Asking a question about rape in a brothel management game aside.
Well, it's a brothel (wo)manned by sex slaves, so the issue is
just a bit more pertinent than for a 'normal' brothel.
Since you mention Evil character being a weakness of BK, I'm wanting to ask why Merchant MC sucks so much compared to Warrior and Mage MC, no actual skill at all, mostly stat increase skill on levelup.
Isn't the Trader actually a favourite of experienced players? I know Chris12 plays Traders, and didn't Kite80 do so as well? I usually played Mages, but I also didn't play vanilla, so that doesn't count.
Warrior can reliably defend brothel, train the girls and kick the whole town ass while mage is a mega pimp that can min/max your girls for stuffs.
Trader has the best skills and stats for actually making money and developing slaves, the two things that matter most in a BK playthrough. The mage has a lot of versatility, but he's not quite as focused. Well, until you get Fairy Dust and Dragon Soul.
Magical training eats up your profits, and I think vanilla still scales actual stat gains via Charisma and not Spirit, even for hypnosis. Warrior is largely a one-trick pony, and city challenges are spread across all three stats. Charisma may be a little weaker than the other two, but not massively so. Maybe I'm remembering vanilla wrong, but I think Warrior was generally considered the weakest of the three by a large margin?
...the Farm and job board are weak in contrast to straight whoring.
Balance is hard.
It's not that balance is
inherently hard, more like cost vs benefit. Multiplying stat gains from working by, say, 0.1 and farm stat gains by 5 would make both much more balanced against other options. It would actually work to solve these specific issues, too. Bonanza is a testament to that. But Bonanza is not balanced, either, it just has more and more distinct choices.
And this is the road to Sisyphean work.
The game is pretty complex by now, and making sure everything more or less works afterwards, and that 3 or 10 or 0.2 or 0.15 (or 0.15b
) aren't better numbers is
a lot of work for ultimately little gain compared to more writing, features and bugfixing. Especially since there will most likely be more additions and changes to core concepts down the road. I spent untold hours tweaking and testing various numbers in Bonanza, and the best I could do is make sure it was not
completely off the rails. Come mid-late game, it's still horrendously broken.
Also, the simbro playerbase is not very much into hardcore minmaxing, and those who are can set up their own challenges, like Chris12 does. So balancing is a time-intensive endeavour with relatively tiny benefits, one that is ultimately only really doable for something that's feature-frozen. BK isn't, and Goldo has very limited time these days. Time that is more productively spent on writing the rest of the story, or adding new interesting mechanics like headhunting, contests, or rivalry with Kosmo.
You
could go down the way I did with Bonanza and tighten the screws until players start screaming.
Some
masochists players were even happy about it. But it ultimately didn't work out, because I'm not a dev studio with a full-time crew and a non-trivial amount of testers. And neither is Goldo.
It's in good part the same reason that evil players are weak.
Evil players are weak because neither Goldo nor anyone else has managed to come up with something interesting enough that'd work within the current framework of BK. In a way, it's similar to the periodic proposals for pregnancy. Anything truly distinct would necessitate basically a new, smaller game within the game. My best effort was adding wages to girls you can take for evil points and cries of despair, selling former free girls, and a kidnapping option with rather convoluted mechanics where you 'buy' new girls with stat checks and temporary excessive security. I don't think any of that worked in the long term, since ultimately the girls were still the same as always. And Goldo shot down the '24/7' girls idea, with some justification.
