Future suggestions to improve difficulty

[Rose]

I think any girls who play this may be offended if you made pregnancy lower looks.... also it doesn't really, even in RL.

First of all, I am a girl. Second, all I meant was that most people probably wouldn't buy sex from a prostitute in the later stages of pregnancy, and I thought the game should reflect that.

[zodiac44]

Why not make it so that customers who don't have the fetish won't hire the services of a pregnant girl?  That way, we can keep looks the same and achieve the desired effect.  Ditto for the freakish traits (twisted, futanari, mind fucked, etc) that only those who have the fetish would be interested in?  If I were ever to seek the services of a prostitute, I wouldn't hire one who was packing the wrong equipment, so to speak - why would customers in Crossgate be any different?

[trex]

Very true. I wasn't sure that you could bar customers (modify their behavior?) so that they do not seek out girls that have undesired traits, unless the customer fancies that fetish. Why make mind-fucked girls be a fetish? (Is it a fetish? I thought it was just a trait from abuse)
I much prefer that, it makes sense that a fancier of a trait will hire that girl, and those who loathe it avoid it. Perhaps we could see far more use of traits as a tool for customer behavior and general numbers. By general numbers, why not make it that a more varied assortment of girls will attract more customers in general, whilst if you have too many girls catering for a particular fetish, customer numbers thin out. You can always play around with this, say forget catering to all and go niche, just put quite a few girls on the stripbar to entice more customers to negate that limited appeal. I'd love to see a more complex use of traits in this regard, maybe its *too* much to strike a balance for those who like micro managing and those who like to cruise with less to worry about, but I think the balance can be struck without too much fuss.

[zodiac44]

Mind-fucked people emit an aura of wrongness or disturbedness.  You can feel something horrible happened to them just by looking at them or being in the same room as them.  It's creepy, and I can't imagine even thinking about having sex with someone like that.  So, personally, I think they should be on the fetish-only list.

[sgb]

'Bad' traits having more of a drawback would certainly be a good idea, though at the same time it's not exactly realistic that a customer could identify some of these traits in advance.  While the brothel would have to disclose a girl being a futa or pregnant in advance to the customer, you couldn't tell if a girl was Yandre until it was too late.

@ Trex: Mind-fucked means the girl has 0 rebeliousness forever.  It does make sense as a negative fetish though, since it would essentially be like fucking a doll.  Most customers certainly wouldn't want that.

As for the disease never happening comment, maybe it's just better to take it right out IMO.  I don't see it adding anything to the game beyond forcing more trips to the store.

[trex]

While that's true that someone couldn't tell from the appearance to a girl's trait (Mostly), repeat custom would be hard if the girl was the polar opposite of what you thought/got. Not making the traits a 100% customer selector would balance that out. (Say a 70% new customer- 30% regulars mix, or however you want to make it.)


I knew mind-fucked was practically the same as broken willed, just theoretically worse. (game wise) I've never encountered a girl with both, although being mind-fucked is just a far more severe progression of a broken will.


Well, being a brothel simulator, making disease more prevalent and serious would be a logical way to make the game harder. A more simple solution to what I wrote would be just as good, if not more so. I agree in its current form it doesn't really add much to the game, but for realism and as something that can be already built on, I think it has potential to be expanded on without too much fuss.

[Command]

Like have a sector in the game where you can attract different groups of customers.  Like customers who had sex with mind fucked girls will likely lower the number of customers who don't have a fetish for it to show up.
 
A thought just struck me what if you send a client to the dungion but if he's remained there long enough you get a chance for his daugter showing up to make a deal for his release and you get another set of options to choose from.

[Alugere]

One thing I've noticed when reading suggestions at times is that a good portion seems to be either to make things more expensive, or 'your suggestion sucks since cost isn't an issue'.

Why not set a cap on the net profit a brothel can bring in? It makes the game harder and then we wouldn't have people running up to every suggestion that has a monetary cost in it saying "Money isn't an issue, take your suggestion and shove it". Not to mention, some of us don't spend several hours playing to reach the point where we are gaining a hundred thousand per turn.

In other words, Make it to where, after taxes and the like, you can only gain a net profit of 5000 times the number of brothels you have.

[exodia91]

there already is a limit, customers are limited in each brothel unless you throw a ton of girls into the strip bar, and capping gold is unrealistic and far too obvious a game mechanic, it would break realism and people would go "WTF?!" when they hit it ingame.

[letmein]

Yeah, right now the basic issue is just to balance things.  The mechanisms are, in my opinion, fine - they just need tweaking and playtesting.

[trex]

Like have a sector in the game where you can attract different groups of customers.  Like customers who had sex with mind fucked girls will likely lower the number of customers who don't have a fetish for it to show up.
 
A thought just struck me what if you send a client to the dungion but if he's remained there long enough you get a chance for his daugter showing up to make a deal for his release and you get another set of options to choose from.

Yes, specializing and even enticing customers over time would allow you to make one of your brothels a niche service, logically a place that only caters for say loli lovers will be renown for that fetish and have a stronger attraction to customers. A cap on how many will ultimately trek to your den of loli would rely on how many strippers are luring in jons and whatever else you like. I think increasing the danger to the girls could be implemented if you consider that via specializing, customers of all dispositions learn about who you employ, and thus will try any of their fantasies on your girls. It would increase the difficulty a bit too.



Hell, you could tweak the traits so that strong, tough girls will not entice danger, yet a mind-fucked, broken willed, fragile girl dominated brothel would increase their risk. I think that's ultimate customization though, and logically restricting it to the more prevalent (traits you could sense such as loli *seen as weak*/ Strong-Tough *seen as capable to fight back*) and not doing every single trait is commonsense. Even lumping traits into a few loose groups and assigning group stats for dangerous events is more practical.    



On your second point, Yes, that would make a good father (for not ratting out his daughters) thing possible. Buying freedom, swaping for wife/daughter(s)/The whole lot, release for compassionate reasons are some basic options. I like this idea! Just hope *if* its made it doesn't trigger crashes like with the *opponent turns to you* event.



I wouldn't cap incomes, as its been rightly put that customer limitations and future game development (Varied Buildings ect) will take care of the money issue. Implementing better customer behavior for the brothels isn't something I think would be too difficult, and would add something to take into consideration when planning, but again that's optional as it isn't *forced* onto you. I may be wrong with the amount of effort needed for it but it gives those who want more difficulty the option to tackle it. Without being too outlandish.

[Command]

How about create more cost's for certain jobs that mostly become available as the game progresses.  Kind of like if you want to purchase body armor for your gangs (I'm guessng chainmail and plate) it improves your groups defense and survivability but also costs more to maintain.
 
Or if you get some of the members of the gang arrows or crossbows you need to worry about amunition.
 
The stage one weapon for all gangs could be clubs since it cost's nothing to make a club.  (Some wood and a carving knife)

[Fstop]

If your worried about to much money just make us start paying Taxes =O
and if I rememeber correctly necno planing on implementing diet for girls (skinny,normal,obese)
so theres 2 (possible) ways to cap meat

[zodiac44]

We are paying taxes, although the tax rate is rather low (7-8% eyeballing it, though it might be taxes on operating income rather than operating profits, in which case the tax rate is even lower).  Move to a more typical (for the modern day - I know next to nothing about the medieval tax structure) with a flat corporate tax rate of 25-40% (depending on how friendly the government is to businesses) on operating profits (total income from operations minus the costs of running the operations - many countries also tax interest, so you could add that in too).  Leaving out interest, it should require much of a change to the code to shift the tax structure.

An idea I've been playing around with to fix the income problem is to introduce a "minimum wage" for girls.  Currently, so can pay your free girls next to nothing, and they never complain.  Slave girls you take everything from (as is appropriate, IMHO), but they earn less from customers than free girls, which makes no sense to me.  Why would a customer care if he's sleeping with a slave or a free girl?  In any case, it becomes significantly more profitable to run an operation with entirely free girls whom you are extracting >90% from.  Having a maximum house take of 60% seems reasonable, and girls should be asking for raises as they become more skilled.  Slaves then become more profitable than free girls.

Next up is to fix the pricing of slaves.  Currently, they are absurdly cheap.  Assuming they will work half time in the brothel, attracting an average of 8 customers per week, and an expected 10% return per week, a fully trained slave should sell for about 7000 according to my back-of-the-napkin calculations.  I don't yet have a formula for taking training costs into account to find the price of a less than fully trained slave, but I could whip something up if I knew a) the cost associated with training a slave for 1 week, b) the average amount of increase in a each stat per training period (with 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 partners), and c) the cost of accommodations.

Because there are no costs associated with acquiring free girls (assuming you meet them on the street, not kidnap them), they are still more profitable than slaves.  Under the same assumptions (plus a house take of 60%), a fully trained free girl is worth 4800 (lower as the girl's take gets higher) which you currently don't have to pay.  To balance them out, there should be some sort of hiring costs put in place for free girls.

That could be injecting too much realism to the game, though, so I will understand if no one wants to go down that road.

[LordShame]

There's something to be said about how absurdly easy it is to acquire girls with 80+ looks. Not even because they're inexpensive (or free), but because they're so very common. It's like you can't throw a cat in Crossgate without hitting a stunning woman at the peak of feminine attractiveness. And that's not even including the add-on girl packs we got so far, which are truly admirable endeavors in many ways but really don't help solve the problem. (If there is such a problem as "the girls in this town are too hot". )

I mean, as I see it, a woman with 100% looks should be the kind of girl wars are fought over, a rare and coveted prize a brothel owner would take ten mortgages on his establishment to acquire; I'm talking about Helen of Troy- or Diao-Chan-grade beauty here. And yet there's one or two of them at the market every week.

I've actually made a "Plain girl" random girl type with bad stats and looks that rarely top 40%, and challenged myself to run a game only using those instead of buying supermodels in bulk. To be honest it was a lot more fun than usual, gameplay-wise, and it's even kind of a struggle in the beginning because you get very few clients and those you do get don't pay much. (The only bad part is that I can't for the life of me find hentai-type pictures of specifically plain girls, if such a thing is even possible in the style. There's ugly if you search for it, but I'm not looking for outright ogres.)

Of course I could go in the editor and manually tone down charisma and beauty for everyone, but that only solves the problem for me. Heheh.