HTML Masters of Raana [v0.8.4.7] [GrimDark]

[Gunner Rey]

Yeah, not doing that. The combat isn't fun. Putting all that effort (including save scumming) just to make it viable, only proves how lopsided the combat is. Want to be good at melee combat? How about spending literal months of in-game time training in a menu to be marginally less-shit at it? Yeah, doesn't exactly sound enticing. Sure you could do all that, or spend a fraction of the time raising just Ranged Combat, loot a Coil Gun or Plasma Rifle, and be comparable in a fraction of the time and resources. Plus, nothing in the game or wiki say anything about the existence of that 'striking position', something that might be useful to know. Plus, a scientist with 30 in Strength and Dexterity has just a much health in combat as a uber-ninja with 100 in both.

I tried melee. It sucked, and making any sort of progress with your stats took forever. That and compared to the hired help Peasant, who was blowing shit away with his .30-06 rifle. Looted some more rifles and gave them to Ansel and Loren, they too started blowing shit away, and my character was utterly left in the dust and with no clear progression to getting any better on a time scale not used to measure tectonic movement. As a new player, even one looking at the wiki, there's no reason to even think melee is a viable option after you've played the game at start, and realize that one of the biggest advantages you have is that you move first AND most of your opponents are mostly melee and need to waste a turn moving into range. Your greatest strength is 2 full rounds of actions before they can even start to fight back. When that's where the combat starts, why would anyone even think spending their time trying to improve melee is even a viable path forward?

Melee is best used in a supplemental role to mop up opponents after taking out anyone they have that can reliably pierce Duraplate (plasma, coil, auto-rifle). Once your dex gets high enough (I think it's 70) your MC can start in the advanced position and doesn't have to close. A high dexterity will also mitigate the penalties incurred by the heavier armors.

In the short run, you're correct, getting everyone rifles makes the early game much easier. In the middle to long term though it's worth it to use melee rather than fire coil/plasma guns at weak/wounded opponents.

 

[iamnuff]

Lol, LMAO.

Melee combat does suck balls though. You have to waste a full turn to get close, so at the very least you should do twice as much damage as a ranged combatant.
But you don't. You miss just as often as a ranged character does and your damage is sub-par.

I got the power-katana merc from the arena area in my combat party and she's definitely my lowest contributor.
Even worse than Aiko, and I only just took her shotgun away and gave her a real gun.

Maybe it's just a lack of good melee weapons, maybe melee is just inherently inferior.
Either way, don't bother to level melee. You can afford guns, you'd have to be a moron not to use them.

That said, I do agree that the way that you level up skills needs to be made WAY more interesting. At the moment it's just a timesink where you have to waste dozens of in-game days on it. Even more when you want to level up your followers.

I know there's a chance to gain ranged skill in combat, but I think that's either only on kill, or only on hit.
If your skill-level is low enough, you don't get to hit, so you don't get that chance.
Change it to 'chance per attack' weighted towards lower skill-levels gaining skill way faster.

Then you can bring slaves into combat, give them crossbows and just get them used to the idea of shooting at things and they'll improve over time.

Alternatively, as I suggested before, let you take your whole combat party down to the range to train all five of you at once, so even if it does take months to get someone to level 90 ranged, you at least don't have to do it five times in a row.

 

[Kavalor]

I think nobody here claims that the system is amazing ( not even Grimdark) , there is a reason a combat rework is planned.
The question is not if, but when and it is most likely when the other core system are in place - at least I hope so.
But we are still talking about a twine/html game, I doubt you will ever be able to get a super tactical experience out of that.
Better - absolutely , but not on a level of a professional game from a gamestudio with more than 1 "Employee"

 

[Gunner Rey]

Lol, LMAO.

Melee combat does suck balls though. You have to waste a full turn to get close, so at the very least you should do twice as much damage as a ranged combatant.
But you don't. You miss just as often as a ranged character does and your damage is sub-par.

I got the power-katana merc from the arena area in my combat party and she's definitely my lowest contributor.
Even worse than Aiko, and I only just took her shotgun away and gave her a real gun.

Maybe it's just a lack of good melee weapons, maybe melee is just inherently inferior.
Either way, don't bother to level melee. You can afford guns, you'd have to be a moron not to use them.

That said, I do agree that the way that you level up skills needs to be made WAY more interesting. At the moment it's just a timesink where you have to waste dozens of in-game days on it. Even more when you want to level up your followers.

I know there's a chance to gain ranged skill in combat, but I think that's either only on kill, or only on hit.
If your skill-level is low enough, you don't get to hit, so you don't get that chance.
Change it to 'chance per attack' weighted towards lower skill-levels gaining skill way faster.

Then you can bring slaves into combat, give them crossbows and just get them used to the idea of shooting at things and they'll improve over time.

Alternatively, as I suggested before, let you take your whole combat party down to the range to train all five of you at once.

You gain skill points with critical successes, which means no matter how low your current score you have the same chance of increasing your skill up to the cap at least, which I think is now 150. The chance to crit is roughly 4-5%. That means every combat that goes long enough to allow at least four shots from your five-person party will result in roughly one of you gaining a skill point on average.

Tactically guns are superior, but strategically you can gain through using less ammo by utilizing melee in at least a supplemental role. Alternatively once you really learn the game you can forgo ranged combat to increase the challenge as I've read some veteran players do.

 

[JaxMan]

Don't know why you guys are responding to or trying to placate the poster. He doesn't like the game, made his reasons known and has no intention of changing them. Let him go and play something else he, hopefully, might enjoy. That's how it works. If he stays and continues to comment on his critique he's a troll.

 

[GD-studios]

Piss off. I'm not just a gamer, I fucking went to college for Game Design & Animation (Art Institute of Pittsburgh). I subsequently have a much more refined 'gamer' pallet. Stuff that doesn't bother other people, bothers me a lot. In the same way that a film major is going to notice poor editing and pacing in a movie, or a medical student will notice bad practices in a medical procedural TV show.

If this shit doesn't bother you? Great. Have fun. But the game has fundamental issues, and I gave it a long and solid try, hoping that it would eventually get better at some point. It did not. The more I played it, the more the problems compounded. Even when freed of the rat-race for money, the experience didn't improve. That speaks to a fundamental problem with the core gameplay loop. The progression that is there is grindy and almost meaningless (e.g. in combat, stats matter far less than gear), the interaction with your slaves is rather shallow and uniform (e.g. once they reach the same range of stats, they all have the same reactions).

That's not including problems with the UI, like how some pages within the slave menu let you swap between slaves without having to back out to the main menu, but others do not and force you to swap back and forth to check each slave individually (e.g. the prostitution and house rules submenus) because the dev decided to waste half the UI real-estate with a still image that you won't care about after you've seen it twice. Or how the house rules lacks options to set a slave's preferred clothing to some of the available options, like any of the swimwear or the New Eden gown. Or how making one of your slaves your wife completely eliminates any bondage options with them. Why? What did that accomplish? Even if you have later plans for a slightly different version of the bandage stuff unique to the wife, why completely remove the standard options you'd been using to train them up to that point?

Or how the house menu options are split into 3 confusing categories (why is Training under Actions & Events and not Manage, are you not managing yourself at that point?) that each lead to a 6 icon submenu that none of which actually have an entire 6 icons worth of options. Just eliminate all of the submenus, put the Spend Time / End Day options at the top, and now use the entire bottom to display a row or two of those icons. If you want them displayed with a lot of excess space, make it a single row with arrows on either side to rotate out to a second or third row of icons (much like how the Manage Household submenu works, and it already has the arrow UI elements you need). That way you're not getting confused with where each icon you want is hidden, you can just see them all right there.

The only trick to the combat is having good gear and decent aim, all of which are money sinks rather than XP or skill progression. You don't even need to bother training your Ranged Combat skill (which determines your accuracy, not your Dexterity, despite how they're often tied together in character creation) when you can just purchase that ocular combat implant that makes it nigh impossible to miss. Your only meaningful character stat for combat is accuracy, and that can be bypassed with money.

Here's a question: how much health does the player have? No fucking idea! It's not in the Wiki, nor is it displayed on the character stats screen in game. Nothing in any of the attributes on the Wiki says anything about effecting health, and Stamina is it's own dedicated stat rather than a derived one (from say a Constitution score). How do you increase it? More costly implants! Money might as well be a core character attribute, cause it means more than your actual stats; you might as well be a walking bank account with a gun.

So yeah, I started out initially with a big mean bruiser of a melee build, trying to play into being a raging barbarian. It wasn't great. Later I started over with a high Intelligence scientist build that used guns, and with zero options in character creation put into combat utility, and it utterly mopped the floor in combat compared to the earlier melee build. Even with the money sink that is ammo, ranged combat does more damage faster, which keeps you safer and spending less on healing and armor repair.

Again, the game isn't bad. It's writing is serviceable, but doesn't rise above that. It gets the job done with a minimal of grammatical errors, but you're not going to find yourself playing this game for the strength of the prose. The renders look okay, but they're small, grainy, and frequently missing. They also include a generic bald guy (despite all three of the player avatar images having hair) who I know I've seen in dozens of other 3D CG games (the one that comes immediately to mind is the antagonist of The Point of No Return). You're going to see the same content dozens and dozens of times, because making any progress requires inordinate grinding of the same actions over and over and over again. What might have been engaging or hot at first, absolutely loses all of its luster when you're seeing or reading it for the hundredth or two hundredth or three hundredth time.

Which would bother me less, if it was actually any fun. But it's not. It scratched that itch to see numbers go up, that most basic of Pavlovian gamer responses. But once you get beyond that? It's just not an engaging experience. It's a money and time management game with the occasional repetitive sex scene, which makes you feel like you're trapped in a soulless 9-to-5 office cubicle job rather than being a globe trotting noble slavemaster bounty hunter badass. There is no power fantasy here. The only power is the size of your bank account, and you will need to grind incessantly to increase it; again making the game feel more akin to the office cubicle rat-race than a epic RPG adventure.

Several interesting suggestions. However, I'd say at least 75% of all those issues are something I've planned to address eventually - especially the combat system, slave diversity and different ways to "grind".

Are you on our Discord server? There's a lot of planned features and discussions going on there and I usually bookmark all suggestions posted by players. You do seem like a veteran MoR player so I'd love to hear more!

 

[AH-64E]

Don't know why you guys are responding to or trying to placate the poster. He doesn't like the game, made his reasons known and has no intention of changing them. Let him go and play something else he, hopefully, might enjoy. That's how it works. If he stays and continues to comment on his critique he's a troll.

I'd say it's an overall constructive conversation. If you ignore his less than... sociable... traits (which might be rather difficult), he does indeed have some good points and critiques to share. The best kind of feedback to get is negative feedback, provided it's informative.

 

[EvolutionKills]

Several interesting suggestions. However, I'd say at least 75% of all those issues are something I've planned to address eventually - especially the combat system, slave diversity and different ways to "grind".

Are you on our Discord server? There's a lot of planned features and discussions going on there and I usually bookmark all suggestions posted by players. You do seem like a veteran MoR player so I'd love to hear more!

I actually post here because I prefer an old-school traditional forum to Discord's stream-of-consciousness take on interaction. I enjoy taking my time to collect my thoughts, then edit and format them as needed before posting; and Discord really isn't conducive to that. That being said, I have been mainlining MoR for the last few days, so I have put a lot of hours into it in a relatively short amount of time.

Happy to hear that you're aware and working on improvements, rather than doubling down. I haven't written the game off for good, and perhaps I should have been more clear with that in my original post. While I am certainly done at the moment with the version that I played, I haven't written the game itself off entirely.

But if I can make a suggestion here. I thought the option for difficulty was good, and the choice of dice rolls was rather novel. Maybe add in a third option that would invoke a game-wide modifier to most all stat changes? Not combat health or damage, but an option to raise a multiplier (2X~5X) for stuff like money and stat gains would help cut into the grind for those who would prefer a more streamlined experience with faster progression. That way instead of making a lot of individual tweaks, you could still build to your vanilla baseline, and give those who want it a fast track.

 

[GD-studios]

I actually post here because I prefer an old-school traditional forum to Discord's stream-of-consciousness take on interaction. I enjoy taking my time to collect my thoughts, then edit and format them as needed before posting; and Discord really isn't conducive to that. That being said, I have been mainlining MoR for the last few days, so I have put a lot of hours into it in a relatively short amount of time.

Happy to hear that you're aware and working on improvements, rather than doubling down. I haven't written the game off for good, and perhaps I should have been more clear with that in my original post. While I am certainly done at the moment with the version that I played, I haven't written the game itself off entirely.

But if I can make a suggestion here. I thought the option for difficulty was good, and the choice of dice rolls was rather novel. Maybe add in a third option that would invoke a game-wide modifier to most all stat changes? Not combat health or damage, but an option to raise a multiplier (2X~5X) for stuff like money and stat gains would help cut into the grind for those who would prefer a more streamlined experience with faster progression. That way instead of making a lot of individual tweaks, you could still build to your vanilla baseline, and give those who want it a fast track.

Understandable! F95 works fine too of course.

Yeah. Check back around 2026 or something when the game has (hopefully) reached version 1.0. - even if the next couple of updates have a lot of new stuff coming.

 

[iamnuff]

How is your 'combat power' calculated for the Mad Preacher questline?
I could grind my gambling for hours... but I kinda just want to kill this asshole?

It says i'm at 13/25, but it doesn't tell me how it's calculating that.
Gear level? The combat-skills of my companions? Everyone has combat armour and coilguns, and almost everyone has a ranged attack stat of 90+

 

[Gunner Rey]

How is your 'combat power' calculated for the Mad Preacher questline?
I could grind my gambling for hours... but I kinda just want to kill this asshole?

It says i'm at 13/25, but it doesn't tell me how it's calculating that.
Gear level? The combat-skills of my companions? Everyone has combat armour and coilguns, and almost everyone has a ranged attack stat of 90+

One thing I know is that everyone in your household with a ranged or melee combat score of 25 counts one.

 

[iamnuff]

One thing I know is that everyone in your household with a ranged or melee combat score of 25 counts one.

Total household?
But why?

I'm standing two feet away from this dude holding a man-portable plasma weapon. He shouldn't be assessing the strength of my household, he should be assessing my ability to vaporize him and his retinue before he can put pants on.

Relatedly, I know how to modify my own stats with console commands ( SugarCube.State.active.variables.master-) but how do you target slaves/mercs with that? Their names don't seem to be working and if i'm going to have to start a new save when the capture update comes out, i'm going to want to cheat a bunch.

 

[Gunner Rey]

Total household?
But why?

I'm standing two feet away from this dude holding a man-portable plasma weapon. He shouldn't be assessing the strength of my household, he should be assessing my ability to vaporize him and his retinue before he can put pants on.

It could be he's concerned that even if he does win you might have enough thugs and slaves in your household to avenge you.

My endgame characters can shake off a couple plasma blasts.

Relatedly, I know how to modify my own stats with console commands ( SugarCube.State.active.variables.master-) but how do you target slaves/mercs with that? Their names don't seem to be working and if i'm going to have to start a new save when the capture update comes out, i'm going to want to cheat a bunch.

I've never actually done that so I'm not the one to ask, the Discord might be the place to ask about that if no one answers you here.

There's no reason to think you'll have to start a new game when the new update goes public.

 

[iamnuff]

My endgame characters can shake off a couple plasma blasts.

\Probably not while naked tho.

There's no reason to think you'll have to start a new game when the new update goes public.

I killed a bunch of potentially capturable slaves. I'm going to restart.

 

[Hargan2]

Total household?
But why?

I'm not sure whether the Preacher quest uses household power or if combat power means something else.

Relatedly, I know how to modify my own stats with console commands ( SugarCube.State.active.variables.master-) but how do you target slaves/mercs with that? Their names don't seem to be working and if i'm going to have to start a new save when the capture update comes out, i'm going to want to cheat a bunch.

So, the variables aren't straightforward. Slaves use an $av_# variable, and mercs/issids use $is_# (for example, is_3 is loren) see my post below for more details

All of the mercs/issids have their stats saved in an array tied to the "$is_" variable. "is_3" is Loren, for example. Here's a screenshot of Grim's explanation of each number in the array.

Spoiler

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[Gunner Rey]

\Probably not while naked tho.

Actually, yes. With all the implants your health is 200 at least, that's roughly two first-shots by Ayden.

At any rate Hargan makes a good point, I naturally assumed that was your household
power rating being considered, that might not be the case. I've never seen that screen because I let Michelle take care of that problem, she's a slavegirl and a slut, that's what she's for.

I killed a bunch of potentially capturable slaves. I'm going to restart.

Ah, I get it.

 

[Mahroni]

How is your 'combat power' calculated for the Mad Preacher questline?
I could grind my gambling for hours... but I kinda just want to kill this asshole?

It says I'm at 13/25, but it doesn't tell me how it's calculating that.
Gear level? The combat skills of my companions? Everyone has combat armor and coilguns, and almost everyone has a ranged attack stat of 90+

This, I need to know what determines the power calculation. At first, I thought it was about influence but after having over 10000+ influence, it still stuck at 17/25. I don't want to share my waifu. Also, my character is a total noob at gambling so savescumming is futile.

 

[EvolutionKills]

Understandable! F95 works fine too of course.

Yeah. Check back around 2026 or something when the game has (hopefully) reached version 1.0. - even if the next couple of updates have a lot of new stuff coming.

Cool, good to hear.

So taking you at face value, here are some of my thoughts about cleaning up the overabundance of slave traits.

Some of them are on the 0-100 scale, while others use a split gradient where the neutral value is 50. I think there are a few that could be simplified and combined, so that you had way fewer stats to worry about.

An example right off the bat, Frigid and Nymphomaniac. This is the easiest one to call, as they're opposite ends of the same spectrum. Get rid of both, and replace it with one of the gradient scores and call it Libido. Make <26 trigger the effects of Frigid, and make >74 trigger the effects of Nymphomaniac.

What about Oral Fixation? Why does this exist separate from the sexual skills? A few of these Traits really read like they shouldn't be gauged on a 0-100 scale. They seem more like the Perks from Fallout, unique abilities separate from the SPECIAL attributes or the proficiency levels of the various skills. Stuff like Oral Fixation, Daddy Issues, and Size Queen seem more like particular kinks, there for roleplaying flavor, and a lot of them cannot even currently be modified. I think putting them, and potentially other behaviors that represent particular kink-like behaviors or personality traits that can be expressed as a binary (either on or off), into their own category (e.g. Perks) would make a lot of sense. It would help distinguish them as a core part of a slave's personality, and not something that could easily be changed in and of themselves.

Now you actually had the right idea for having a system to negate or neuter these particular personality traits, and it is demonstrated in some of the traits like Feminist. Reaching a certain Affection or Corruption level should allow you to potentially bypass the negative effects of various traits. So for example Daddy Issues you could have the -20 to Charm/Persuasion rolls be negated once you reach a certain Affection level, representing the slave's love for you in particular overcoming her natural aversion to a more immature MC. So it's not a 0-100 skill, it's just always there, but you can bypass it by working around it rather then through it.



These are the Traits that I think would work better combined into a gradient scale, with a neutral middle ground. Also, not every trait would need to trigger the upper or lower effects at the same amount. Like, maybe being ashamed is harder to kick then being a Vanilla fan, so Ashamed kicks in at 30, while Vanilla kicked in at 20. Just some thoughts.


Frigid & Nymphomaniac -> Libido (Frigid > Healthy > Nympho) : Increased through orgasms, with more and different ones being better. Perhaps have it lowered by ignoring a girl who's reached Nympho, and letting their happiness fall too low. Perhaps once back to healthy, could be lowered into Frigid by further abstinence combined with Fear and/or Pain through punishment.

Vanilla & Perverted -> Perversion/Corruption (Vanilla/Chaste > Kinky > Debauched) : Similar to above, but with Corruption. Hell, this could make a separate Corruption score quite superfluous. Bonus points the kinkier the sex is.

Shamefast -> Exhibitionism (Ashamed > Average > Exhibitionist) : Just how comfortable they are with showing the goods to you, and to the public at large. Increase by getting them naked and keeping them that way. Possibly decreased through some sort of dialogue option or just having them in more conservative clothing more often. Maybe different outfits would have a passive effect on this over time, with casual outfits lowering, dresses being neutral, and stuff like bikinis raising it up to a point, with true exhibitionism requiring the training gear or being naked for extended periods.

Dominant & Submissive -> Submission (Dominant/Defiance > Average > Submissive) : Unless you plan on implementing a Switch option that would enable girls to be both Dominant and Submissive and you started making Femdom content, I don't see a reason why this shouldn't be combined into a singular scale. Another idea is that this could replace the Defiance attribute, with a low score on the scale representing a slave's resistance to your authority. I get that would require more work, and there is an argument to the utility of enabling/measure Defiance outside of Dominance/Submission. Conversely you could make it so that current Defiance gains result in much larger changes on the scale, not only because 50 would be the new baseline, but even doubling the current ones would result in effective quadrupling the relative change/loss in Submission.

Workaholic -> Work Ethic/Workmanship/Discipline (Sloppy > Average > Diligent) : Regardless of how skilled someone might be at something, not everyone shows all their work or does so without cutting corners. Then again, this could also make Discipline superfluous, or perhaps could even replace it. Making it a gradient scale and granting bonuses for very disciplined girls, and maluses for undisciplined ones. Potentially increased though dialogue/praise when at high Affection, or admonishment when at low Affection or high Fear. Lowered by being unassigned a task/job, or punishing without cause?

Jaded -> Outlook (Pessimist > Realist > Optimist) : The slaves general outlook on life. Increase it towards Optimist by completing personal quests, requests, and generally treating your slaves with affection and respect. Lower it by doing the opposite of that, making them more insular and jaded as a result.

Religion -> Faith (Atheist > Agnostic > Faithfull) : Unless you had other plans for religion, it's another thing that could be represented by a gradient scale. Not even sure if you'd want to actually allow it to be a scale that can be effected by the player. But it would allow differentiation between slaves that are really into their particular faith, and those that are decidedly less so.

Shy & Extroverted -> Sociability (Introvert > Sociable > Extrovert) : Honestly, this could potentially make Advocate superfluous, as the side effect being being a gregarious extrovert would be their outsized effect on others. Probably increase slowly through public group activities. Possibly decreased through a player dialogue option combined with low Willpower (repeatedly emphasizing that slaves should be 'seen and not heard' and reinforcing that through submission/corruption)? Likewise, it is a neutral trait, with being a Extrovert being potentially harmful or beneficial depending on the slave's outlook and how you want to them effect the other slaves. Do you want them steering their peers towards being a sisterhood of strong willed Amazons, or a pile of cock-hungry sluts?



Traits that I think would work more as stand alone Perk/Feat-like abilities that could possibly be negated or altered when reaching certain Affection/Corruption scores, or even other progression markers (e.g. certain levels of sexual skills).

Advocate/Feminist: Their natural inclination to share their opinions, with the opinion being shared changing with their temperament. Probably not distinct enough to have 2 separate traits for what amount to the same thing, that they're going to have an outsized passive effect on the rest of your slaves. Might not be needed at all depending on bonuses/maluses of the above proposed Sociability scale.

Brawler/Warriorress: Are they different enough to justify 2 different traits? Or should they be condensed into one more generalized 'she's an Amazonian badass' trait that your combat-oriented slaves would gain value from.

Daddy Issues: Keep as is, but perhaps negate the age malus with enough Affection.

Delicate: Keep as is, but perhaps negate the size malus with high enough sex skills or Corruption. Alternately, a high enough Masochisms score, is you ever decided to put Sadism/Masochism in as a gradient scale and did Femdom content.

Materialistic: Keep as is, nice flavor trait.

Nerd: Keep as is, nice flavor trait.

Oral Fixation: Keep as is, nice flavor trait.

Perfectionist: A side-grade to the old Workaholic, with a kill switch that ends the bonuses if Workmanship/Discipline falls below Diligent.

Size Queen: Same as before, but negate the size malus with enough Affection or Corruption.

Starlet: Keep as is, nice flavor trait.

Sweet-Tooth: Keep, but maybe remove the overeating malus? Or have some way to negate it with enough Discipline.

Techie: Keep as is, nice flavor trait.

Wildborn: Keep as is, nice flavor trait.




That being said, there are other duplicates across stat type, not just within the same category. Why have a separate Kindness when you already have Pure/Malevolent on a gradient scale? That's a few too many cooks in the kitchen, and should probably be simplified into a singular measurement of a slave's morality/ethics. Unless you want to get real elaborate with a cross-scale setup (the classic Good/Evil & Law/Chaos of D&D, or the 4-axis Myers-Brigg personality matrix), a simple good/bad scale with bonuses/maluses once you reach far enough either way will probably work well enough.

Do slaves really need separate Acrobatics, Dancing, and Performance stats? Couldn't you combine all of the together and just have a singular Performance stat? Cause both the Acrobatics and Dancing are done in the context of performing for others. Why have 3 different stats to do largely the same thing, especially when they only really matter for one of the current job assignments?

Why have Gardening separate from Domestic? Unless you plan on later expansions with would allow for the simulation of an actual share-cropper/plantation setup, it seems like a really niche stat. Now on a farm, expand that out to something more broad like Horticulture (alongside perhaps Animal Husbandry) as one of the primary stats for a farm worker slave, and sure, that makes sense. But for now? It's another 0-100 stat that seems like it isn't worth the effort, especially since you cannot homeschool any improvement for it.

Is there any reason for Academic and Science to be separate skills? Especially when, again, they both only matter in the context of effectively the same job at the same location?

Does Survival even do anything? How is it beneficial? How do you increase it? It has all of a single line of description on the wiki. "The survival skill determines a slave's ability to handle herself in the wilderness, including building camps, gathering edible materials, fishing, and tracking wild animals." Either it needs to do more so as to be worth more than a single toss away description line, or you should seriously consider culling it. Otherwise it's a stat for the sake of having a stat, and that just adds to the general clutter of the stats.



Coming from a background in D&D, how come accuracy in combat is governed by separate skills? Not that you can't do that, my beloved classic Fallout games did the same (Small Arms/Heavy Weapons/Energy/Melee/Unarmed/Thrown), but even they were effected by your base Attributes. If Dexterity is really only useful during a few conversation checks to do stuff like like hide, does it need to be on a 0-100 scale? Could it not replace the Ranged Combat skill, leaving you with one less thing you need to worry about grinding? Or perhaps put it on a 0-50-100 scale using (Clumsy > Average > Gymnast/Ninja), so that you can probably start somewhat closer to the middle and need less effort to reach the top? Could you do anything to make any of the stats increase Critical Hit Chance, or Critical Hit Damage (if anything, that should be how Intelligence contributes to combat, using knowledge to exploit weaknesses)?

Why not have a separate Constitution/Physique/Endurance stat that both Health and Stamina are derived from? This would make it so that you just couldn't cheese the current combat system with a scientist that can take just as much damage as a hulking melee brawler. Plus it would be nice to be able to increase your HP pool without needing to buy costly implants. This is something that could, again, be on a 0-50-100 scale, and picking certain big-brain academic options during character creation could be offset with a lower starting score. Now instead of Stamina 40 being a 'typical Ikaanos individual', you could have a frail MC with a starting Constitution/Physique/Endurance in the 20~30-ish range, denoting a life lived perhaps in luxury or seclusion and without the hardships of manual labor or combat.

Plus, on a meta level, just having more stats start with 50 as a baseline instantly cuts your grinding in half. As someone who thought that grinding stat progression was one of the game's largest weaknesses, I'm largely in favor of a move towards reducing said grind. Now I don't know how you are handling the underlying math in the background, but if you don't want to speed up progression like that, then you could potentially go with a -100 to 100 scale. Which would probably annoy me personally, unless you added in a difficulty/usability option for a game-wide stat gain multiplier like I mentioned before. But I think that being able to express a value as both harmful and beneficial along the same scale makes for more interesting and meaningful representation of what those numbers mean in practice. Of course, speeding up the grind a bit is a nice bonus.

Alright, that's enough theory crafting for one afternoon. I'm going to take a break and go play a terrible shooter, because I have a love/hate relationship with the dumpster fire that is Insurgency: Sandstorm.

 

[Mahroni]

Also i want to mention that u can sell gold bar (150 each)at dedicated shop (tailor guy) and at market for 190each. Shouldn't this tailor pay more than market price? He's also asking me to sell gold bars for better prices but paying less. I already completed his quest.

 

[iamnuff]

Slaves use an $av_# variable, and mercs/issids use $is_#

Oh, that's what those were.
I noticed those popping up when I was searching for ranged variables, but I couldn't tell who's was what.
Neat.