Musing on the Role of Sugestability

I've been figuring most of the issues I have with game play at the moment are a result of the early stages of development. Yes, I've been grinding serums, compliments, and sleep, mostly because there's nothing to do elsewhere. I think the economics needs a major overhaul. Your most profitable serum is one of the earliest ones you develop, and you need to just keep churning it out to get the money to buy new business practices. I never found daily injections useful, because I didn't see a way to make enough serums for that and still stay profitable. I'd suggest what I think would be a more realistic scenario: several production streams for your products. The largest would be the one you use to make non-mind control drugs and sell. The smallest would be the one that feeds the serums for your employees, maybe the "trials production line." So a minimum of two and maybe as high as running as many as you can get employees to run. Maybe one serum per worker in Production. Also, you might want to consider suggestibility more carefully. I think it needs to wear off while corruption remains. I see completely suggestible as undesirable because ANYONE can suggest to the target. It should of course still be subject to the duration extension. Lastly I'm looking for injections and/or training I can take myself. For these I would obviously want to exclude the suggestion component.

The idea of spending suggestability is cool, but I'm still having trouble figuring out how to avoid the benefits of spamming the same type of serum out early in the game. Maybe girls need a "corruption tree" that you spend suggestability on, so when you choose one option you lock out the others until you use a higher level serum to unblock them. This post has been filled with great ideas!

Vren

Balancing how serums are applied is on my list of things to do. I'm planning on introducing (actually reintroducing, I had it in before but never made use of it) an energy stat for the main character that is modified throughout the day. Actions will use up energy, and each time chunk you will have some energy given back. Giving serum might cost energy, limiting how much you can practically give a girl (and this might get easier as you progress, requiring less energy and thus letting you use more doses.) The second thing I'd like to do is add negative side effects to serums, which can be applied either through A) a crisis event during R&D or Development, spend cash/time/people/ect. or that design is tainted with a negative trait forever. B) Giving a girl multiple serums at once. C) Included in some early game researches. A multi-trait serum might be beneficial because it's the safest to give to a person, mixing a bunch of independent serums is asking for trouble (maybe large drops in obedience, randomly changing breast sizes, rapidly dropping happiness, ect.).

Vren

One more set of observations concerning "serum design". Right now, there is little motivation for designing complex multi-trait serum instead of simpler mono-trait serum. Economically, the most profitable path is to simply make a mono-trait serum with the most profitable trait available (there are slight exceptions to this, but they are not consequential). When giving serum manually, making 3 mono-trait serum is only slightly more expensive than making a single multi-trait serum with those 3 traits, but the former is more convenient, since you get to administer only the traits that are needed. Lastly, there's the daily serum, where multi-trait could be preferable, but the economics currently make those prohibitively expensive. As of right now, the only compelling reason I see for multi-trait is the duration extending trait, and adding more such "secondary traits" (i.e. which modify existing traits) would help the issue, though I have no good suggestions. Lastly, my previous suggestion of capping how many serum can be given to employees in each time slot would also help justify multi-trait serum.

Bingbong

Still Loving C's idea of a spend Suggestibility from serums. Combine it with the thresholds idea of certain stats cap of effective others progress via interactions (an extrapolation of Dubsingtons proposal) might prove an interesting direction to take. The girls personality could determine what actions raise or lower Happiness, as Happiness grows new interactions are unlocked that boost Obedience, More Obedience opens up more options to boost Sluttiness and the Suggestibility conferred from the serum could be used to permanently boost any of those stats at a 1:1 cost selected by what interactions you do to/with her while she is under the influence. Its a thought, not sure if it's what Vren's looking for, but it'd be cool if it was.

I'm going to second Bingbong on this. At the moment the stats feel a little flat. My own personal speculation is that the needle on these gauges go 200 because of interaction thresholds to be added later. That said, it would be interesting if 100 became the equilibrium point for the stats (stats under this are easier to raise through common interactions and stats above harder, requiring use of serum to see any major gains), possibly implement a daily slow tick down to 100 like how resistance worked in LR1. [edit: points to Blakeness for saying it first] I also agree something feels wrong about the happiness stat. If employees are quitting on the first day if they are in the low 90's (in my play-throughs at least) would the 'acceptable' level need to be that high? 50 or even 10 would seem to suffice.

On a different note, at the moment the numerical values for Happiness and Obedience don't really fell like they mean much. Tasty Mango mentioned above that he raised happiness all the way to the 200 max. Personally, at first I thought that 140 seemed like it should be enough, but later started aiming for 120. Or to summarize the problem, the game doesn't yet give any guidance on how high one should aim for with these stats. Here are some questions that I think the player ought to be able to answer after playing the game: -What are the stat thresholds at which meaningful stuff happens? -Is a stat increase of 3 large or small? However, right now I can't answer these questions when concerning Happiness and Obedience. And on a distinct but related note, is there a good reason why Happiness and Obedience should be measured out of 200 instead of out of 100? With the latter the numbers feel like percentages, which are easier to interpret, while the current scale makes the numbers fell less meaningful to me.

Bingbong

so I think suggestability should be degradable, every time they are influenced, they come a bit back to center.

blakeness

Dubsington comment on "rewards for non fun behavior" is quite on point, and I agree that C's suggestion is a good one, but maybe I'd take a step back and look at further mechanics that contribute to the problem as well. Right now you can give however many serum you want and have however many interactions you want with an employee in a single turn. This seems unnatural, and if these actions were to be capped, you would get a similar effect to C's suggestion, where you can only get so much out of a single serum.

Bingbong

Have to agree that there is a rather big lather-rinse-repeat exploit with the stats currently. At the moment its pretty easy to spam complement performance on non-doped employees till they reach the 200 (or you get bored) and happiness and sluttiness on serum users to astronomical levels through sex spamming. Though I pretty much assume this was for test purposes and consequences of spamming would be introduced in later builds. Personally I'm in the camp of 'many non-serum interactions' available to slowly breakdown your chosen gals walls as right now the serums make it a bit too easy IMHO. Having worked many game days to slowly build up one of my collections of Lillys (the entire production dept are named Lilly, blame the stats RNG) and one night find her drunk on my doorstep looking to score was probably the highlight of my playthrough.

I rather like this direction (and yours too C). The concept of having obedience as a fluid cap towards suggestibility is certainly more immersive: One can't expect an unruly employee to blindly follow orders, likewise a true company gal would be very willing to take one for the team.

It's not about making the mechanics more complex necessarily, it's about having mechanics that steer the player away from non-fun gameplay habits, such as doing the same thing over and over. And I think we all want more models, looks, outfits, etc, but those need to be paced (and escalate) as well, and doing so does require good game mechanics in place.

Bingbong

You're right about the clicking over and over thing, I found myself doing exactly that to raise up sluttiness. Never reward a player for doing things that aren't fun, because they'll do exactly that and think less of the game for it. (Our whole real-world culture of work is based around rewarding people primarily for doing things they don't really want to do, so rewarding miserable grinding in game is a natural instinct for most people.) C's suggest above is a good one; for every point of an attribute you increase, you burn a point of suggestibility. This solves several problems in the game. (E.g. right now the only real point of researching a bigger/better serum is shoot for a higher profit margin.) I'd take it a step further and have Obedience and Suggestibility interact on these things; the one score is permanent, the other is essentially the "fuel supply" that governs how much you can do with the serum. Thus, anything that increases Obedience makes future serum doses more effective, since they are simply enhancing the existing tendency. It also makes raising obedience a logical longer term goal, with Suggestibility being more of a tactical goal.

Dubsington

I like this option as it actually makes more advanced serums useful.

Hmmm... I get the impression that my comments will be a "loan voice" here; I feel like there has been a huge focus on mechanics and keep hoping for a 'sexier/naughtier' game. More exotic models, looks, outfits, slutty actions, etc. I understand that the next release to come out should address some of my hopes, and I'm very much looking forward to that. For me, the mechanics are already far beyond the complexity of my expectations for such a game. I'm not looking for Flight Simulator, I'm looking for "Oh my...what a naughty girl..simulator" LOL

This new idea sounds pretty good to me, I agree that providing such an easy path to corruption so early is pretty flawed. Honestly though, my biggest problem with the game right now is how hard it is to make money, I've been playing on the same game for a while and I find that I have to make useless serums that have a high enough value:production rate to stay in the game, keeping me from doing what I really want and producing serums that corrupt as well as extra serums for me to use. Idk, maybe I'm doing something wrong but that's been my experience so far.

I think a better option would be to spend suggestability. IE, when a stat goes up, suggestability goes down.

C

So the way I understood is if Suggestability also goes as far as 100 the max Sluttiness you would be able to achieve is 200 (100 Stat + 100 Suggestability), and you can't get her to be a true slut without maxing her Suggestability too. Correct me where I'm wrong :)

Niforan

I like where this is going. I agree that the current mechanic is flawed, non serum induced social interactions are at best pointless and at worst an exploit. I would like a mechanic that demands a little planning. The resistance system of LR1 acompliced this quite well. There were a time for planting serums, and there were a time for charms/petting, progression rate was a clear factor, and there were a risks and setbacks if you managed it wrong. Sugestabillity as cap for sluttiness is a step in the right direction, but some sort of cooldown on drug use / social interactions (forcing you to change tactics now and then) might be a good compliment.

Funker