Pink Petal Games
Feedback => Bugs and Game balancing => Topic started by: Flowersteel on December 30, 2010, 11:26:07 AM
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Im thinking the game would improve from a longer start-to-mid game, and I think the game generally lacks in the endgame. I still think the games great, mind ye ;)
kaneage did a mod where the girls cost 60-100k in the auction and you started with 200k. Prices were increased on the gangs usage as well (I think times 4). This had the unfortunate effect that you never really bought any girls from the auction.
Good things that really slowed progress down though, and that I would recommend working into the game generally:
1) No option to expand brothel, or change price to apr 75.000 per expansion
2) Increase price on gangs by up to x5
3) Increase price of girls to x2
4) Decrease the chance of encounters in the catacombs by girls
5) Brothel no 5 should only be accessible if you have a working bar (defined as at least 2 bartenders & 1 stripper)
6) Brothel no 4 should only be accessible if you have a working casino (defined as at least 3 dealers & 1 customer service girl)
If you cant expand your number of rooms, and gangs are rather expensive - it will take longer, and be more of a struggle to get to midgame (2+ brothels). If you have added accessibility needs for Brothel 4+5 (endgame), you need to do a bit more of micromanagement in midgame to progress.
I found that kaneages mod definitely challenged me a lot more in the beginning of the game, but I think I found a winning formula that is too easy to employ, so Im trying to come up with a clever idea for making the game more challenging.
Hope this is food for thought.
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Well, if you don't mind compiling the game yourself ;)
1) No option to expand brothel, or change price to apr 75.000 per expansion
Search and edit the numbers to your liking in cScreenBuildingSetup.cpp:
if(g_InterfaceEvents.CheckButton(buyrooms_id))
{
if(!g_Gold.brothel_cost(5000))
g_MessageQue.AddToQue("You need 5000 gold to add 5 rooms", 1);
else
g_Brothels.GetBrothel(g_CurrBrothel)->m_NumRooms += 5;
}
If you like, I think you can safely comment out the entire section to disable it.
Also, in the same file (This is just the text you see on the sreen, where the 5 is the cost/1000):
void cScreenBuildingSetup::init()
{
...
ss << "Add Rooms: " << tariff.add_room_cost(5) << " gold";
...
}
2) Increase price on gangs by up to x5
3) Increase price of girls to x2
You can change this in the configs
4) Decrease the chance of encounters in the catacombs by girls
In WorkExploreCatacombs.cpp:
if ((g_Dice%100)+1 > max(girl->combat(), girl->magic())) // WD: Allow best of Combat or Magic skill
{
stringstream noplay;
noplay << "Nobody wants to play with you today in the catacombs :( ";
girl->m_Events.AddMessage(noplay.str(), IMGTYPE_PROFILE, DayNight);
return true;
}
Unfortunately, the encounter rate depends on the girl's combat/magic skill. You can change g_Dice%100 to g_Dice%50, for example, but girls with over 50 magic/combat will never get encounters.
Better if you give all girls a flat rate by changing the first line to so:
if ((g_Dice%100)+1 > 10)
which gives all girls a flat 10% encounter rate, for example
edit: actually something like this would work better:
if ((g_Dice%100)+1 > max(girl->combat(), girl->magic())) // WD: Allow best of Combat or Magic skill
{
if ((g_Dice%100)+1 > 50)
stringstream noplay;
noplay << "Nobody wants to play with you today in the catacombs :( ";
girl->m_Events.AddMessage(noplay.str(), IMGTYPE_PROFILE, DayNight);
return true;
}
}
This set encounter rates to 50%, for example
5) Brothel no 5 should only be accessible if you have a working bar (defined as at least 2 bartenders & 1 stripper)
6) Brothel no 4 should only be accessible if you have a working casino (defined as at least 3 dealers & 1 customer service girl)
Couldn't you just employ the girls temporarily to get around this? This is possible to change, but I'm not sure how useful it would be :/
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I don't think simply making everything more expensive would improve the game difficulty. It's already easy to win without having a single girl, and you can easily make over a thousand gold per day with just a few experienced girls. You would have to completely overhaul the gang portion of the game, or even remove it entirely and work from there, before any changes to the brothel end would matter.
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Search and edit the numbers to your liking in cScreenBuildingSetup.cpp:
In WorkExploreCatacombs.cpp:
where are these files. ive been looking and the only ones i see are the XML files and they dont let me do what im wanting to do. Just tell me where to look and ill gladly do the rest of the leg work.
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It's source files man ;D
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Interesting, intersting. Im not much of a coder, so I wouldnt know half of the stuff needed to change the things you describe above - although they make sense to me ;)
I agree that once youve understood the basics of the game, its not that difficult to break. I was simply aiming at some easily changed parameters to increase start/midlevel game - and a good bit of the things kaneage did in his config appealed to me. And others I felt detracted from the game (because youd never use the slavemarket girls), but overall I liked the sentiment of trying to generate a more difficult - yet still interesting gameplay without breaking the spirit of the game.
Ill try to think up some better suggestions ;)
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A few thoughts on the general subject.
First of all, thanks for looking at the problem. This is the sort of effort I'd hoped would result when I wrote the config file code in the first place, and it's nice to see it getting some serious attention.
Second thing: remember this needs to be accessible to new players as well.The game can be very hard to get started with as it is. If we just crank up the difficulty to the point where experienced players are challenged, we risk making the game unplayable for newbies.
Third thing: I think the real challenge lies in making the game difficulty continue to rise as the game progresses. Currently there's an initial "hump" at the start of the game where you have to run at a loss and take on debt to survive. Then, all of a sudden, you find yourself established, and after that it's just a case of taking on more girls. In a sense the game is over as soon as you're cash-flow positive.
Now, the problem there is that raising prices makes the "hump" harder to get over, but doesn't really extend the period of difficulty. What the game really needs is a prolonged series of challenges to keep the player on his toes. Sadly I don't have any good ideas how to do that purely as a configuration issue.
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Flowersteel: yeah, quite a lot of stuff is still hard coded into the game :)
Also, I have to agree with others with this one,
The problem, as DocClox mentioned, is that perpetual player challenge is not easy to implement using the simple config files we have so far. They can be used to slow the player down at the start and fine-tuning between the various source of incomes, but beyond that, it does not offer anything to stop the player from achieving a run-away profit toward the mid-game. Most likely, the challenge will have to come from scripted or procedurally generated events. That's the whole idea with LUA, if I'm not mistaken. The config files were certainly in the right direction, though.
Anyways, as for ideas; first, we should decide whether or not we want an open-ended game or not.
For closed-ended game, we can give a backstory and have a really hard end-game goal. For example, searching 100+ worth of catacomb floors to locate your father's doomsday device or something equally silly. In this case, the end-goal acts as a HUGE money sink to gear up and equip your elite party of ~50 girls to raid the final floor. Every 10 floors or so, there should be a significant reward beyond common items. The rewards should be unique and have a bit of benefit to the player to encourage them to work their way down the catacomb (eg. new demon girls for recruitment, discount tickets, access to better slave markets etc.). Once the end-goal is reached, however, the money sink is gone, so it's essentially the same free-mode we have now.
For open-endness, we can try a survival-mode type game where the player is trying to wage an endless war against catacomb/alien/gangs/whatever invaders. Difficulties increases exponentially with time with the aim of overwhelming the player eventually. In the current version, we do have gangs that attack the player occasionally, but it’s far too easy (and mostly non-existence where game balance is concerned).
This is not a city-building/designer-type game or anything, so I think anyone would be too attached to their brothel, but that's just my opinion. We can always have a free mode, which plays as it is now.
Anyways, happy modding!
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Most likely, the challenge will have to come from scripted or procedurally generated events. That's the whole idea with LUA, if I'm not mistaken. The config files were certainly in the right direction, though.
Yeah, the config files were attempt #1 to sort the problem. Plan B was to use building management, Lua events and city wards to keep presenting new challenges.
- Restrict available resources at start of game. Fewer customers, less cash per customer, many rooms unavailable, limited brothel size, whatever. Make bypassing those restrictions dependent on unlocking other city wards.
- Make unlocking each ward a significant milestone requiring a lot of player resources. Lua is used to implement the unlocking quests. These can require a certain amount of money, a slavegirl trained to a certain standard; a rare item from the catacombs; vary the conditions from one ward to the next.
- Other Lua events can trigger based on the city wards controlled bu the player. So an event will be more challenging with 5 wards controlled than it would be with just one, and some will not happen at all until the correct ward has been fully controlled.
Doing that, I reckon we could smooth the difficulty curve quite a lot.
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I think this difficulty curve could be introduced by expanding the functionility of your revals:
For example, if a city has a set max customers there will be somewhen a point you cannot attract more customers unless you confront your opponents. And to confront them you will have to invest much money and risk being punished by the jurisdiction. The game should force you increase your budget for advertisement, security, gangs, etc. as the game progresses.
So far I have only seen that the opponents will eventually come to you with some super strong gangs, but if you put all your money on the bank you couldn't care less about their theft. Maybe they should also try you kidnap your girls or maybe even just entice away some unhappy/rebellious ones which are close to run away anyway. This would require you to put more girls/money on guarding gangs and security girls.
Also gangs currently are a little boring to deal with. Also the money you can spend on them is limited. All the gangs are pretty much the same expect for their starting stats. You could for example accumulate all their stats to calculate a level and use this as a multiplier for their costs. This way your gangs could be cheap in the beginning (gangs with starting stats should be in the first few levels) and cost your last shirt when they hit level 10. Using the gangs level in the fighting messages will also give you an impressive of how strong your opponents gangs are. ^-^
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Guys - polol, Doc and mr. Kus thx for the comments. I so absolutely get your points, and I especially agree with Docs comments about the "inital hump" not being the issue - but rather generating a mid and end game once you get over that initial issue. Im a strategic powerplayer by heart, and would hate to have a closed end game. Its like playing monopoly, owning the entire board, and everyone else leaves. Whats the point of the game if you have to stop at a point ? ;)
I would still suggest to limit the expansion opportunities of your current brothel. This doesnt deter new players, and force players into using gangs to expand in order to earn more money. I also think its difficult in the current form to "config" your way out of the lacking mid/end game. And I agree that the Lua scripting can add a lot in this regard.
What I would suggest, though, is have a natural progression of "resources" that you need. 1. You need girls to gain gold. 2. You need territories to gain new brothels.
Expand this thinking, and you add a layer of complexity to the game that will not confuse new players, and keep veterans occupied.
An idea could be to have the 3 brothel placed in the catacombs, and in order to build there, you need to sacrifice 100 monster girls. All of a sudden you have a 3rd resource (monster girls) that require new actions (catacomb combat).
Next step could be that in order to get the 4th brothel, you need a favours from the citizens. Favours could be earned primarliy through gambling dens (so you need to setup a casino), or setting slaves and patrons free. That gives you a new resource you can gather with existing resources, and one youll only need late in the game.
Next step could be to introduce gems, or magical potions, or that your girls have to win contest or any number of "resources" that are required to be able to buy the next brothel.
Ideally, you want new players to initially do logical stuff, like whore out girls. Then get stuck, and realise you need to take over new territories in order to buy a new brothel. The Lua events and the missions are nice to give players an idea of how other options work than the most logical ones. In all honesty, as a new player, it is very difficult to identify the value of some actions like gambling and XXX entertainment, and the like.
If players cannot easily expand their current brothel (by having a steep price, maybe even exponentially increasing for the brothel in question), they would have a need to go out and get the next one in line. You can also "re-invent" some of the cool stuff already in the game, like the bar, the casino, etc. in order to make resources, or spend resources.
More types of resources = more complexity.
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Lots of talk about restricting brothel slots, but I've honestly never seen that 'resource' as an issue in the game. I don't think I've EVER needed to expand beyond my initial brothel except to acquire every single unique girl in my directory. More than 6-7 girls whoring per shift tends to be the limit before you start running in to 'no more customers were interested in X'. Throw in a Matron, cleaner, security and catacomb runner for the hell of it, and you're still under 20 slots.
I think the best ways to improve difficultly at the brothel end would be to require more non-whoring jobs to have your brothel running smoothly. This would require the stripper, bar and casino jobs to become fully functioning jobs of course. Just throwing some thoughts out there:
-Require X amount of bar staff, otherwise customer flow suffers severly.
-The recent update already made steps here, but the brothel should require multiple security girls later in the game to avoid damage.
-Tweak catacombs so that there's only one attempt made per turn, with all girls assigned to catacombs pooling their skills. No more 'one uber girls solos the dungeon'. Also, remove the ability to gain beasts from catacombs. It makes the Beast Capturer job pointless. Remove the ability for gangs to run catacombs.
-Remove the ability to have beast sex acts at all unless you have beasts, or have the gold penalty for not having one severe.
-The recent update already made steps here, but have torturing without a torturer be extremely ineffective.
-Reduce advertising effectiveness, improve the rate at which advertising girls improve advertising.
Basically, just require more and more non-whoring jobs to keep your business running. Right now you don't really need ANY of them except a cleaner, and maybe a matron if you're really lazy. This wouldn't simply be a 'more money to get going' change, this would require more time and micromanagement to get established.
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Late game the problem lies 100% with gangs. Right now, it's very easy to get a near-maxed guard or two with level 4 weapons and safely ignore gangs forever. Likewise a few high-stat gangs will have your rivals bled dry in a few months, and you a millionare. There's basically no way to lose the gang war unless you completely neglected them early game.
There needs to be a way for a near-maxed guard to lose occasionally, but without leading to a snowball effect that causes all your gangs to get killed off. Have it possible for an uber-gang to fail to guard at all, resulting in no damage to the gang but damage to your assets or brothel (having Security girls come in here as well). On the flipside, sabotaging gangs should fail and take losses more often. Make recruiting costs increase with gang average stat level. Replacing skilled gang members should not be cheap.
I'd suggest cutting the gang limit as well. You can have 5-6 gangs sabotaging at once without sacrificing defence, which kind of decimates your rivals in short order. With only 4-5 gangs, combined with one guard no longer being a 100% safeguard, you'd have to be more careful.
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Late game the problem lies 100% with gangs. Right now, it's very easy to get a near-maxed guard or two with level 4 weapons and safely ignore gangs forever. Likewise a few high-stat gangs will have your rivals bled dry in a few months, and you a millionare. There's basically no way to lose the gang war unless you completely neglected them early game.
There needs to be a way for a near-maxed guard to lose occasionally, but without leading to a snowball effect that causes all your gangs to get killed off. Have it possible for an uber-gang to fail to guard at all, resulting in no damage to the gang but damage to your assets or brothel (having Security girls come in here as well). On the flipside, sabotaging gangs should fail and take losses more often. Make recruiting costs increase with gang average stat level. Replacing skilled gang members should not be cheap.
I'd suggest cutting the gang limit as well. You can have 5-6 gangs sabotaging at once without sacrificing defence, which kind of decimates your rivals in short order. With only 4-5 gangs, combined with one guard no longer being a 100% safeguard, you'd have to be more careful.
I'd rather have even more gangs on my side, and make it so enemy gangs can team up to attack in a unified attack, increasing enemy gangs and increasing enemy gang strength.
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With kaneages config I was forced to not have any gangs until about 5-7 weeks in (with gangs being very expensive). And it took a long time to build up a suitable gang that could handle the opposition.
A minor thing - I completely agree that guarding duty for gangs should only be for guarding against other gangs, and the security girls should keep the girls in check. That would mean youd need to make a dependable security girl early on.
I dont understand why you would only need 20 slots in a brothel, when 200 can net you 60.000+ gold per week. But then Im also going very slowly through the weeks and not just spammng the "next week" button once I have a sustainable economy. That tactic should also be discouraged IMHO.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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")
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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.
(http://www.memedepot.com/uploads/0/207_not_sure_if_serious.jpg)
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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.
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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.
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(http://www.memedepot.com/uploads/0/207_not_sure_if_serious.jpg)
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.
So I am serious, Mr. Dick. What's that? You like to be called "Joker"? Oh, I know, Dick.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Well I agree having some extra info on the enemy would be a nice touch, I don't think their activities impact at all (indirectly that is, directly you do know when they attack/steal territory/beat up a streetwalker).
Customer pools that visit a brothel are not influenced by enemy brothels/your other brothels.
I'd like to be able to set what sexual act is available on a per girl basis, so one brothel can have specialists, instead of the workaround now with each brothel being the only way to segment sexual acts. I guess it stems from my current playstyle of less is more, it doesn't really matter much if you have 5 Brothels x50 girls games, I mean, who wants to set 250 girls individually? Micro vs. Macro I guess.
necrodrool, if customer satisfaction and fame worked correctly ( they may already, they seem to kinda work in my games) then adding the "unlock' more brothels (levels?) would be cool too. Those that don't want to, could always shell out 5k for more rooms in the first brothel. Or some other workaround, in this idea.
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Customer pools that visit a brothel are not influenced by enemy brothels/your other brothels.
Then they should be.
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Perhaps you could add some sort of 'fame' score onto your gangs. Then when they get successful enough, they grab a random set of your girls and set off to make a rival brothel. This would help with the 'my gangs are all powerful' problem.
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Perhaps you could add some sort of 'fame' score onto your gangs. Then when they get successful enough, they grab a random set of your girls and set off to make a rival brothel. This would help with the 'my gangs are all powerful' problem.
That sounds awesome, although rage inducing for some. If you could go further and "quest" with your remaining loyal gangs to search,destroy and recapture, it'd expand on and vary the end game, a revolt from within, giving more gravitas to actually keep crusading to crush all opposing you.
An even further stretch would be to implement gang loyalty, use this as a reason why it'd matter, and then give you the option to assign sons to gangs to raise loyalty. Maybe you could vary the code on the 'guard comes and takes girl to prison'? IDK. I know sons were originally planned to be gang leaders, but I think that's dead jim.
Zanfib, yeah, I'd like to see the max. customers in each brothel raised, and then influenced by more factors (unsure if bar/gambling jobs raise customers, it appeared to in one of my games but IDK) Making it vary with the amount of opponents/brothels/their success could then expand the scope, adding to the 'business' side of this game. Money still won't be a problem though, if this starts to impact, you'd invariably go to war and win.
Many aspects to this idea yeah?
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One game 'mod' I made myself a while back was to try and make the game a pure brothel sim;
-All girls in my file were set to slave so they only appeared in slave market. Walk find % set to 0.
-Starting gold increased to 10000 but slave purchase costs tripled. This resulted in girl costs from about 2500-6000 each, allowing the player some choice early on but greatly slowing the rate at which you can get new girls.
This run requires some self-imposed rules since they cannot be configured:
-Only allowed two gangs. They can only use Guard, Training, and Spy on Girls. I realize this limits you to one brothel, however having even one business means you have a chance to get a free girl every turn which defeats the point of a slave market only run
-You must free all girls immediately after purchase; no abusing 100% house take and lowered rebelliousness. Do not re-brand them later on.
-Try to avoid using catacombs for the same reasons as the no business rule; no free girls. Adjust your catacomb-only items if you can't live without them.
-Girls from pregnancy are okay so long as you use the default pregnancy times. It is long enough for them to grow up that it does not really break things, and without catacombs this is the only way to obtain random monstergirls.
-Never save and reload to re-roll the slave market roster.
-Optional, but since WM has no end give yourself a time limit; ie see how much gold you have after three years, or having X number of girls within a certain time limit.
I found this type of game remained interesting for longer than a normal playthrough, but it still eventually reaches a point where you have silly amounts of money and can start getting new girls every turn (hence the suggestion to give yourself a time limit). You can further refine difficulty by adjusting tax rates and/or income.
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That sounds good, I can see how it can make the game more interesting and extend it further. I guess after the first year though, once you get a girl to 100 fame, and if she gets 100 constitution/you give her items to get there, you'll quickly raise the capital to rapidly progress?
I don't like progressing quickly too much, so what I did in my latest custom 'rules imposed' play was:
-Not buy constitution raising items, or pretty much any items really. Just the clothes that have minor bonuses, to sort of set a 'uniform' of sorts. Also so you still use some of the items, and burn up some cash.
-Not go into the catacombs, for the same reasons you outlined, and that money also comes easily in there. It's annoying because I haven't set the items to be obtainable in the shop, though that's an easy fix. Although, it does make serious afflictions a real consequence from neglecting/abusing girls, so if you like that sort of option, leave mind fuck/fragile/retarded stats uncureable. It'll make you think twice about how you value them and your income stream.
-Start out with one slave girl, and only use her daughters to expand girl-wise. A slow process, but you could also make use of her daughters for the same reason. Just use customers to do that process, or yourself if you have no qualms lol.
So as you can see, it's slow going early on, and progresses slowly. I also like doing these last two to make it more difficult.
-Have no gangs whatsoever. There's risk in whoring, and coupled with the uncurable damage that may happen, (also slows down the birth rate, rather brutally) it makes the next point more advantageous. Alternatively, config file to raise the rape possibly.
-Once you get enough girls, change your brothel to a bar/gambling den. Lower income further slows down, but keeps more girls 'intact'. You could also just have them be massusses in the beginning to minimize risks and income. I like how the sex rules of the brothel also apply for these jobs.
Some of these you can do by config file alteration, but I do like to have more regular play style games able to load without swapping config/item files.
I also played like this:
-Only employ 'damaged' girls. Girls that have addictions/negative traits.
-Cure them with the income they generate, and then make them 'Free girls'. If you have too many girls, release them.
-Usually I also make these girls work in bar/gaming, to lower incomes and also if they're damaged, is it right to make them work (solely) as whores?
-No gangs other than for guarding. You don't want to be receiving daughters from businessmen.
This is more of a 'good' play style, and also works on burning up that capital, while keeping income lower.
-I usually keep the girls that are 'uncureable' because their cure items are in the catacombs, which I avoid. Again, the alternative way is to make a shop item/change the existing item to be shop obtainable.
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Yeah, a super whore hitting 100 fame and 8 customers a day @ 100 gold is usually the 'end' of any playthrough. At that point you really can't fail, unless you set a sky-high tax rate. That could make the early game too hard though, I'll have to try 25% and see from there. I totally agree with the constitution thing; once you hit around 90, you basically never have to manage that girl again. I've considered removing them from my item list entirely simply beacuse they break the game too badly. I think I did notice from an all slave market run is that the price of slaves is calculated very oddly. Relatively average girls going for near 6000, while some above average ones going for 2500. Needs to be reworked, or better yet set completely manually from the girl config file.
I'm not sure you can do a pure no-gang run though. Without any guards, you start losing huge chunks of cash around month 5-6. It doesn't seem possible to have enough income at that point to keep absorbing the losses. I usually just have two high-stat guards and ignore the gang part of the game entirely. In r593 my game crashes after buying a second brothel, so having no businesses works out anyway.
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The second brothel crash seems to be caused by using a brothel name that exists in another save file. It may be related to the autosave, I'm not sure, but it hasn't happened to me since I started making sure to give each brothel a unique name.
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Well I get around the no guard thing by depositing any positive cash into the bank each round. If you got no cash=no attacks. Using the keyboard shortcuts helps with that added micromanagement. I guess I could cut that out altogether by making the guards cost much higher, having one uber gang on guard, making sure they're stocked with healing potions every now and again, and bumping up the rape chance so whoring still is a risky business. But I like not having guards at all, eliminating the management altogether and not having that temptation of sending them to the catacombs to search for a cure for rarer negative traits lol.
I'm doing a play through now where I'll have 1 girl on security (to exploit the extra confrontations it generates) and still having no guards. In another I was going to have catacomb raiding girls, but I decided to start another game instead.
Interesting about the second brothel naming thing, I try to keep my number of girls down, as I find I start to lose interest when multiple brothels are involved. Although now with all these new girl packs I've got in the last couple of months I might need to do a 'gotta catch them all!' game to see all the new ones I still haven't encountered yet.
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I limit myself to adding 10 rooms max per brothel. After the 3rd or 4th you really don't even need to add unless you get bored. In between you can sell randoms to replace with uniques you get, but that can generate a lot of money so usually once a brothel is full I swap catacomb girls to beast capture and stop town walk arounds.
I like the gang warfare as it is right now, I get constant conflicts. After the first brothel even aquiring territory often results in a gang war and often a gang wiped out. I can't deny that if I get bored or run out of my own limitation ideas I'll be looking for this post again though. On turn summary I only check highlighted girls, and in management I check happiness to choose which girls to check on.
To burn money I first equip any girls that combat in any way. I try to keep magic higher than combat and keep those stats up, but exp eventually kills that idea. I do that because the current script basically counts magic only when it's higher than combat level. Magic has a higher chance of winning though, if you want to make it harder, lower magic and focus on combat. I choose magic because it's harder to boost and costs more.
Another money burner is to sift through the girls and if their "looks" are below 95% try to bring them up. In the long run though, this generates more money, but for a while it burns a lot if you don't weed through the girls you use. To be honest though, while my profits are in the red I don't use girls with addictions or disease.
It sounds like people are going to pick the game back up later, so I'm also curious as to what they'll do; but, until then, I appreciate some ideas on how to challenge myself. I've been a gamer for over 20 years and hate when people tell me a game is easy/finished but they used cheats/bugs/breaks etc. I don't use the quit/reload to get items/slaves/walk arounds, would be too easy. I always quit when I'm ready to hit next week, then hit it right after I load.
Sorry for the WoT, but I think this is an interesting topic and would like to see the ideas and responses. I currently like the gang warfare, but I can guarantee that at some point I will try these ideas. I'm a casual gamer, but every game reaches the point where you want something new eventually.
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Didn't see it mentioned as I skimmed through, but you can hurt your cashflow especially in the beginning a lot by prohibiting all but one kind of sex. I usually do Lesbian. Since there are six kinds of brothels, you can have one for each type if you want. Then the game becomes a micromanagement one of checking every so often to switch each girl to the type of sex brothel you want her to get better at. I've got some girls who are level 30 and still not maxed at some kinds of sex because I restricted everything but one kind.
I'm considering what would be a good way of improving the mid to end game, but what appeals the most to me is the idea of gradually (as opposed to an instant poof she's a slut item) corrupting your girls into sluts or turning your nervous/meek girls into sadists, or that kind of thing. The system where the girl gains skills as she grows to love a job type seems to work well for this (like how a Matron gets Charismatic and Psychic, etc). It seems like we just need some of the less supported jobs like Stripper to have their own aspects.
Ahh, I have a lot of ideas, but I suppose I should stop being lazy and go learn some c++ if I want to see them implemented.
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The second brothel crash seems to be caused by using a brothel name that exists in another save file. It may be related to the autosave, I'm not sure, but it hasn't happened to me since I started making sure to give each brothel a unique name.
Hmm, good to know. I usually just name my brothels One, Two, Three, etc. so that would conflict with other saves.
I like the gang warfare as it is right now, I get constant conflicts. After the first brothel even aquiring territory often results in a gang war and often a gang wiped out. I can't deny that if I get bored or run out of my own limitation ideas I'll be looking for this post again though. On turn summary I only check highlighted girls, and in management I check happiness to choose which girls to check on.
The two gamebreakers with gangs are Sabotage and the free girls once your have one business. Once your have a couple gangs high enough to sabotage, your gold will quickly go from thousands to hundreds of thousands. For some reason they accumulate insane amounts of money early on; insane amounts of money that will all go to you. The free girls don't make any sense considering each business only pays 10 gold a turn, while selling a branded slave is at least 1000-2000 gold.
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The two gamebreakers with gangs are Sabotage and the free girls once your have one business. Once your have a couple gangs high enough to sabotage, your gold will quickly go from thousands to hundreds of thousands. For some reason they accumulate insane amounts of money early on; insane amounts of money that will all go to you. The free girls don't make any sense considering each business only pays 10 gold a turn, while selling a branded slave is at least 1000-2000 gold.
Yeah, avoiding sabotage seems to make a big difference. By not using it it seems to keep the rest of the gang warfare aspect more active as well, and keeps the amount you need to bribe higher. Depending on how I'm playing at the time, sometimes I leave the free girls in the dungeon until I get the next brothel, but that can leave you with a lot of girls or girls with a lot of extra traits at times...if they survive long enough.
Another way I've played, is to limit yourself to starting each turn with say 5-10k gold unless you need more to buy a brothel. At the beginning of each turn just deposit the rest of your gold and never withdrawl any. It slows the game down a lot in terms of progress without having to take away from the rest of the game play. Doing this with a limit of adding 10 rooms to the first brothel and a limit of 5-10 to the rest is my most common way to play. Forgot to add the gold limitting idea in my previous posts.