Was reading the Dev board's "Too many girls?" thread... and I was sort of worried on hearing "maybe we should get rid of random girls".
Frankly, I care -much- more about the randomly generated girls than the uniques. They're a unique entity, instead of just some random imported character from some other game. ...As it is, though, they're not much besides generic filler characters. If they were generated with personalities that affected their replies and stuff, if they could cause random events (maybe they come into your office and ask for/demand a raise, etc), and if the basic personalities were modifiable (say the "angry" base personality could be modified to make her directly combative, passive aggressive, etc, with different reactions/dialogues from each; also, if like/dislike/love/hate triggers could be set... which would expand on the interactions (different stuff for the chat action and the various ask/force options))... something that made them more than statblocks, I guess.
There is the fact that the micromanagement is a problem, though, and that doesn't fix it at all... just makes random girls interesting.
I think a lot of it would be alleviated if the data were more accessible. You can scroll through girls with the mouse in the summary screen, but not their events, and you have to switch in yet another menu if you want to see stats on your different buildings or your gangs. Making all of that viewable by keyboard would solve a lot of the issues I have with it personally, though I can't speak for other players.
Let's say something like this - the turn summary page as a scrolling menu, like the ones WM usually uses, set up the same... except the three different windows (the top one, separating gangs/girls/brothels, the middle one listing names, and then the last one listing events) joined into one, with the data collapsible, like in the attachment.
You can scroll up and down through the menus, with the cursor keys. Hitting right would expand a menu, left would jump back to the root of the thing you're looking at, and left again would collapse it. You know how these things work, right? Two more keys might be required, for scrolling the window with actual text - page up/down, or something.
Turn summary - the over-page. Here, it lists your entire operation's expense vs. income in red/black, and the net loss or gain (also in red or black, depending), then they're broken down into similar summaries for buildings/gangs/territories/etc. You know, the sort of economic report you see in the month summary for X-com, or in the things for SimCity. In addition, stuff like loot and girls are also listed.
Also here are general stats, like how many people you have in the dungeon (girls and customers separated), runaway girls, your total gangs, and the total gangs set to do important/variable stuff like guard and dungeon dive.
Finally on this page are outstanding things that need your attention, like the stuff that shows up in red - Girl x refused to work, gang x has been wiped out, a place has been attacked, or if there's anyone under, like, 20% HP in the dungeon (incase you forget you weren't feeding someone or something like that). It would probably be good if these notifications linked back to the incident.
Under that, are the collapsible menus
buildings,
gangs, and
individual.
In
Buildings, you get a list of your buildings. Each one is also collapsible, and highlighting one (which, if I've not made clear, means scrolling to it with the cursor keys) gets you the income vs. expenses and the net gain/loss, just like the Turn Summary screen, as well as the outstanding-things-needing-attention (the stuff that'd appear in red boxes) pertaining to this location (refused to work, customer didn't pay, raided by the guards, stuff like that), and the other site-specific stuff, like security level, building hp, decoration/"building prettiness", and cleanliness.
Each individual building would collapse into the individuals working the place, just like in the individuals menu (below).
The
Gangs menu would break down into a total summary, just like the other overmenus. If you were attacked, the results of your attacks, money made (total, then broken down into catacomb/petty theft/major theft/racketeering/whatever) and spent, all that stuff. It'd break into the individual gangs, and then further into a specific gang's events.
Individuals would be a bigass masterlist of all the girls, in case you forgot where one worked or something. The individual's overall summary thing would work like so (plus whatever I forgot):
Tired
Happy
That-HP-stat-the-name-of-which-I-forget
(in red if at critical levels)
(noteworthy statuses, like pregnancy, STD, or addictions)
(outstanding events that need attention, possibly in red, and linked to the girl's page so you can correct it)
[Day Activity name]----------(column separation)-------------[Night Activity name]
Money earned------------------------------------------------------(same shit)
If doing something applicable (whoring, though I guess waitressing and stuff could use this too, right?)
Customers seen
Customer 1 - [activity], paid - , tipped
- (if applicable), satisfied/not satisfied
Customer 2 - as above
...
Customer n - as above
If not, then still separated the night and day shifts, list her activity, and relevant info (how clean she got the place, if she successfully bouncer'd the place, etc)
------(uh... column non-separation?)
Average satisfaction:
Total earned:
Net profit (i.e., subtract her wages and shit):
Just a summary, none of the text or pictures - those'd be seen in the individual events, that you could access for each individual.
...Doing that makes me think of SimBrothel 2, though... discarded the fuck out of the original's porn content for streamlined results pages. Since you can just scroll through the detailed/written out stuff, it might be acceptable, but still.
Assigning jobs is possibly problematic, since it uses the dual-menus-that-you-can't-keyboard through. If I could digress for a second, mouse control isn't my favorite for menus like this; I prefer keyboard controls.
What about another collapsing list? You could scroll through the girl list with the secondary scroll keys - which, unlike the turn summary list, would require you to hit "enter" to change to a different girl, I suppose - and use the regular cursor keys for the job list, which would be sorted into whore/bar/casino, same as now. You could set Day jobs with D, and Night jobs with N. It might help if the list could support icons - give the base/root job entries (whore/bar/casino) an icon, so you could easily see the dice sign next to the job's specific name in girl
- 's job list, and see her job is based on whether or not she likes casino work.
...If that's confusing, basically I mean like in that second attachment.
...That still doesn't fix the micromanagement, though. I would suggest having the game take idling girls and sticking them into whatever job they like most/would be best at if they're doing nothing, but that would get annoying if you
wanted a girl idle. Perhaps change "rest" to be separate from free time? When a girl has free time, the game'd assign her a job based on her stats and the building's needs, going down a list if she rejects the first one enough times (so, if she refuses to whore out for three days, the game would go "fine asshole, go sweep the place up instead" or something. Or, if the place is a pigsty, the game would decide that, since she's not an assigned whore, she'll sweep up until it's acceptable, then change jobs again). Resting would be different - it would be the girl's assigned off-time, when she rests and does her own thing. Letting girls switch to rest and back when their HP is low would be good, too - that is, let them decide to take a break without a Matron.
Penalizing the girl's results wouldn't be good, since that'd discourage users from using the feature - you choose between tedious microing or shitty performance, like.
Oh yeah, and one last thing. It sort of bothers me that the large number of stats are represented by exact percentages, for a couple reasons. One, it's kind of hard to track - you look at this huge list, and see just statistics everywhere, like - the meaning of each is sorta lost. I would suggest one of two things: either track them with an actual, graphical bar, that fills up going from 0 to 100; or to hide the actual number and just describe it with an adjective ("unmatched" at 100%, "strong" at like 60-69, "pathetic" at 1-9%, etc).
...And by last thing, I meant one more thing too. Loli really describes more of a body type than an age, and yet, IIRC, every 17-year old I pick up is a loli. Loli should be rarer - it refers to a
really young look, and most in the 17-18 year range resemble developed adults.
I don't know a thing about coding, so I don't know if any of that is at all viable, but those are thoughts on the subject.
