Imperator summurized it, but I'll juste add a thought: the idea behind the "mindbroken penalty" was to keep the mindbroken status as something negative, in any case. BUT, I wanted to give something to do with a mindbroken slave, and you can make a broken slave used to be a cow. You should rank up her cow skill by putting her in the barn, but she'll never be as productive as a trained and healthy girl (and you still can sell a broken cow to the public farm!)
Using a mindbroken slave as a cow seemed like a nice alternative to just disposing of her. In my opinion, any
sane girl would resist being stuck in a barn and milked, and might thus have a production penalty. Roughly the reverse of current implementation.
Yep, the goal was to encourage the player to milk her at the right time: if this right time was the first day, the player should have milk the cow every day, to maximize his profit. With this boost at 2/3, an observant player could understand that milking during the first (or the last) days is not the best thing to do.
But I understand it could looks unlogical
I see that if these production buffs were eliminated the player could get maximum milk by milking her every day, but that also costs the most MC energy. The penalty of frequent milking is already built into the mechanics.
And take away this decrease during personal training, for A+ cows, could be considered too.
The thing is, I do not like the idea to pull out a girl from the barn to make her fight in the arena, or teach her a random lesson, just to increase her ego or temper. I like the idea of some consistency in the trainings, furthermore for a very specific like this one^^
I agree. Having a cow fight in the arena does not make any sense to me. Frequently pulling her out of the barn to do other stuff so she doesn't become mindbroken seems like just a lot of repetitive maintenance clicks to keep a productive cow.
It appears to me there's a deeper design philosophy difference that underlies some of these points.
First, I suggest that design choices should, when possible, conform to generally accepted principles of biology/physics. (e.g. Breasts produce more milk when they are empty; A fat woman who has lactation implants in her huge tits would be a poor fighter.) That way the player can use their existing understanding of the world to predict outcomes in the game.
Second, game systems should allow the player to be at least somewhat successful/profitable within logically grouped mechanics (having a barn with a cow), without exploiting other game areas that are not related. In this case, having your cow be profitable requires 1) having a fiend, 2) having a fiend milker, 3) pulling your cow out of the barn to train her so she doesn't become mindbroken, 4) pulling the cow out of the barn to fight in the arena.
ImperatorAgustusTertius's argument that the balance and design of the barn+cow mechanics should
expect players to min/max by utilizing all those other game systems is not persuasive to my ear. Sort of like saying you should only expect a restaurant to be profitable if you grow crops on the roof and hold boxing matches in the building at night when the kitchen is closed.
In any case, thanks for everyone's thoughts. I enjoy playing the JoNT updates and poking around in the code.
I posted here to bring up some things that do not appear to be working right or do not make sense to me. At the end of the day, changes are up to whoever writes the code. If I fail to give persuasive ideas about how the design could be better, so be it.
