Hello! Just hopping in to give my thoughts about the ways to improve slaver start variety without having to resort to decay, I will propose ideas for early, mid and lategame :
First: How to emphasis slaver nature without decay in the early game:
Context : The core gameplay of jack o nine tails is understanding how to deal with slaves and how to process them in order to make profit. In almost every versions thus far, and especially in those later ones, this is something you find especially at the beggining of your runs, because your slaver simply doesn't yet have the necessary skills to train proper slaves in all categories.
As such, It's also harder to train your slaver in categories they're not good at since they will hit their own training cap on slaves on subjects they're not apt in. This alone is sufficient to encourage players to focus on areas their slavers are good at when training slaves, because of that, they will not focus much on areas their slavers is not good at, thus slowing even further progress towards areas they're not adept at.
The ideas:
- In order to encourage making every slaver feel different , rather than using decay that only gives frustration from taking away progress that was originally harder to achieve than normal (and thus should feel rewarding instead), you should focus on improving the effects that the specific abilities of slavers have. This way the player will instinctively focus on what they feel is working.
In order to do that : give some buffs to specific actions depending on slavers, make it known through text that thanks to slaver's experience, the effect was better than if they were working on something else.
- focus on variety can also be improved through a small revamp of the ranks for slaves: At the moment, since you always need a plethora of maxed common and sexual skills for your slave's rank to improve, you force the player to maximise their skills in different areas in order to make high rank slaves, this goes directly against the stat decay and as such gives a feeling that the game is working against the player progressing.
A solution to that would be to make ranks of specific slave archetypes more closely related to their field, and less about making them jack of all trades that can also do specialised stuff.
This way, the player will focus by themselves on making high rank slaves that fit their slavers, before focusing on other slave archetype that require other skills to achieve.
Secondly, You should make training low level stats (of the slaver) more related to money :
Context: In order to finish the game's story, a slaver needs to deliver high rank slaves of different archetypes to different people. This can currently be done in any order no matter the start.
Objective: The idea is to raise the bar needed to improve low starting stats, this will induce the player to focus on raising high rank slaves of a specific archetype (related to their starting slaver) to get money in order to fund their improvement towards training other archetypes, and thus storyline progress.
The added value is that this make the mid and end game feel fresh, as your slaver suddenly needs to "relearn" how to train slaves in other categories (albeit slightly easier than at the start thanks to quest items and funds).
Last: Lategame improvements regarding slaver stats
As for lategame, when the stats of a slaver is high, you currently get to raise that specific stat even higher by just spamming training, which is easy because again, that stat is already high : Somewhat grindy yet fast and not very satisfying.
The idea:
Consider giving less exp by grinding training and instead giving exp "bonus" when selling a slave that's well trained in areas related to those stats.
The objective :
- Gameplay wise : Rather than being able to make perfect slaves from the start, this will make players increment the rank of slaves they produce itterativelly, giving a feeling of progress and preventing too much "rank skipping" -> This change along with the first change should make every new slave focused towards a certain archetype feel like a new challenge instead of just a more grindy version of something they've already achieved.
- Enjoyment wise : No matter how the player chooses to train their slaves, they will be rewarded based on the result of their training efforts rather than grinding (which doesn't prevent them to choose the grindiest options if they want). Lore wise, you can make the appraising for the sale a testament that the slaver did well in his training, reinforcing his know-how in a field.
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TLDR: improve the benefits of training specific archetypes, reward with progress players that succeed in challenging themselves, renew the game's core gameplay multiple time during a single playthrough.
PS: I hope I made sense and didn't leave a mess after editing my text so much, I've loved the game for a long time and hope it can become an enjoyable experience, both for casual players and for those that want to give themselves a challenge. I wish you all happy slave-making o/
