Alright guys I have completed what is essentially an alpha version of a balance mod. It's pretty rough as it is just the result of me tweaking things as I play over a few days. Some things are not going to be reflected correctly in the game advice, tutorial etc now.The gameplay is radically overhauled based on what I considered to be interesting and challenging game mechanics. It's not made this to replace the current game, of course, it's just my personal take as someone who was looking for a challenge and started tweaking lots and lots of different things. It's not meant to be coherent with any lore, it's just supposed to be a fun challenge for experienced players who are a bit bored of the current game mechanics.
Important to note is I balanced this around hard mode. I haven't tried it on any other difficulty.
The aim of training now is to get your slave to become obedient, without raising despair and draining her stats. That's is the challenge of training now, particularly for high attribute slaves. Once your slave becomes obedient, she will quickly reach her potential rank, depending on her attributes, and can be sold quickly without having to do much annoying grinding. You need to get Obedience to 9 to start raising Devotion, which means raising Taming, Habit, Awareness, Fear, and lowering Pride. You no longer need random skills.
To reach high rank, the slave will have to have accordingly high atributes. Such slaves will require a lot of time, precision, and a high-level trainer to train successfully. Sensitivity is particularly important. High sensitivity slaves gain despair at higher moods than low sensitivity slaves and require a higher mood to lower despair. They also gain more despair at very low moods. It's also worthg twice any other attribute in rating, and drains very quickly at high despair levels. Endurance is no longer counted in ranking. The higher a slave's attributes, the more disobedient, so you will also have to raise fear and taming/habit/awareness more, and lower her pride, while strictly managing her mood! I have tried to balance this to be a slow and painstaking process, however, this is still an alpha so it may still be somewhat unbalanced. In general, it is a very bad idea to have a high-sensitivity slave going to sleep with a very low mood very often unless you don't care and just want to sell the slave at a low rank. I nerfed the crap out of Encourage so don't think you can just spam that! The reward spell is also nerfed, but it's still incredibly useful. It adds 1 Merit at base and 2 at high-level spellcaster. Mood is also less important for diligence, so your low mood slave can still perform decent, gain merit, and therefore mood. A slave with a bit of fear is always gonna get a bit of merit if you invite a tutor early on.
Training a slave to rank C+ and below remains relatively straightforward. You simply have to get her obedience up by being nasty as hell. You just need to raise her fear and lower her pride ASAP. Even if you drain her stats it doesn't matter much for such low-quality slaves. Don't worry about her mood or despair too much, for these low-quality slaves it's all about training them quickly and selling them for a quick profit! Use every tool available. Force rules, BDSM gear, Punishments, sleep in the dungeon when she has >3 guilt. Train these slaves to increase slaver stats increase and collect money to tackle a higher quality slave. Training a high-quality slave is going to be almost impossible without a high-level trainer!
Another change I made is to make rape a punishment. Oral is tier 2, vaginal tier 3, ( unless virgin then it's tier 5) anal tier 4. Effectiveness is based upon slavers sex skills. Also the high tier public punishments no longer are treated differently than other same tier punishments. They are very useful at lowering Pride but hurt mood like crazy so be careful... Another thing to note is that forcing rules no longer causes despair independently, but it lowers mood a lot so you have to be careful.
EDIT: Made some changes. Remove code that was capping diligence to 1 at negative mode.
