Punishment, affection, grind and tough recovery
Loving the game so far but it’s feeling a tad too grindy. Hard to feel like I’m getting anywhere once I was through the initial Kymanto quests. Passive income takes a LONG time to tip over which makes the time management pressure high as you need to be getting bounties constantly to keep afloat. This is not bad in itself but it just felt a tad excessive in normal mode. (no idea how fleshed out this state of the game is supposed to be at this point)
Also had trouble recovering from unfortunate dungeon mistakes. Once a slave gets unhappy and hates you, it’s such a massive climb back that it feels insurmountable at times (though I DO know for a fact it’s possible). I feel like part of the issue here is one of conveyance when it comes to the dungeon, punishment, defiance and how these things interact. I ended up deciding to live with my mistakes but also felt I struggled to understand what I was doing, how far I could go, etc… After that, my affection went to “Venomous”, my happiness plummeted and those stats are really grindy to claw back, inch by inch, at least back to neutral.
As a player, here is how these things looked to me: Slaves kept accumulating defiance, the game gave me an option to use that as justification for dungeon, which is where I could then bring that defiance back. There’s an implication that the slave has accepted their punishment in that case and that there is an expectation on both ends of some “discipline”. But I can never seem to be able to tune one of these sessions so that the slave is not tremendously distraught in the long term, even as my skills improved. So I keep getting the impression that there is a way to do it “right” but I’m just not finding it. And if I then don’t reload and just accept I’ll have to live with that defiance until I can get the slave’s affection and happiness high enough so I can do a gentle introduction to the dungeon as kink instead, I’m in for basically having the slave be mostly unworkable for who knows how long
BONUS: Is it just me or Rifles are just indisputably the best weapon in the game? Got excited about the plasma but 100 bucks per shot is just too prohibitive, might need to reach some sort of “infinite money for the rest of the game” sort of state to even consider it
BONUS 2 - Weird Behvaiour: So I’m working on Rachel and she’s quite into Oral, which has allowed me to carefully claw back her happiness and affection, i can manage her arousal during both prelims and main act…. except when her willpower (a mechanic that probably could do with some clarification) drops to 0, at which point she becomes fully pliable but, since her affection and corruption are low, she then also just ceases to get aroused, and I need to bump her back up to try and keep working. I don’t know if this is intended but this switch flipping is a a bit weird
BONUS 3 to avoiding spamming since this hasn’t got a reply at this point: Why isn’t the save file serialised plain text? Just let me cheat, man. I know that’s a json in the end =P