I’ve played the game a little bit. Overall, I really like it, and I’d like to provide some feedback to make it even better.
The story
The story is generally pretty good. Unlike a lot of NSFW games, the story is good enough that I actually care about most of the characters, and the world has a mystery that I'm looking forward to uncovering. My main complaint here is that there isn't more. While this is understandable for a game that is still in development, I'd like to list the narrative content that's most in need of development, excluding content that is obviously under development:
i. Adrienne
Very cute. That by itself is enough of a reason to want more of her. Some threesome content with her and Michelle would be very nice. I'd also like to transform her into a proper slave. On a less horny note, the Preacher is underdeveloped, and an Andrienne quest could help develop him more.
A minor complaint I have about the quest to acquire Adrienne is that there is no violent option. While intimidating/defeating the Preacher shouldn't be easy, it should be an option if I don't want to whore out Michelle or play poker. Perhaps this could be tied to the player's power.
ii. Sera
The storyline around the fort is very underdeveloped. Not enough time is spent developing why the soldiers want to align themselves with the MC. While Sera tells us that the established houses are run by assholes, we never learn more about this. Aligning herself with a minor house like the MCs instead of a more established house is a very significant decision on her part and ought to have a deep motivation. Perhaps you could add some story elements exploring how she was treated by the establishes houses. Alternatively, you could take this in a different direction: even though Sera says she refuses to work with established houses, maybe, in reality, those houses refuse to work with her because of some secret in her past.
iii. Mei
She ripped off our buddy Ansel. She needs a story where she faces the consequences for this. I'm sure Ansel wouldn't be too hard on her.
iv. Aisha
She's gone from being an emkid to a common Ravenhead slut. When I ask her about her background, she says she has been humbled. No kidding. There is a lot of potential to expand on this. Perhaps events/scenes that pop up has her willpower and corruption reach certain thresholds, or a quest that has her interacting with some old emkid friends from her youth who haven't fallen from grace.
v. Bounty girl (I don't remember her name)
One of the bounties from the City Hall leads to a pair of fugitives in Kasey's park. They say that they are not guilty, and that they are just in the process of leaving Ikaanos. I'd really like to learn more about their story. Perhaps with different quest paths if I chose to let them go vs. enslaving them.
vi. Miss Winton
I've completed the quest and found her brother. The fact that she is still labeled on the map tells me that I'm supposed to care about her, but I can't actually do anything with her. If she doesn’t matter after the quest, her map label should be removed. If the player is supposed to care about her after the quest with her brother, then a new quest that explores her and her house should be added to the game. Perhaps a seduction plotline, and the ability to acquire whatever assets house Winton has left. One possible angle to explore here is the intersection between nobility and patriarchy in Raana: what is it like to be a woman leading a minor noble house in Raana?
Business management
While most slave training games involve some amount of business management, Masters of Raana also models the larger economic and political environment that the player's business operates in. This gives the game more depth than most games like it. However, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Automation
Business management is too grindy. After manually pressing the relevant buttons a certain number of times, the player should have the option of automation. I see 6 areas that could be automated:
1. Prostitution
Right now, to whore out my slaves, I need to click the prostitution button every night. I'd like to see automation that, when enabled, automatically whores out all assigned slaves with a condition better than some player-defined threshold every night. If a whore's condition is worse than the threshold, they stay home for that night, but are not disabled for future nights. This should happen even if the player is not home.
Automation could be tied to a "Madam" role. If you add a Madam role, then the Madam's attributes could affect whore revenue, and injury/rape/theft/skyguard risks.
2. The arena
Right now, to make my arena slave fight, I have to physically go to the arena and press the button every single day. Automation should empower my arena slave to fight every day, and to take tendstims as necessary to heal injuries. The player should be able to configure a risk level for their slave. Riskier fights offer larger potential prizes, but a greater likelihood of losing and being injured, while safer fights offer a lower, more consistent income.
3. Combat
Combat is boring when enemies are significantly weaker than the player's party. When the player's party is significantly more powerful than an enemy there should be a way of automatically resolving the fight. When a fight is automatically resolved, the player's party takes some damage, and spends some ammo depending on the strength of the enemy. The player should have the option of trying to capture slaves. Trying to capture slaves when auto-resolving should apply a malus to the player's party that increases the risk of injury. The probability that slaves are successfully captured should depend on what weapons the player's party has armed in the melee slot.
Once the player's household becomes strong enough all daily combat involves a large strength disparity. Thus, even with the auto-resolve system above, there would still be combat grind in the late game. To resolve this, the player should have the option of automatically sending out mercenary parties to clear out raider trash. When enabled, all respawnable raiders on the map will automatically be cleared each time they would have respawned, the loot that they would have generated is automatically added to the player's inventory, and the tendstims and ammo necessary to clear them are automatically deducted.
4. Slave training
Slave training becomes boring when it involves repeatedly going through the exact same scenes. While I like reading through the scenes the first few times, after that, I find myself repeatedly clicking to just get through them. In addition to being grindy, this creates two additional problems. Firstly, sometimes I press the wrong button by accident. For example, if I order a slave to give me a blowjob while I'm filthy, then the [Next] button becomes [Force]. This can create a situation where I accidentally rape a slave (sorry Juno). Naturally, as a kind and civilized master, I'm quite adverse to this. Secondly, because there is no way to quickly see whether the scene's text has changed since last time, I end up skipping through even new content. To put it another way, because the scene's text only changes one scene in ten, it doesn't make sense to read through the same text I have already read just for a one in ten chance of seeing something new.
Ideally, there would be a way of setting a daily schedule that includes slave training amongst other tasks. When automated in this way, players should have the option of seeing any scenes that have new text. This way, players can still see their slaves being broken while skipping through the boring stuff.
Another annoying feature of slave training in the current version of the game is how affection naturally decays over time. This can be resolved by fucking or talking to slaves, but can end up being grindy. Ideally, the daily schedule would give players the ability to automatically improve the affection of broken, but unaffectionate slaves.
5. Skill training
Skill training involves a lot of grind. While I appreciate that each lecture at the university has unique text, other sources of skill points are not so interesting from a gameplay perspective. The daily schedule mentioned in the slave training section should include the option to read books and train basic skills.
6. Inventory management
Part of managing your business in Masters of Raana is ensuring that you remain adequately stocked in food, ammo, and tendstims. While food is somewhat automated, the automation is imperfect since it doesn't take into account revenues from gardening. Ammo and tendstims are completely unautomated. The player should have the option of setting a target stockpile level for each consumable. Then, every night, so long as the player has money, the stockpile replenishes to the target level. The player should also have the option of choosing where to buy replenishment goods, and whether to buy in bulk.
The economy
The current economic system in game is a big step up from other similar games. Even so, it could be better. I'd like the economic simulation to be deeper, for the player to be able to invest in a broader set of ventures, and for the player's ventures to have a larger effect on the economy.
The economic model
I envision a system where the economy is divided into agents. An agent could be a business (ex. Aimee's goods), an individual (ex. Aimee), a social stratum (ex. the poor, the Emerald Islanders), a noble house, or the government. Each agent supplies and demands various goods and services to the market, and the prices of goods and services fluctuates dynamically based on supply and demand. These fluctuations in turn impact the income of the various agents which in turn impacts their behaviour. The income that businesses earn is split between reinvestments and dividends to shareholders, while the income that non-business agents earn is spent on various consumer goods. The amount of goods that agents are able to purchase from the market may also affect other aspects of their behavior. For example, if the urchins become less impoverished, this may reduce crime, which in turn reduces protection payments, reduces raider spawn rates, and weakens crime-focused houses. Less impoverished urchins may also reduce the supply of new slaves on the market, increasing slave prices, and by extension the price of prostitution services.
Agents may also be affected by random events. For example, a natural disaster may kill people, reducing the labour they supply to the market, and the goods/services they demand from it. A disaster may also destroy investments which could affect the supply and demand of various goods and services.
At a minimum, I'd like to see markets for the following goods/services:
* Every tradable item already in the game, including but not limited to guns, ammo, armor, food, and sex toys
* Unskilled labour
* Professional labour
* "Protection"
* Sexual services
* Narcotics
* Slaves
Investible ventures
For every commodity in the game, the player should be able to invest in a venture producing that commodity. These ventures then supply and demand goods and services on the market just like any other agent. After achieving a modest cash reserve, any additional profits are payed out to the player in dividends.
How this would improve the game
Games are interesting when they give the player interesting choices. By tying agents and events together through markets and prices, the player's choices can have complex second-order effects on other agents. For example, a player who invests in agriculture may reduce food prices, and by extension the profitability of other agricultural ventures. This in turn weakens agriculturally-focused houses. It also gives the player an incentive to undermine houses that compete with their investments since competition increases supply, and thus lowers prices and profits. It also puts players in the position of having to evaluate trade-offs. For example, while destroying a competing farming venture may make the players agricultural investments more profitable, it would also further impoverish the poor, which may in turn destabilize the republic.
Return on investment
In general, the RoI in this game is too high. Payback periods are often less than a year. While this makes sense for gameplay reasons when it is rare for players to play for more than a year anyways, if the game is improved to be less grindy, allowing the player to invest an unlimited amount of money at a such a high RoI will eventually break the economy as exponential growth does its thing. For this reason, if the player is given unlimited investment opportunities, there needs to be diminishing returns to capital, and/or a lower base ROI.
Fort Sera
Fort Sera is pretty underwhelming. It costs a huge amount of money to acquire, and then it generates a modest trickle of income. I'd like to be able to do more things with my private army. Maybe assign them offer "protection", “recruit” criminals and impoverished citizens, raid convoys, or attack rival houses.
Aging
Right now, there is a settings option to freeze aging, and a drug the player can buy from the palace that does the same thing. I'd like to see some sort of auto-apply option where the player has the option of automatically buying and using the drug on members of their household to freeze aging. This way we can maintain our young pristine story slaves without "cheating" by using the freeze age option.
Art
Most of the human-drawn renders are pretty good. The choice to use AI is interesting. On the one hand I could see how using AI could substantially reduce development costs, and free up resources to spend on other areas of the game, on the other hand, the AI renders have lots of visual incongruencies. Since the fun in the game comes primarily from the story, NSFW, political, and economic elements, and your development budget is fairly limited, I think it makes sense to use AI for minor background images, but not for characters. This mostly seems to be what you've gone with, though Sera notably lacks a human-drawn render.
Since breaking slaves generally involves putting them in bondage harnesses, the lack of bondage harness renders for random slaves is a major shortcoming.
Bugs
The only potential bug I have encountered so far is with sex with Adrienne. I'm not sure if this is a bug, or if this simply hasn't been implemented yet, but even though her corruption is 69, age is 18, and my lust is "satisfied", I can't "Demand Sex" or "Ask For Sex" with her. If this is a bug, it could be related to the fact that by the time I acquired her she was already 18.
