1: Why don't the lust and physical defense skills level up with you? They're useless so quickly. Oh boy, blocking 7-21 damage out of 80x3. So helpful.
2: It's way too easy to scare off enemies and resummon new ones with new equips to farm. You can just farm weapons on succubi early on and be able to afford everything in a few days. I wish when you removed a character from a tile they wouldn't respawn for a day or a real time hour or something. At least that'd require you to move around more.
3: The obvious exploityness of finding a demon/slime and turning them into a milk slave. What I think about when I see something like that is: "If it's that easy for the player to do, why isn't everybody doing it?". Wouldn't the market be oversaturated with bodily fluids? Even non slaves would be hooking themselves up to milkers for easy cash if it sold that well right? Supply and demand. The more is produced, the lower it would sell for on the market, so capping how much money you can make by selling milk/sex fluids actually has some realism to it.
4: Being able to lower magic cast cost so much that a heal with Soothing Waters + Arcane Spring regenerates more mana that it uses. Arcane Springs probably shouldn't exist.
1. True, all-out offense quickly becomes the name of the game, instead of observing the opponent's 3 actions and deciding how best to weave physical/lust-based attack and defense actions together.
I had a little more fun with extremely early-game combat for that reason, though it wasn't perfect because races with significant innate Physique bonuses (or anyone who spawned with a particularly strong weapon) could tear through your limited Physical Shielding like it wasn't there.
I feel like the perk tree would be a good source of permanent improvements for the Block and Resist actions, but it has been stuck in WIP/proof-of-concept limbo for ages.
2. and 3.
This is part of an overarching imbalance in the monetary reward system that I crudely "solve" through a series of heavy self-imposed restrictions. They're probably not very fun-sounding for most people, though:
- No permanent removal of NPCs from the game (eg. chasing them off a tile, betraying a friend, attacking enforcer patrols). Once an NPC occupies a danger tile, the only way to clear that tile is to enslave them.
- No capturing slaves solely to sell; a captured slave must be kept permanently, properly trained, and interacted with on a regular basis. (Capturing a slave just to clear a tile and then neglecting them or setting them up as a fire-and-forget moneymaker is a no-go.)
- No milking fluid-producing slaves; they completely destroy the value of money.
- No looting equipment from defeated enemies (unrealistically, this also includes those I enslave; I leave their stuff untouched). Looting their consumable items is allowed.
- No getting into fights solely for the sake of earning money. If passing through a dangerous area, I need a good reason to be there, at which point I can fight what gets in my way.
- No selling enchanted elixirs. (Making use of the School of Water perk and the Transformer perk when enchanting personal/slave-use equipment and consumables is perfectly fine.)
- [Tangentially related] No orgasmic level drain, which indirectly affects earnings somewhat by throttling the speed you level up.
With those self-imposed rules in place, my income becomes very low. But I feel that these earnings
make sense compared to what things cost.
Early on, I needed to make serious decisions over which spell to buy and upgrade next. For that matter, I still don't have full upgrades for every single spell. I also need to consider whether I can spam powerful Arcane-Essence-consuming weapon attacks, since I can't simply buy as many Arcane Essences as I want.
Without the rules, there are just
too many ways to make money easily, even without fluid-producing slaves.
This reduces the value of rewards from quests/exploration/combat, because the only truly valuable finds are rare base item types (artifacts etc.) that are never available in shops.
4. I think this one is fine. The existence of Arcane Strike as a basic spammable move means Aura was never meant to be a serious limiting factor for spellcasters being able to do, well, anything. Arcane Springs just adds some action efficiency to the Soothing Waters spell.
Enchanted restoratives are also straightforward to create, so restoration between combat encounters isn't an issue (unlike, say, Vancian magic systems where you would have to budget your spells between limited-and-uncertain rest locations in a dungeon).
Regeneration perks (among many others) being lackluster is a separate issue. I'm waiting for the perk tree to get some attention again, to see if shoddy perks are
still shoddy after they get another look-over.