Hi guys, I have a few question for the veterans of this game to assess if it makes sense FOR ME to invest a lot of time in this game.
1) It seems to me that this game has a serious amoun of "grind" in it. When I look at things like the investments in the Wiki. I need 10.000 Influence for the big ones and then it takes for example for the General Store (Redhaven) investment more than 200 days before I break even 70k investment / 350 profits a day IF their are no disruptions. I mean I like to take my time and not trying to speedrun the days / the game. So I am supposed to play for half a year until I have the reputation, then invest and then play for 1-2 years so that the investment actually pays of eventually? How much time is that in Real Life? 100 hours?
Is there actually - FUN - stuff to do in this game for this kind of insane amount of time?
2) The combat system. It seems to me combat is: Get the best Ranged NPC you can afford. Give them Rifles. Give them Armor. Klick on NPC. Fire at Enemy. Klick on NPC fire at Enemy. Klick on NPC fire at Enemy. Is there anything else to it? There are no Skills like "rapid fire" or "aim" or anything else right? Also no leveling up except for the ultra slow and boring you get +1 if you crit (1/20 chance). There also is no special equipment with stats or stealth or anything. Just generic equipment and autoattack. Right? Combat feels like a boring chore.
Does this get better / more interesting / more challenging later in the game SOMEHOW?
3) There isn´t a way to get plastic surgery for the girls or a mod that adds varity for the body types is there? ALL women in this game - it seems - are of the same body type: "petite". As someone who likes curves, big boobs and big asses there aren´t really any options for me, right?
4) Is there any purpose to gambling beyond the 3 games a day in the Tavern for a few hundred bucks in potential profits? Are there some high stackes games later? Anything? I took all options to max gambling in char creation but it seems I loose 3 out of 4 games and "progress" seems to again happen 1/20 games on a crit ...
Gunner Rey's points are very valid and he is an established, long-time player. I haven't played the game for nearly as long as he has, but I'll add my point of view on things as well, since I've grown to love the game:
1 - It does have a serious amount of grind, no going around it. Some of it is pretty fun though. Other parts of it, makes me want to tear my hair out, so it kind of depends on what you're talking about. Influence grind is really not bad at all, the 10k number seems like a lot but it can be achieved relatively quickly without you even focusing on it specifically. The money grind is a different beast though. The thing about breaking even with your investment is a totally valid point, and in a vacuum, correct. But consider the fact that you are making a one time large investment for permanent passive income.
Eventually those investments add up and allow you to NOT have to do bounty hunting, for example, in which case you could get by doing nothing and staying at home all day. Which is not what I recommend, but I bring it up because at that point, you can switch your focus from bounty hunting to buying up slaves from slave markets and/or capturing them in combat, training them and then selling them for MASSIVE profits. OR, you could spend most of your time crafting items that will get you standing with several factions (that will, in turn, give you even more passive income once you reach certain thresholds).
So the game is about slowly building up an empire, or sorts, and offers different ways to do it. The harshest grind imo is actually the stat grind when you are looking to train certain specific stats on slaves (like Charisma). Those things could get tuned in the future though. Overall, managing your time and actions and slowly working towards a goal is one of the things that make the game interesting and fun for me. And you also get to build a big slave harem, that's also a plus.
2 - The combat is rather simplistic atm, and it does need an overall revamp. There is at least one combat revamp scheduled for a future patch already though. As of now, combat serves as a means to an end rather than as an end in and of itself, although I don't find it to be as boring as you described. It's simplistic, yeah, but if it was something that is orders of magnitude more complex than how it is now, it'd get old REALLY fast. Due to the nature of the game, you have to do combat a lot. A LOT. If every single encounter is some high-level super strategic encounter, player burnout would catch on really quick imo.
3 - There are no women with overly unrealistic proportions and it's true that there are plenty of petite, fit and athletic women in the game. There are some curvy ones though. Then again, depends on what you mean by curvy. Look up images of a slave called Nicole Boulay and/or Aisha Hasan. They are both what's considered a "story slave" (meaning they are "special, unique slaves instead of a random one you can get through RNG by capturing in combat or buying at an auction). They are both curvy, but also pretty fit.
And I know of at least one random slave that is curvy all around (but not fat). However, if what you mean by curvy is fat, then no, I don't think there are any of those ingame. There are a couple of random slaves with a little bit of a "beer belly", yes, but I don't think they have had their sex scenes done yet, and I think they are the closest to "having a belly".
Also you CAN give the slaves plastic surgery ingame, but it doesn't change their appearance. It instead, increases their beauty stat up to a threshold (which is one of the factors that weigh the most when you put that slave up for sale, since beautiful slaves sell for a premium).
4 - Gambling is also kind of raw in the game atm, and I can't really comment on it. I don't think it's worth investing in it atm though, as there are no "high stakes poker" or some high-end way you can use gambling to earn big profits. It might get worked on in the future, but as of now? I'd say focus on other stuff.
So to sum it all up, this is currently a management game more than anything else, and a lot of the fun in it comes from the setting, writing and straight up actions you can take in that regard, like training slaves. Specifically, the way you train slaves.
It has a bit of a mean learning curve, but the discord community is very active and very helpful, including the creator himself.
Give it an honest shake, you might like it.
