebelliousness is 0. While making the glut of "Take a walk" girls less attractive early on.  And not just in the "they refuse to work" way we have now. But in a "I didn't sign up for this" <leaves> way.

Also, if a girl is free, and you go to "recapture" her. It should be far more risky than if they are slave. Specifically, there should be a very high chance that the authorities get involved. Arresting and or killing the gang you sent out. (the can still succeed though, if they do it's a kidnapping. )

[DocClox]

The price of girls needs to be increased across the board.  When I hit "endgame" I was swimming in money. So it's not like it will ramp up overall difficulty. It will however put a lot of that gold to use.

That's available right now as a config option

One thing I wanted to do was start a thread/contest/poll sort of thing to try and find some good preset config files. I thought people could submit what they thought worked for them, and an idea of how hard they thought it was, and people could try them out and discuss the results. Never quite got around to it for some reason, though.

[Bluebeholder]

I know it's already in the game but increasing the aggressiveness & power of the rival factions as you get stronger.  I find while they get better they don't grow nearly as fast as you do and end up meaninglessly weak real fast.

[Lorde]

That's available right now as a config option

One thing I wanted to do was start a thread/contest/poll sort of thing to try and find some good preset config files. I thought people could submit what they thought worked for them, and an idea of how hard they thought it was, and people could try them out and discuss the results. Never quite got around to it for some reason, though.

This I did not know, Thought that was for increasing how much it cost you to do certain actions like training. Gonna have to give that a looksy.

Also, now that I think about it I should probably just double the price of everything and see how that goes 

And that sounds like a great idea about the poll. 

  I know it's already in the game but increasing the aggressiveness &   power of the rival factions as you get stronger.  I find while they get   better they don't grow nearly as fast as you do and end up meaninglessly   weak real fast.
 

This goes triply so for new rivals as they appear. Your gangs do make short work of those easily.
 

[fires_flair]

well one thing I'm a big supporter of capping the number of customers a girl sees, it would make the game more realistic (I mean can a girl really see 10 customers in a night? and have sex with all of them). have groups take up more then one time slot, but raise the amount they give (so count them as 1.5-1.75, for income or something, but take up 2 time spots). I myself would cap it at 5-8 customers a shift (depending on how long we view each shift as lasting). you could increase fatigue rates so that it's harder (when whoring) to make girls who won't tire out.

I would also think having more goals to reach would make things more interesting, and adds difficulty from the player trying to achieve them. so, maybe have both short term and long term missions, rather then one long term event and a few random short term events.(I know this sounds a lot like sims brothel...) add some missions (I forget if this is in there) like "own __  of properties", and I would move the brothels into long term goals, since there are only what  5 or 6 of them. "have __  girls successfully preform __ job". successfully complete __ number of ___(movies). even if it doesn't make the game much more of a challenge it would make it more involving and more entertaining. it also barely, if at all, increases micromanaging.

maybe decrease the effectiveness of bribes as the toughness as fame goes up, I mean the more famous a person, building is, the harder it is to keep secrets hidden, thus the more people you have to bribe.

I would love to have people come seek my girls for themselves when you are famous enough. (this could create a late game challenge, sell __ girls)
I would also like the ability to train girls to be certain things, like ponygirls, or cat girls (yes like Slave Maker). there could also be seductress, dominatrix, or things like that.

I also think that it would make things harder if more traits were earned, instead of given at the beginning. the way I play I don't even have much trouble at the beginning (get all the gangs, buy/find a girl or two and I'm set)
 

[exodia91]

Difficulty has always been a bitch, because some people just want their sandbox, and others want their hardcore sim. And if you favor one, the other side is gonna bitch. Loudly. My suggestion, give the player more options to spend gold on, there's little use for it aside from slaves, items, and occasionally another brothel. I suggested in another thread, specialized training to raise a girls stats or give her traits, but make it cost money, perhaps a lot of money. Customizable brothel rooms should help, and I think I saw discussion kicking around about a players house, make that upgradeable and customizable, add more events, like a festival coming to town where you can give all your girls the week off in return for a massive happiness boost and income loss, or keep em working for a happiness malus and a significant income and customer boost (festivals are good for business in the red-light district too), and other stuff like this, it'll give a facade of difficulty (having money to do cool stuff when it pops up, while not really restricting sandboxy players at all.

[megamanx]

You could add a switch for sandbox mode when you start a new game, slave maker has that option so it has worked for them.

[DocClox]

This was more or less the idea of having different profiles with preset configs: we could have a normal, hard, very hard and sandbox.

[fixet]

well one thing I'm a big supporter of capping the number of customers a girl sees, it would make the game more realistic (I mean can a girl really see 10 customers in a night? and have sex with all of them).

if you want realism, the number should probably be higher than that, considering the turns are weeks, not days

I don't get people who look at this game and want "realism"
it's a game with magic portals that spit out anime girls

I mean, common sense is fine, but a realistic whore master would not be a very fun game

[DocClox]

if you want realism, the number should probably be higher than that, considering the turns are weeks, not days

 
+1 to that.

Assume a 7 day week and a 12 hour working shift. Assume that with tidying up basic hygene a trick takes two hours. we get 6 * 7 = 42 clients a week as a maximum. Which is silly. If nothing else I'd go nuts reading them all.

It's one of the things that didn't carry very well when the game time turn changed from one day to one week. That said, the sex is an abstraction in any case. Necessarily so, if you think about it.

  I don't get people who look at this game and want "realism"
it's a game with magic portals that spit out anime girls

Yeah. What most people mean when they say "realism" is "I don't want this game to interrupt my suspension of disbelief with too many unexpected elements". And the Principle of Least Surprise is a generally a good rule of thumb for most elements of game design.

The trouble is that expectations vary, and so one player's realism is not the same as another's.

[sgb]

I think they already expect better conditions as they go up levels, but   it would be nice to wrap a bit of interaction around it, so long as it   doesn't get too intrusive. We' d need to try it out and see how it   worked.

Just to expand on this, I have NEVER run into happiness problems related to housing.  I set everyone to average, even slaves, and never look at it again.  Even double-shifted girls can maintain stable happiness levels at average conditions.  If there actually is some mechanic that starts to make them unhappy at high enough levels, this effect needs to be drastically increased to make a noticable difference on gameplay.

Definitely agreed on high stats scaling slave market prices more.  The problem here is also coming up with something for free girls so players can't simply ignore the rebalanced slave market.  The negotiation thing that ker suggested wouldn't work, because most people here have dozens of custom girls.  It could take many months before a girl with low enough stats was chosen on a walk action, at which point the player is broke and/or bored.  Forcing players to use slave girls to run things initially would not go over well with most people.  Nothing really comes to mind at the moment to solve this one; making free girls higher maintaince wouldn't work as the player would just brand everyone then.  Lowering the maximum amount of income each girl can generate seems to best route at this point.  As others have said, no more super whores seeing 8+ customers at 100 gold a pop + tips.  ~4 should probably be the limit, while increasing the fatigue per customer so constitution doesn't become irrelevent with the lowered limit.

I think the best way to handle any proposed difficulty changes would be a have a new game choice between Sandbox or Sim mode.  Sandbox would be about how it is now, with basically little way to lose unless you really screw up.  Sim mode would incorporate whatever script ideas are decided on for making life harder for the player.  I'm not sure a 'easy/medium/hard' division is really needed here, as I think generally everyone here either wants things to be easy or difficult.  Further refinements to difficulty should be simply left to the player to control via the config file like they can now.

[megamanx]

just dozens i have a couple hundred custom from downloading the packs it would take me about ten years in game if negotiation were implemented to get them.

[DocClox]

Just to expand on this, I have NEVER run into happiness problems related to housing.  I set everyone to average, even slaves, and never look at it again.  Even double-shifted girls can maintain stable happiness levels at average conditions.  If there actually is some mechanic that starts to make them unhappy at high enough levels, this effect needs to be drastically increased to make a noticable difference on gameplay.
[/code]

Sounds like a bug, then. Although (off the top of my head) I think "average" should keep everyone happy until level 7 or so anyway, so maybe you're just hitting it. Probably the thing to do is stick them all in slave kennels and see if they hit happiness problems then.

Definitely agreed on high stats scaling slave market prices more.  The problem here is also coming up with something for free girls so players can't simply ignore the rebalanced slave market. 

I'm tending towards making the better girls appear less frequently. I thought about basing it on the number of customers they'd attract.

Code: [Select]

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 = 36

# customers     odds          d100 roll
8               = 1/36 = 0.03 00-03
7               = 2/36 = 0.06 04-09
6               = 3/36 = 0.08 10-17
5               = 4/36 = 0.11 18-28
4               = 5/36 = 0.14 29-42
3               = 6/36 = 0.16 43-58
2               = 7/36 = 0.19 59-77
1               = 8/36 = 0.22 78-99

So that would mean that almost 60% of the girls would be in the 1-3 customer bracket. Which is probably too low. Maybe the way to do it is to set the tier weights in the config file.

I'm not sure a 'easy/medium/hard' division is really needed here, as I think generally everyone here either wants things to be easy or difficult. 

The thing is, you have to bear in mind newcomers to the game. The hard level is going wind up being hard for the regulars on this list - the guys who know all the best tactics and want a setting that challenges them even when they do everything right. We need something for the newbies who want more than a sandbox, but are going to do lots of sub-optimal things because they're just learning the game. If we only have "hard" and "sandbox" then new players who want more than just a sandbox may be left without a way in.