Okay, so after playing the current version of this game far longer than I'd like to admit, I have some thoughts.
First off, I've noticed the following bugs:
1) It is possible to impregnate a single girl more than once. For example, if you impregnate a girl when you capture her, and then again during training.
I realized that when i implemented it, but since the girls are not individuals that a marked somehow, it would be a huge effort to change it. But i liked the idea and wanted it in anyway. Maybe i change it when more important stuff is solved (and since i make the game alone, i have a huge list at hand)
2) It is possible for a submissive girl to capture a runaway even when you only had one girl to start with. So is she cloning herself, and then ratting herself out as she tries to run away?
Will be changed, i never realized that. There are a lot of interactions and i improve them one by one.
3) If you have "take prisoners" set to no, but "hire goons" set to yes, you can end up still getting more prisoners if visiting goons bring their own at the beginning of the week. If "hire goons" is set to no, but "take prisoners" is set to yes, the same event will result in them all going away.
Yes, i thought about that, but as players reommended to add the option to deny prisoners/goons, i wanted it simple. The strangers trade the girls for shelter and protection, which means, you don't take them, they leave with their girls. The other way around it makes no sense, but 1 or 2 girls is not a big deal.
I will eventually do change it that it makes more sense, but atm i think it's ok.
Instead of having "take prisoners" and "hire goons" be options you pick before exploring, I would rather be given the option to add citizens to my colony or not at the time they become available. That would make more sense, and help the player to avoid over- and underpopulation.
It was either that or a toggle. I deceided against making decisions during any encounters, since it's the basic concept of the game. Like with end turn, that you only get events that you have to click through, but you cannot do anything. I wanted it "arcade like" if you understand what i mean with that. You adjust your "console" and the game flows by itself.
As for population control, i rather wanted it the way that you can get rid of goons more easily, but those ideas i had in mind aren't really in the game yet. The few more goons you get are only at the beginning meaningful, later in the game it doesn't matter if you have 103 or 107 goons. But as you mentioned before, the seperation between refugees is not very great.
As others have pointed out, the loyalty system is pretty broken right now. I can't really figure out what factors go into the numbers, apart from training improving female loyalty and adding citizens reducing the loyalty of their respective sex. I certainly can't manage to hold onto citizens - especially prisoners - for very long. Between the girls running away and killing themselves, it seems impossible to build up a stable female population.
Those comments that loyalty is broken was before i did a complete overhaul of loyalty and fear (which is now humility). I think it is pretty straight forward. training improves loyalty, hiring goons while exploring lowers loyalty. The other changes to loyalty are either due to government or focus (which is in the description) or when your goons get the chance to bang a girl (in the text, whenever there are loyalty changes, it is colored in the loyalty color, turquise).
The thing is, i cannot give the player every little detail of information, it would be like reading a book. I thought that the goons increase loyalty when they have sex is obvious and the player would figure it out on their own.
However, it was suggested to give better info in the loyalty screen at turn end and it is on my to do list for one of the next updates. I already improved a lot of the end turn events and have done so again, as next update will show. At some point the loyalty screen will be improved too.
The second stage's objective is beyond me, barring some extremely good luck. Getting the farm to level 5 was not too hard, but getting enough money and goons to stick around so that I could have 25 is a task that, given the current loyalty system, is probably impossible. I tried earning money through the brothel, but it takes more time to train a whore than it does for a trained whore to die or run away. I might have been able to complete the task - maybe - if I'd been given more time to build up. Getting to the point where you can populate a level 5 farm requires a lot of infrastructure. You need a level 2 prison and enough money for 5 wardens to reliably train whores (something I've never accomplished thanks to my wardens leaving and money being hard to find).
The stages have to be reworked. The first stage was just for leveling up which the players found boring. Therefore i added the governments, the foci and the provisions. Due to the overhaul, the stages and many achievements are obsolete and will be step by step.
But they shouldn't run away when you use "reeducation" which is always possible to chose when you have 5 soldiers. At least it will happen fewer times.
You can also let humility go down on purpose and re-capture escapees. It's my prefered method, but i wouldn't recommend it for beginners. Reeducation pretty much solves the issue with girls running away, same as the governments does for goons.
The training system you have is interesting, and not inherently bad, but the randomness of it does mean that you're much more likely to turn prisoners into useless specialists until you get a prison and a lot of wardens. I still don't know what, if anything, concubines do, but I know that scientists are completely useless at the stage of the game I'm at, and in my last playthrough, I got a LOT of scientists. The low odds of getting anything of value out of a training session also makes the specialist females you get extremely valuable... despite them not being any less likely to run away or kill themselves. I think the system you have could work if you play with the numbers a bit to get a better balance - something where you can make meaningful progress.
I promised to balance it but haven't gotten around to it. In fact, whores are easiest to train, it's the stage design of stage 1 that makes it that hard.
I wanted something else as the training of about 90 % of all porn games who do the same thing all over again. Train anal, increase anal, train oral, increase oral. The problem atm is, it's unbalanced and not easy to explain how the system works, since it is very different as everything i have seen in other games. But i think it has it's logic, i just have to find a way to make it more transparent.
Concubines don't do much since the overhaul, iam playing with ideas, but haven't got a good idea that makes sense and is useful to the player.
This is just a me thing, but I really hate the suicide aspect. Realistic as it might be, I just find it a turn-off. The same goes for the deaths you get before you find the prison, but at least you can prevent those if you know what you're doing, and they're somehow less disturbing to me. As far as I can tell, the suicides are entirely random. I'd personally like the option to have the suicides replaced with girls running away. The effect on the gameplay is the same, and in a porn game, I always find it a plus when I can turn off my turn-offs.
I added suicides because it's common for a mental breakdown, which is the game title. The title BreakDown stands for the breakdown of the "old world" but also the mental break down the player is the cause of.
But i get it that people found it disturbing. I remember when playing "Jack o nine" and brought a girl to the slaughterhouse, i hated it.
Good suggestion, i will add an option to change that content and it will be escapes instead. Maybe something like "went nuts and ran naked into the forest".
Overall, I think you might want to consider your system from the perspective of the order in which things become available. Concubines are the easiest kind of trained girls to get currently, but as far as I can tell they're completely useless. Whores are the hardest to get, but they're the kind you need most early in the game. In order to get farm workers, you need money, but in order to get a steady income, you need whores, and in order to get whores, you need wardens, which also cost money. So you have to have money to make money. It's true to life, but not necessarily great for game design. If there were some way to convert one resource into another, or to stack the odds in favor of your exploration turning up whatever you most need right now, that would go a long way toward easing this tension. Alternatively, you could look at juggling the order of things to make the march of progress in the game a little smoother.
It's the first stage, whores are easiest right now. Concubines can be easy when you have enough gold. But will be rebalanced, both stages and training.
With a village you can sell females for gold however. At some point i will add the building "port" to the game where you can trade. I implemented the supplies provisions to give the player more control, but that is more for later stages, since the supplies will come from your territories (former stages). It's not fully implemented yet, since the areas will specialize in a resource and the gain will be higher as it is now. But that has to do with the areas, since after area 3 the player can decide what he wants the area to specialize in. There will be other decisions too, and that's what iam actually working on the most, to make the areas more interesting and rewarding.
Finally, if you want people to make progress in the game without savescumming, you'll need to make it possible to restart a failed stage instead of going all the way back to stage one. That's what finally broke my fixation on the game and made me want to go do something else - the fact that I'd have to play through the entirety of stage one again without getting to keep any progress from my last playthrough at all just to retry stage two. Since almost nothing you do in stage one carries over into stage two, it's just a waste of time and effort. Fortunately, I do have a save from the beginning of stage two, so I could go back and try again, but the way the game is currently designed makes that feel like cheating.
I feel like this game has a lot of potential, and I'd like to see where it goes. There are other nitpicks I could make, but I think I've said enough for now.
Good idea, i will add an option to retry the area. Needs some work though and will take a while.
There will also be a sandbox mode, but first i want to concentrate on the main game and i want combat in first.
