Some thoughts on rental cost balance (hard mode):
1. The way things are right now, you are expected to be living in the slums for a very long time before you can afford to pay 250+ sparks a decade for the cheapest rental. Living in the slums bars you off from accessing many game mechanics such as kitchen, bath, alchemy, dungeon, etc. - I think this is not something you want to subject players to for too long.
2. By the time you can afford to rent the cheapest property in the Quarters, you'd most likely have trained and sold many slaves to many clients, building up your reputation in the meanwhile. Say you now have a C rank brand reputation... that home you worked so hard to afford is now considered substandard to your slaver and thanks to the way slaver's personality works, you'll find it difficult to increase it (unless I'm misunderstanding the way it works, idk I'm stuck at "caitiff" even after moving out of the slums)
3. In conclusion: Managing your finances feels so much harder than I remember it to be... it's probably the double whammy from rental cost increase and slave price nerf. I think lower tier housings could stand to be less expensive and if sparks is too easy to come by in the late game, then maybe the higher tier ones could be made more expensive instead.
Thanks for reading.
1. It is called "extreme difficulty" now. If you simply want less financial challenge, you can play on normal
game difficulty but set the
obedience difficulty in the options menu to "hardcore". Still, you can cover the extreme difficulty costs of living sooner than you think. Guild subpurchaser pays 250 for a D- slave, no questions asked. You can also rent an apartment for just a few days at a time to get access to services temporarily. The first decade bill is prorated based on how many days are remaining in the decade. You still have to pay the rental agency fee.
2. With C reputation the slaver wants B rank cost of living. That particular negative entry in the diary tends to follow you for a while, but you can address the "I live in a decrepit hovel" complaint with a sufficient amount of premium-quality interior remodeling, depending on the master's reputation. You'll know it's enough when the diary entry goes away. As for the master's personality level, some interactions with slaves increase it, but it tends to decay towards the standard of living or home decoration quality, whichever is less. The amulet reward from the forum quests counters that when personality is less than B+.
3. The path of least resistance is to move from slums to outcasts. You get a free barn, which allows you to keep a pig, an extra assistant, an egglayer and a cow. An egglayer has some setup cost but gives passive income of 100+ sparks per decade (having a fiend helps a lot here by reducing food cost). Cows can be sold to the public animal farm (conveniently located in the outcasts district also) and you can use the restraints if the cow is resistant. Cow value is mostly unrelated to skills, other than "cow" skill and a few sex techniques. Pig can be sold or simply used as an extra slave for training. You can alternate slaves between pig diet (cheap but unhealthy, gains weight fast) and restricted/starvation diet (cheap but unhealthy, loses weight depending on metabolism).
Alternatively or additionally, a dungeon is a very powerful tool for increasing your income because you can be training a prisoner alongside your active slave, passively raising the prisoner's obedience (through fear) just by imprisoning them overnight, and using them as an example of punishment for your current active slave. Moving to serpentine instead of outcasts has some merit too, as it gives you free (no travel cost) access to cryo storage and the pub for meals, and taking slaves to the beach costs half energy and is usually an effective way to build devotion faster after a slave reaches D-.
I think the rent right now is fine, but I do believe that brand rep growth is too high, like you shouldn't be B tier if you still live in the slums, maybe if it was limited by the reputation with the faction or the faction you're with?
Good advice. I also feel brand rep grows too quickly with regular arena events. I capped it at B+ from arena in a recent dev update but I'm considering lowering that to C- (Recognized) and also increasing the gap between C- and B+ so it takes selling several high rank slaves or buying your way into the Taurus club to socialize it up.
Another idea: require minimum D- brand rep to participate in arena, so "spreading rumors" in the forum becomes relevant again in the early game.
