If you only have a small number of people at risk of escaping, the only guaranteed method I know of is to imprison them. It also helps to assign several people as guards and upgrade your guard tower, etc so if an escape attempt is made you're more likely to catch them. Pool parties are a good way to fix affection for newly captured people unless they have the deadly enemy or detached traits. Party Animal trait helps with that if you started with it as well. For females, the fastest method is to just fuck them but this assumes you have decent skill at charm, manipulate, or copulation to ensure they like it.
Also until you've discovered all of the secrets from any secretive people you might find you may want to prioritize interrogating any secretive people who have low willpower until you finish that. Once you do, all remaining secretive people will have that trait removed. I just auction off any high willpower secretive randoms, but not uniques.
The thing is that sending them to prison is a closed circle of negativity.
Prison gives them fear, makes them less likely to escape BUT it also lowers affection, by a lot.
And you need affection so they dont escape. There is no winning move here.
I just checked building the pool:
- it cost 22.000$
- it gives 1 affection (2 if you have party animal)
- you cant even stack it with free time cause they dont go to the party
Giving them free time:
- it cost 0$
- it gives 2 affection, plus 4 happiness, less stress, etc
- did I mentioned that its free?
- doesnt even make time pass
I just think there should be a better system to either lower escape attempts, or increase affection, that doesnt require grinding going person to person to spam free time. As of now I dont see a consistent method that doesnt either take a lot of spamming all NPCs, or investing a ton of time and money, plus having proper attributes.