Pink Petal Games
Feedback => Bugs and Game balancing => Topic started by: LordShame on June 09, 2010, 09:35:46 PM
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The other day, sgb pointed out to me that love increases from items seemed oddly excessive and that girls fell in love unexpectedly quickly from even small increases. I did some testing on a hunch, and it appears that this may be caused by girls getting a generic love boost when they receive anything from the player, a boost which depends on the price of the item. It's easy to see this in action: create two miscellaneous items with no effects, one which is worth 1 gold and the other worth 50000 gold. Giving the former to a new girl has no visible effect, but giving the latter to the same girl makes her fall in love instantly.
Now it makes sense that girls love receiving expensive gifts, but this mechanic (if it actually exists) is undocumented as far as I know and it'd be useful to at least have some numbers on it (if not to outright revise it), especially considering you can give a girl some costly items that are actually quite harmful to her.
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I'll dig into the code later and post back here with the way it currently chooses to boost love based on item cost.
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I think part of the problem is that LS' item pack bumped up prices for a lot of items. The love boost was sensible for the original item costs. (Two dozen red roses costs about the same as hiring a goon squad to spy on all my girls for the next two years - she damn well better fall in love with me at that price!)
Two questions from that. First is it easier to rebalance the game to fit the items, or the items to fit the game. We can always reduce money supply by changing the default config settings.
Second one: whichever way we do it, how do we establish price guidelines so other item creators can stay broadly consistent.
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Sorry, this slipped my mind. We'll assume the item has a badness of less than 20, so they like it; otherwise, none of the following applies.
It currently divides the item cost by 50, then adds that to the girl's happiness. It adds the same number minus 1 to PCLove. For example, an item with a cost of 5000 would result in happiness of +100 and PCLove of +99. Also, obedience is always boosted by +1, PCHate dropped by -2 and PCFear dropped by -1.
Definitely not the best method for boosting happiness and love, I agree. Any suggestions on a modified algorithm, or a better way of determining it? I suppose I could at least just have it work on a curve or something.
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Isn't there a slider in the item creator for whether or not an item is bad for a girl. Why not base happiness off that. Or just redo that stat for happiness solely. I have never seen a girl not accept an item that's bad for her not matter what the slider was at. (Might be the way I train girls though) so that could put that stat to use.
I also noticed with a lot of items in the Item creator that Item makers (And I've done this too) Just add + Happiness to the items. meaning that people probably didn't know that price = More happy. So an alternate thing you could do is drop the whole price based happiness and let the item creators put those on the items.
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I'd say axe the automatic love and happiness gains altogether. Items that are meant to boost these stats already do so. Nice clothing and jewelry usually already come with a large happiness gain for example. As Doc said, this system made sense back in the earlier versions; but now that stat gains have been fine tuned there's really no reason for the bonuses.
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Hmm. I think giving items which don't have any inherent love or happiness boosts should still make the girl happy and boost her love, personally. I do agree that the current rates are quite ridiculous, though.
Perhaps, for the time being at least: cut the increase to 1/10 of what it is now, with a further 5% reduction for every point of badness the item has (ex. 19 badness = 95%)?
That way, an item worth 5000 gold would give 10 happiness and 9 love (assuming item badness of 0).
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Hmm, so a 1000 gold item would give 2 happiness and ~1 love then? I guess that would satisfy having some effect without making things silly. While I didn't sit there and average everything out, generally most items a player is going to use from the current LS item list are between 100-2000 gold, so that seems managable without having to tweak much on the item file end. The only trouble I forsee is catacomb items, which are sometimes valued at over 10000+ gold. The badness modifer sounds like a good way to keep these items at their intended effects without drastically changing anything.
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To me this is a great idea as you shouldn't be able to make someone head over heels in love with you in one day. That breaks even ANIME Logic :D
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No it doesn't. I can't count how many anime have true love in the first FIVE SECONDS of meeting someone.
Also, I say keep it behind the scenes happiness from items in in, but implement the badness thing Dagoth suggested, WM is gonna be modded a lot when its released probably, and people are gonna want their own items and whatnot and completely revamp the game, in which case item happiness should be coded in. as giving EVERY SINGLE positive item a very small happiness increase would just seem meh and generic and pointless when we already have the more advanced and cooler auto happiness in.
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But that is FANgirl/boy love not true love as love is built through weeks/years not 5 seconds looking at the face and/or other parts
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Aw man, I had a long-ass post written up, but the board ate it. But maybe that's a good thing, it'll force me to summarize for once. :D Alright, here's the gist of it, sorry if it's a little terse.
(Two dozen red roses costs about the same as hiring a goon squad to spy on all my girls for the next two years - she damn well better fall in love with me at that price!)
Oh, expensive stuff needs to be effective, I wouldn't debate you on this. The main issue was that the stuff which was meant to increase love slightly as a side-effect was way too good at it on account of its price tag. With the old gowns for example, you paid for charisma, but you were meant to get a little love and happiness on the side, as opposed to the dresses where you paid for charisma and got bonus libido. But with the high-grade items, both gowns and dresses give craploads of love, so the nuance was lost. (Gowns don't give love anymore, because girls can buy them for themselves. I made them cheaper per point of charisma to compensate, but I will probably specialize them somewhere down the line to make them more interesting and useful.)
Hmm. I think giving items which don't have any inherent love or happiness boosts should still make the girl happy and boost her love, personally. I do agree that the current rates are quite ridiculous, though.
Perhaps, for the time being at least: cut the increase to 1/10 of what it is now, with a further 5% reduction for every point of badness the item has (ex. 19 badness = 95%)?
That way, an item worth 5000 gold would give 10 happiness and 9 love (assuming item badness of 0).
The mechanic itself is a good idea that makes sense, but the numbers on it were clearly meant for the old items which had a generally lower and narrower price range. Your reduction proposal makes sense, though maybe I'd set the reduction to 1/4 instead of 1/10 so it's still relevant on the less expensive items. Either way would be an improvement, though. And in any case it's good to have a peek into the love system mystery box, so thanks for digging that up!
The only trouble I forsee is catacomb items, which are sometimes valued at over 10000+ gold. The badness modifer sounds like a good way to keep these items at their intended effects without drastically changing anything.
Yeah. The thing with the price of catacomb items is that it needs to be high enough that if you find something good that you don't intend to use, you can get some decent cash out of it so it's not a total bummer. (Plus I like the idea that if you're in financial trouble, you can pawn a powerful artifact and keep your operation running for a few weeks at least; it's almost like an extra life, heheh.) That said, now that we know exactly how the system works, at least we can put -love effects to keep it in check if it seems appropriate.
Haha, I still made a long-ass post. Can't keep a writin' guy down, I guess.
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OK, implemented it. I went with 1/6 the old rate as a compromise.
So, the initial "value" is first reduced by 5% for every point of badness, then this value is divided by 300 for the happiness increase. If the item is worth less than 300, it rounds up to 1 point of happiness; otherwise, it always rounds down. The love increase is still 1 less than whatever the happiness increase is.
Also, girls having good items taken away will have their happiness reduced using the same formula.
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so a 300 gold item would give 1 happiness point as well as no love points is that right. a 600 gold item with 0 bad points would be 2 happiness points and one love point correct. and is the 5% a compound decrease or would anything over 20 bad points give no bonus what so ever.
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Hello everyone, this is my first post (I've been lurking for a while).
I've build up a simple excel table with the formulas above to test what happens when you alter the values and calculations.
After some modifications I have found a formula that looks good:
Happiness increase = round [ ( item value - Badness Factor*Badness ) / Hap Factor ] ,
where 'Badness Factor' is 10 (not 5%) and 'Hap Factor' is 300 (1/300), and rounding up for Badness zero and down for 1-19. For badness higher than 19 I suggest fixed values.
Since this is my first post I don't know if this thing is going to let me attach files or post links, anyway there they go:
pic:
(http://j.imagehost.org/0940/HapLuvTable.jpg) (http://j.imagehost.org/view/0940/HapLuvTable)
Feel free to play with values / input data / formulas. Hope you enjoy it.
Cheers.
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Well, anything with a badness of 20 or higher is automatically disliked by the girl, and the happiness amount formula isn't run in that case. In fact, it just gives the item to her and equips it if it's equippable, and tells you she didn't appreciate it. It doesn't even actually reduce her happiness or love or anything like that. It would probably be better to have it do so if the item is bad enough to warrant it, and maybe add in a possibility for her to refuse it (based on slave/non-slave status, aggressive traits, etc.).
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would something with 19 points in badness give 5% of what it would if it had 0 points is what i meant or would it give more than because of a compound decrease.
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Ahhmm... Point taken, didn't know how refuse mechanics worked.
What about results for badness zero ('C' column)? You have to give a girl three 'superb' 10 000 gifts if you want to gain her heart. (well, maybe if you buy her a car... or three) or +30 of the 'cheaper' 1000 gifts (lots of fancy clothes, nice shoes, jewelry...). Obviously, it's better to give +love items (diamond ring's time) or just chat with her -show her you care, call me old fashioned. I think that could be the idea.
On the other hand, linking refuse / badness reactions to girls traits sounds good to me. Iron will, fearless, agressive and such are cannon fodder for 'gift saturation bombing' wich raises love easily (that was the problem, right?). And it just can't be the same giving gifts to free girls (they would likely think you really mean it) than giving gifts to slave ones ('don't give me more things, I want freedom') The question is: it would be a relatively easy thing to implement or will give lots of headaches to devs?
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The main problem that I see is that currently if you get yourself a high value low badness item and then buy yourself some 25g cheap perfume then you can give the high value item to her then take it right back and then give it again and take it back. This will max her love and 0 her happiness but then you just do the same thing with the 25g cheap perfume and you can max obedience and happiness and end up having her with maxed love obedience and happiness and no items. I do not mind the current item value verses love system and obedience as well but there needs essentially be an undo type relationship for giving and taking.
I would recommend having a floating effect for happiness for gifts so that if you accidentally give an item that you did not want to give then you can take it back without penalty. I know that most of the stats have a floating effect where they end up being over 100 or under 0 they only read between 0-100 but their actual values can be in a much broader range. My suggestion would be to add that effect to happiness but then have it cut off any extra when the turn is advanced. So if you had 150 happiness you would only get the benefit of 100 but you could take away a 50 happiness item without going down to 50. But then all of the effects from the turn effect from the 100 happiness point. Of course this should only be implemented if you fix the problem of having items that you give to a girl and then take them away leaving their love and obedience behind.
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I never tried that, but if love is not being removed by taking away an item you should probably mention that in the bug thread so the devs are more likely to see it.