Not only. One player complained recently that they cannot fully engage in slaving trade and slave-based economy. And he was right, the game so far is not about running a slave enterprise. As another player pointed out:
"I dont see any reason to limit your slaves at all...its only a coders problem, not logistic, not logic, just coding nightmare since they need space, food and a schedule on who sleeps with you, could be auto picked the ones who performed best each day or you need a big orgy bed for the best performers and a few bedrolls for the worst..."
I've included the slave trade in the calculation in my reply; realistically i'd guesstimate no more than 5-10 of such slaves (for the total amount of 20-25 slaves in the household) since more than that and it becomes quite difficult to keep track on individual characters, their training goals etc. Not to mention simply not enough time in the game day to take care of them all.
The other player's quote is a bit misleading when you take it out of context -- while they've said that, they've also specified what sort of gameplay they had on mind, which was simply having some slaves working at stores, and some keeping the household running (cleaning, hunting, raising crops etc) Couple dozen characters should be quite sufficient for it in practice, there's no need for
UNLIMITED SLAVE WORKS.
And if you're referring to FC as an example of a great HTML based econo-simulator with lewd content capable of managing +100 NPC then I have to disagree.
No, i was actually completely unaware such game existed. The game i had on mind was Accidental Woman (which am not saying is particularly
good, as it suffers from bugs and poor design decisions, but it does implement large procedural semi-active NPC body count)
Does a twine/sugarcube engine allow for creation of AI players whose intelligence and agency is not expressed through some random or criteria-triggered events, but are moving pieces in a playthrough, the way that AI players in Civ merchandize actually build their own civilizations, grow cities, expand territories, produce, move troops and all that jazz?
Yes, any functional programming language will allow this; i'd offer Unholy Arts as a working proof of this concept -- it pits your character against a handful of NPCs who compete with you using the same tools and mechanics you're given. They're pretty much independent and move around the map and interact with one another according to their own personalities and strategies.