I've poked around and it seems incredibly difficult to get any servants currently. Everyone I capture is (understandably) angry at me and even filling up the cuddle lounge, prisonners gain at most 0.3 per 'cycle', however long that is. I've yet to see it have any kind of effect and it kinda feels like I'll just go forever without any progress on this.
Am I misunderstanding something about this? And is there a way to recruit friendly NPCs?
There's a new 'cycle' each time you advance to a new floor. Prisoner opinion is increased by having Servants assigned in the dominant roles for the Cuddle Lounge, and Managers make the process even more efficient. But of course, you don't have any Servants to begin with, so if you only do things with captured girls, it's a very slow process. The trick to getting the Summit to work quickly is that, when you finish the first floor, you bring in whichever random people were in your party and you make them into Servants, then kick them out of your party and assign them to the Cuddle Lounge to start training your first new girls.
Bear in mind that Sanctum content is all totally optional and provides minimal gameplay benefit at the moment. Sure, you might be able to get a high-level girl to join your party after enough cuddling, but it's finicky. If you ally with a faction, you can just get miniboss rank girls to join your party directly, skipping most of the need to capture anyone. Aside from that, the recycler can break down unwanted restraints into material for other restraints... but you really won't need the extras if you aren't trying to keep hundreds of prisoners.
A lot of really solid info. The fact that you can bring people you've recruited, in particular, is extremely useful information and I'm going to try doing that my next run. I should probably get the command tree just so I can keep them alive until after the elevator because god that sarcophagus fight is nasty, I hate those.
I noticed that later when I got the offer to train trainee mages and started recruiting ALL of them for my staff. Now, the only thing I'm not sure on is how to bring prisonners out of the collection so I can lock them into stands, right now only the staff are doing that automatically with the prisonners selected for the struggle snuggle cuddle lounge.
If you're having trouble keeping your allies around, one thing any PC can do to revive an ally, even without any skills, is to lock them in a stationary restraint, then unlock them. Swap them repeatedly until they're on the tile of the sarcophagus or the mummy's post, then interact to lock them up, then bump them and choose to pick their restraints. They'll be back to 5 HP, and able to follow you back to the Summit.
Bear in mind that they won't otherwise heal after doing this, so it's not an amazing free heal, and is instead only a stupid trick to 'friendly capture' an ally so they can be transported to the Summit, but that'll still get you some extra Servants that you might've otherwise abandoned to their fate.
