On Generators and Cash

[Maruk]

First off, I apologize if this post is a bit long.  Secondly, I welcome any suggestions people may have, as I remain unconvinced that my solutions balance the game, at best they apply band-aids.  I'm not even sure if they can be called balance issues either.

There are 2 sections to this post: Generators (random girls) and Cashflow (rewards and penalties).

The problem of Generators:

Currently the catacombs is a printing press of cash for me, and I'm not penalized for slaving and selling anything that comes out of it.  For the record, most random girls that come out of the catacombs sell for about 1k each, and at 0 to (# of gangs in catacombs that week), I can make quite a pretty penny by selling bodies alone.

This problem is compounded by the girlpacks, which have better stats than any of the randoms.  At this moment I have 224 folders, 21 of them randoms and I haven't used all of the add-on packs available yet.  This means that all 5 brothels can be filled easily with uniques alone.  Expanding the brothels a number of times (+5 spots per expansion) would solve this, but it would make management a nightmare in and of itself.  Even without girlpacks, randoms are not really all that needed.  This might be fixed with balanced generators, but getting free girls that you can sell with no penalty would fix that cash loss.

As it is, I see random girls as extra cash, and any additional generators of this type would make me even wealther at an alarming rate.  The only downside to this is that it makes you evil in disposition, but since disposition is only really used to modifiy the chance of a government bust, there's no incentive not to do it.

The "solution" so far:

Making it so that any girl-generators are not so heavily abused (or have the potential tobe heavily abused).  This generally means restricting access and making them conditional.

What I have thought of so far is to:
1) Make the generators hostile the more you farm them.  Losses increase and gangs going down there take massive loyalty hits.  Limiting the number of girls that the generator produces would also work.

2) Anything caputured from there would rather die than be branded after a certain point.  This means they would try to flee the dungeon no matter what you do or do not do.  If they do escape, they might also wreck havoc on your business and reputation.  They might also be followed out, and would begin attacking your gangs, then your girls and property.  This would provoke massive reputation loss and government inquery - perhaps even leading to the sealing of the generator.

4) Make random girls matter.  As it is, they really don't do much else and with each new girlpack put out there, their impact grows even weaker.  Using the disposition modifier in the game more would go a long way as well.

As a note to the above:  I'm not picking on girlpacks - I like them myself.  What I am saying is that most girls from the packs have above-average to stellar stats starting out and a faster return than a random girl.  Even without swamping your game with girlpacks, it's still rather easy to collect the uniques without a single unsold random having a major impact.  Granted, going vanilla (no packs) is more random-friendly, but after the 5th month or so, the number of demons in the dungeon becomes more of an annoyance than a benefit.

The problem of Cashflow:

Cashflow, the perpetual problem of games.  I've found myself barely halfway through the year with more money than I know what to do with.  I've tested this with vanella and modified (+girlpacks and LSItems) and it's always the same.  Girl generators make for quick and constant money - fixing those fixes roughly half or more of the problems.  The other half is what to do with the money you do have, or rather do not have.

The only penalty to going negative is you can't buy stuff.  The only benefit to having money is that you can buy stuff.  No matter what you do, your cash never really has an effect other than waiting a week or two to buy something.

The "solution" so far:

Low on cash, negative cash, shrinking business from previous attacks:
- Your better gangs leave you, and probably taking their payments out on your property and girls - or just taking your girls with them.  Maybe also tipping the authorities on your activites?  No one wants to be tied down to a business that's not growing, and these guys are only loyal so long

- Girls begin to try to run away as the gangs leave, knowingly tipping off the authorities the worse you have treated them, probably also taking everything that's not nailed down and on fire.

- Rivals will begin to attack more often, sensing weakness.

This should be interesting, having a game-start where you begin with a loan, or in the negative and have to crawl back up.

Positive Cashflow:
- Invest in the growth of Crossgate and the general "feeling" of it, such as if you want to play as the bad guy you can invest in more slave markets and such.  Increases the reputation amonst the scum of society and lowers the reputation among the lawful ones.  Vice versa if you wish to be the good guy, as the police patrol more often and the city gets cleaned up.  Can also be linked to Disposition (or de-linked) so that you can appear to be the good guy while being evil to the core.

- Able to pay your gangs more, to secure higher loyalty.  Or even pay patrolling gangs of your rivals for information or to turn a blind eye?  Should link better with increasing the risk of farming generators, or with rivals doing the same to you.

- Increase of rival attacks to cut in on your business.  You probably should expect raids to steal your girls and bribes to lower your gang's effectiveness (prevents 100% gang stats from steamrolling everything).

- I would put interesting developments here, but that's been done, and better, in other threads - such as the Personalizing Interactions thread.

If anyone has other ideas or extensions on the one's I put here, I'd like to hear them.  If the developers already had ideas to do things like this - I apologize for spoiling your fun.

Edit: Spelling errors, changed crossroads to crossgate.

[zodiac44]

Pretty much every problem you brought up will be fixed when cash flows are balanced.  The problems in balancing the cash flows come in when "realistic" models would make the game progress so slowly that no one would want to play it at all, so we'd have to agree on how economically unrealistic the game should be.  I could write up a series of formulae that would relate the costs and returns of everything in the game if I had access to the source and could find everything I needed there, and then make it all dependent on a rate of return (which could be selectable as a difficulty setting - higher returns = more cash and an easier game).  I like the idea of cash sinks better, though.  Accumulate your millions and then spend it on things that yield no cash returns: charity, schools, orphanages, civic projects, parties for the rich and famous, perhaps a title of nobility.

[DocClox]

Some interesting points there, I thought. I had a fairly detailed reply ready to go, but I think I want to look it over before I post, and that's best done when I'm a bit more awake.

[Alugere]

I looked through your post and I only really have one thing to say off the top of my head:

Problems that you are finding in game that are significantly less when using the vanilla version are therefore not as big a deal as you're making them out to be.

Simply put: the strength of a problem is only the strength of which it is in the vanilla version. If there is a problem created by using user made girl packs: don't use the packs.

I really dislike how every so often I see:
"The game isn't balanced when I use all over 9000 girl packs, we should therefore make the vanilla version of the game require the use of the girl packs by making the game focus on the girl packs at the cost of the vanilla."

I prefer the vanilla and don't really like unike girls. In fact, I've basically disabled unique girls in my game. I fail to see why I should suffer simply because I don't want to waste excess memory downloading the massive amount of girl packs out there.

[DocClox]

Certainly, I think most of the concerns can be addressed in the config file. There are also plans to increase the scarcity of girls, and to close a couple of loopholes when it comes to hiring and replacing goons, all of which will help ensure that the catacombs are approached with due caution.

Girlpacks are a problem and probably necessarily so.  Everyone has slightly different visions for a particular girl, and there is no clear consensus as to what are constitutes reasonable stat and trait usage.

I do like the idea of putting some elements of feedback into catacombs and kidnapping. The simplest thing would be to manage the pool of possible girls for each source and make it slower to recover the harder it was exploited. (Kidnapping may already do this, I'd have to check). Another possibility which I quite like is to set a chance of getting raided by adventurers set on rescuing their beloved, and maybe liberating as many of poor exploited girls as possible into the bargain. I mean if you're keeping Bulma and Android 18 as slaves, you have to think about who might come looking for them. On the other hand, if you keep catacomb usage fairly low, then the then chances of anyone using them as a dimensional pathway into your premises can be reduced and eliminated.

I also like the idea rewarding a player who invests in the city, and I do think we can manage debt a lot more elegantly than we do at present. Having goons desert for lack of pay appeals, and seems to work quite well as a deterrent in a lot of 4X games, so that's a definite possibility.

[Maruk]

First off, I wish to thank you all for replying, and in some cases giving me things to think about.  I shall hopefully answer some of the concerns you may have.

Zodiac44:
I am not adovating for a realistic model, and I apologize if I gave you that impression.  I just believe that the current model is too lax in what it hands to you.  I will get to why in a bit.

As to money sinks, I agree with you wholeheartedly on it.  Most of those would go a long way in lowering the accumulated money.

Alugere:
These problems exist in both the modified and vanilla versions of the game, granted they are more exaggerated in modified.  The core of the problem - mostly girl prices, frequency and restrictions - becomes more noticable with packs.

Now, to test the impact of random vs girlpacks, I set my vanilla version to just randoms (deleted any unique entry in the .girls file) and played a few times with my normal start.  Some of the trends I noticed:

There are a lot of generators in the game: Market, Catacombs, Walk around town, Kidnapping and non-payment abduction.  The Catacombs, walks, kidnappings and abductions can be considered "free" at one point or another.  This means I get swamped with girls often.

Money was even easier to get - this is because I am a 'collector' and like getting any and all uniques I can.  Since any girl I had could be replaced, I just set them to brothel day and night.  When tiredness hit 70% I either used a refresher or sold and replaced them.  Since the slave I sold had roughly the same price as the new one, it was a trade-in.  This goes for any abducted/kidnapped/catacomb/walk person as well.
Note: abduced girls from non-payers are worthless, the rebellion is too high.  Sell them, go to market, buy lower rebellion girl.

I had a brothel and a half full of girls when I quit, and money up the wazoo.  I had enough to buy the 3rd brothel, stripping and gambeling halls for all 3 flat out - but couldn't as I didn't own 70 businesses (which also made money).  This was around Day 7 of Month 5 when I actually counted and noted it.

The game threw girls at me.  I filled up my first brothel extremely quickly - so quickly that I was selling demons left and right while waiting for my gangs to finish aquiring territory so I could expand.  Needless to say, I got quite a bit of cash rotating the demons in the dungeon with exhausted girls and selling them.

So no, it does not look like girlpacks have that big of an effect other than making you want to keep and care for them (unique adds) and having better stats.  The problem is that random girls do not matter - girlpacks only makes this trend of "randoms are useless" more apparent to those playing.

If you think I was biased in this test, by all means tell me where I was and what I can do to fix it.  Just beware that "uniques" are essentially "Once used in a brothel, you cannot sell them" type of randoms.

DocClox:

I wouldn't say girlpacks are a problem.  Users create add-ons that they want to see.  The only problem that comes from them is merging the packs together (there are 3 or 4 Cassandra files now).  The main problem of girlpacks is that they increase the uselessness of randomly generated girls.  Most players will take a unique over a random any day of the week, which means that the normal demon girls from the catacombs become nothing but fodder for the slave market until Carrera finally gets caught.

How about polling the .girlsx files during startup and limit random generation of girls by the amount of add-ons?  If they have a lot of adds, it means they probably want to play a game where the girls are unique.  This would also limit the problems illustrated above by increasing uniques in game and lowering randoms that could be used for easy money.

The feedback elements are only things that I think would band-aid the problem.  Most feedback solutions are usually limited in scope and quite reactionary.  If you could tie the feedback with the player disposition, girl treatment and other hidden values, then the elements become much more involved.  I can't begin to think of how to undertake this.  I'd have to think hard about this before I can really contribute anything more in this area.

Once again, thank you all for your replies - you have given me quite a bit to think over

[sgb]

As for the catacombs, I do agree the monster girl capture rate is a bit high at moment.  With 2 gangs running catacombs every month, I usually get one every week.  That's a bit too high a rate, and they do just become an annoyance after a while.

As for point #4, you know you can manually tweak them right?  You've added extensive custom content to your game, so of course the original content isn't going to be balanced around it.  You can go in and tweak the unique girl packs too if any of them have gamebreaking base stats.  There's really no reason for the devs to tweak to core game based on mods.

[Solo761]

I think you kinda missed the point of random girls. They're just that, random girls, they're meant to be fillers. 3-4 months ago there wasn't that many addon packs (let's just say that they could be counted on fingers of one hand of sawmill worker). You had around 10-15 unique girls and that was that. If there were no random girls you wouldn't even be able to fill one brothel.

Since then there's been many girl packs and unique girls aren't that scarce anymore (at least for those that use them). In that case random girls can't measure with unique girls, from what most people say, new unique girls are "overpowered" (even compared to ones that came with the game). But that's not really game issue, but lack of self control on behalf of those who made them .

This is not actually a priority at the moment, as stated before, making v1.30 playable is. After that is when balancing comes into play.

[LordShame]

You know, this makes me think that investing in the item shop could be a great money sink with immediate gameplay results. You could spend a certain amount of money to expand a store category (shoes, necklaces, etc.), and that category would have more stuff to sell. It wouldn't make individual items any less rare per se, but it'd "roll" more often and you'd have a bigger selection, and therefore indirectly a better chance to see rare items. The cost of investing in a given category would increase massively for every increment (maybe a growth like 500, 1000, 5000, 25000, 100000), and as a special reward for maxing out a category there could be a small chance of seeing catacombs-only items show up.

To balance this in the beginning, maybe the initial shop selection could be really tiny, like half of what it is now or even less than that, so you'd have a real incentive to invest as you get richer.

[DocClox]

I wouldn't say girlpacks are a problem.  Users create add-ons that they want to see. 

That's not entirely the point. If you want to consider girlpacks purely from a "set up your game the way you want it set up" then girlpacks are an unalloyed good. If you consider them from a viewpoint of balancing the game, then as you yourself have pointed out, the lack of consistency between girls can be problematic. I'm not proposing to limit creator freedoms in any way here, but we're not going to get anywhere by pretending the problem doesn't exist.

The main problem of girlpacks is that they increase the uselessness of randomly generated girls. 

Well, from your viewpoint, and for the way you play your game, I'm sure that is true. I just doubt whether your priorities are as universally representative as you believe them to be.

How about polling the .girlsx files during startup and limit random generation of girls by the amount of add-ons?  If they have a lot of adds, it means they probably want to play a game where the girls are unique.  This would also limit the problems illustrated above by increasing uniques in game and lowering randoms that could be used for easy money.

Or it could equally mean that they like to be surprised by who turns up next, and value the presence of generic girls as the matrix which lets the unique girls sparkle to full advantage.

What I will do for you, if you don't mind waiting until we get 1.30 out the door, is to look at providing a config option that'll let you dial the occurrence of random girls right down to near zero. I probably won't switch it off entirely, because there are a few places where the game assumes there will be a girls available, and can crash if it doesn't find them. Still, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't reduce the chance of seeing one to something like one-in-ten-thousand, at least until such time as all the unique girls have been collected.

The feedback elements are only things that I think would band-aid the problem.  Most feedback solutions are usually limited in scope and quite reactionary.

See, I'd have said that feedback elements are the heart of any decent sim. Remove the feedback elements and you have a setting that fails to react when the player acts. The further down that road you go, you find the game tends to become an over-elaborate porn viewer. I'd say the feedback was worth having in its own right.

[zodiac44]

Well, I took the liberty of discussing the profitability of brothels and other "criminal" (to our modern senses) enterprises with a friend of mine who majored in Medieval Economic History (is there a more obscure discipline out there?  I'd like to know) at Cambridge.  According to him, such businesses had absurdly large profit margins by modern standards, as wages were near zero.  Essentially, business owners would be akin to minor feudal lords who were totally responsible for the well being of their employees: they paid low wages but provided food, clothing, shelter, and protection (from the law, acquisitive nobles or other wealthy individuals, and competing "criminal" organizations) for their employees and the families of their employees.  Slaves were often cared for in the same manner, though without wages being paid, without the choice to leave, and (depending on the society) without caring for their families.

Such a system is largely implemented already in Whore Master, with the exception of caring for the families of the girls employed.  I think it would be trivial to add an option for the player to put the families of his girls under his care and protection (possibly increasing the girls' happiness and earning points towards "good") or leave them out in the cold to fend for themselves (possibly decreasing girls' happiness and earning points towards "evil").  Taking them in raises the player's costs of running his operation, and possibly exposes him to risks (families represent targets for rivals or could get in trouble with the law), so there should be some upside to going this route.

Girls could have a number of family members specified in the .girlsx file or, failing that, have a randomly generated number (say, 0-6 or something like that).

On the other issues:

1.) I don't think girl packs increase the uselessness of random girls; even in the days before the first girl pack was released, I sold or fired every random girl I got beyond the first of its type, so I would say I found their usefulness to be next to zero.  I don't even bother to obtain the "free" ones anymore (say, from deadbeat customers - I actually wrote over the deadbeat script with a blank one so I wouldn't have to go through the hassle of clicking on the "let them go" option every single damned turn).  That being said, I'm only one player; I doubt that my particular play style represents the majority of players.

2.) If you invest in training your girls, their long-term profitability is much higher and you can't simply replace them when they get tired.

3.) Feedback is critical.  I'm a big fan of the "all actions have consequences" school, though I accept that it is impractical for literally every action to have consequences, the major ones should at the least.  If I play as a vicious, evil bastard, I expect that the game will be substantively different than if I play as a benevolent dictator.

[DocClox]

Well, I took the liberty of discussing the profitability of brothels and other "criminal" (to our modern senses) enterprises with a friend of mine who majored in Medieval Economic History (is there a more obscure discipline out there?  I'd like to know) at Cambridge. 

Cool

I think it would be trivial to add an option for the player to put the families of his girls under his care and protection

I like that. Definitely something to look into

[sgb]

Also keep in mind overpowered girls aren't the problem.  It doesn't take very long for even mediocre girls to hit the fee cap (100 gold per customer), even without items.  Once they hit this, further improvement to their stats has little benefit.  The only difference between a girl who starts with all 10s and another who starts with all 100s is that the unskilled girl will take longer to hit the cap.  The real problem is that you will have nearly limitless money with only about 10 girls working the brothel.  If you simply want to 'beat' the game, you don't even need to bother with the brothels at all once you get a few gangs trained to 100%.

Random girls have other advantages as well.  You can see their stats and image set before you add them to the brothel, and you can always buy them as opposed to random chance with walks.  They also start as slaves which means lower rebeliousness and you get 100% house take; before you have 100% trained guards, it is not easy to brand some girls.  There are numerous random girl add-ons (more characters and image set upgrades for existing ones) to make them more appealing.  You can also remove unique girls sets you don't really care for and use their image sets for random ones to easily add more variety.

[Vorpal]

How many girls can Crossgate support, anyway? The biggest brothel in Europe services about 1000 clients a day. Sure, that's not the only one in town, but modern cities are a lot more populated.

Perhaps there should be a general level of commerce statistic for the city, and as the player (and the rivals) saturates the demand, it will require increasing advertising costs to bring in more customers from abroad. That will give some diminishing returns for having more girls, and hence put a throttle on the accumulation of wealth in the late-game.

An interesting variation would be if there is a secondary advertising for the level of tourism in Crossgate, a global payment in addition to bribes, rather than just expanding the already-present individual advertising statistics. That way, the upper-level renown ranks of "town hero", etc., would actually make more sense, because the other bussinesses would indirectly benefit. Sucking up to the mayor may stop raids, but it's not going to endear you to the populace all that much.