- Apr 22, 2019
- 2,023
- 1,796
A couple of critiques of game play.
Money needs a sink of later game play
Players are strongly incented to build up a strong cash flow to acquire powers. Once those powers are acquired, there is nowhere to spend the money. Either introduce something that provides player convenience and consumes 100s of dollars every week or provide a later game disincentive to maintaining the cash flow.
I see a start in this area with the monthly rent and the future possibility of spot-checks on people around Billy looking for signs of mental domination. Those alone won't be enough. My last game,I removed all mindcraft effects save Family Matters and 2 subtle personality shifts and still cleared over $500 each week just from security work. Perhaps later Ops jobs should actually cost money or Billy needs to buy insurance to cover accidental injury/ property destruction? Whatever it becomes, it needs to hit the later game much harder than the early game. Cash and influence acquisition are extremely well balanced until powers are fully acquired. Influence still has a very large sink in stat improvement and further Discipline shots.
Random mission assignment in the superhero club
This is the only subsystem causing me to consider using a mod.
The random mission assignment is a bit of a problem now that specific mission completion is acting as a gateway to story development. I typically complete the club in January and attend all meetings. I do not get to the Pixie story until late June / early July in most playthroughs. Since there is at most a single chance each week, a lot of different mission types (nothing, video games, simple missions, complex missions) and multiple repeatable missions, the mean time to complete and even worse, the bottom quartile time to complete is getting quite long. Since adding new missions provides simple repeatable content, it is likely to get worse.
This is a tough area to address as I expect the current code is a simple table selection sometime in the week. There are a variety of strategies to control poor RNG results so no user ends up heavily screwed over, but they tend to be a pain to get right and maintain as a system grows.
Money needs a sink of later game play
Players are strongly incented to build up a strong cash flow to acquire powers. Once those powers are acquired, there is nowhere to spend the money. Either introduce something that provides player convenience and consumes 100s of dollars every week or provide a later game disincentive to maintaining the cash flow.
I see a start in this area with the monthly rent and the future possibility of spot-checks on people around Billy looking for signs of mental domination. Those alone won't be enough. My last game,I removed all mindcraft effects save Family Matters and 2 subtle personality shifts and still cleared over $500 each week just from security work. Perhaps later Ops jobs should actually cost money or Billy needs to buy insurance to cover accidental injury/ property destruction? Whatever it becomes, it needs to hit the later game much harder than the early game. Cash and influence acquisition are extremely well balanced until powers are fully acquired. Influence still has a very large sink in stat improvement and further Discipline shots.
Random mission assignment in the superhero club
This is the only subsystem causing me to consider using a mod.
The random mission assignment is a bit of a problem now that specific mission completion is acting as a gateway to story development. I typically complete the club in January and attend all meetings. I do not get to the Pixie story until late June / early July in most playthroughs. Since there is at most a single chance each week, a lot of different mission types (nothing, video games, simple missions, complex missions) and multiple repeatable missions, the mean time to complete and even worse, the bottom quartile time to complete is getting quite long. Since adding new missions provides simple repeatable content, it is likely to get worse.
This is a tough area to address as I expect the current code is a simple table selection sometime in the week. There are a variety of strategies to control poor RNG results so no user ends up heavily screwed over, but they tend to be a pain to get right and maintain as a system grows.
