hi
dvemail and
DVEGames
thanks for the game, I like games were you have to work to get some success, so you're hitting the spot
. Your setting is great, graphics are nice to look at, and the girls are cute. Although it's a great game, I want to point a few things out:
- The guy you pay your dept to is totally irrelevant in the game. Your money making ability at the beginning is practically non-existent. So you're either screwed no matter what you do if you bought too much stuff/slaves at the beginning or the dept doesn't concern you at all. A quest where you have to start to repay (a part) your dept in a limited time would counter the fact but would need a lot more guidance during the game on how to achieve that.
- This is an adult brothel management game. So the place should be your main source of income, but even if you get it running it doesn't feel like you make any money there at all. Things look better when you upgrade the brothel for the 1st/2nd time but if you have the money to do it, you are practically already through the difficult part of the game and the upgrades just feel like a bonus. Ridiculously enough, if you buy Fasti and Inka at the beginning and train her in vaginal sex, your starting money is enough to get you a high rhetoric skill so you can make a few thousands / ten thousands at the basilika. If you luck out and get an emperor/treason case and win it, you can get 800k and *puff* you can buy all and everything.
- The money distribution in the brothel .... isn't properly thought through. 1-10 sestertii for everything but 300-1200 for 1x vaginal sex? Time is money and a good massage should be worth something as well, don't you think? Would love to see the difference with a Fasti that is trained in everything and one who is only trained in vaginal sex (no other girls with available skills)...
- It would be nice to warn the player that Fasti is currently the only one with vaginal sex. I think you can get pretty screwed if you decide to start with a different slave as vaginal sex is the only possiblilty to keep up with the intrest you own the money lender in the beginning.
- The brothel makes money when you're there (starting from 2 pm) - either you're observing, squander time by being idle or training your skills with Alfidia, but if you are anywhere else you get nothing. Doesn't make much sense.
- If you train Fasti only in massaging and the other girls in everything except massaging, the only service that will ever be demanded at the brothel is massaging. That makes all the other girls obsolete as it doesn't increase your income in any way. I highly recommend to change that so that having more girls with different skillsets and different stats matter. Perhaps take a look at the game "Wicked Rouge" and implement a cooldown for every girl until she is ready to serve a customer again.
-In overservation mode you get popups saying 'great service' or 'poor service' but regardless of the popup the text window at the bottom always says 'XY arrives at the bordello and is dissatisfied with the service' even if the brothel is upgraded 2 times.
- Would be nice if you didn't have to run through all the time if you decided to go to bed. Getting instantly to sleep and getting an overview of the bordello buisiness from the past night would be much appreciated. In my opinion this 'waiting for the clock' makes the game a lot slower than necessary.
- You might want to take a look at the text concerning Fastis massage and bathing training. The text isn't fluent but feels bumpy and rough. There are also a lot of upper and lower case errors as well as grammatical errors.
- When your inlicio is low and you start training the girls the whole set of training hits me as bumpy as well. MC is straight rude, somehow get the girl to do what he wants, he is unsatisfied with the service/progress and at the end the girls says something like 'I hope you liked the service'. When you get into the later stages it gets a lot better.
- When you review the week you get a good amount of messages concerning x increased by 1-3 this week or didn't increase at all. If you crossreference these values with your character sheet for the values you can see as a player (namely social, mercantile and rhetoric) you will notice that they almost never match. Text can say your social increase by 3 and it didn't at all and vice versa. Makes you wonder about the other skill changes as well.
- Buying the stuff for the upgrade quests is annoyingly difficult. Finding the stuff and getting to the corresponding vendor is ok. When you arrive early in the day and buy the stuff on the first day and you want to wait for the second day to buy the rest you can get pretty frustrated as you have no 'End the day' option. I later found a workaround by putting talking to Kreon somewhere late into the calender to skip time...When you start buying stuff for the quest you will notice that crossreferencing what you need and looking it up at the vendor is no very user friendly, although managable. Would be nice to mark the items in the vendor menu if you have the quest (possibly as a switch on/off option for each quest as you can have the villa and the brothel upgrade quest at the same time) and the amount needed and the amount you already have, perhaps change the color as well. Then, when you want to buy the exact amount of an item, things get difficult again. E. g. if you look for the bronze fitting you'll need 100 but the vendor has around 79 per day. So you buy up all on the first day and on the second you have to click 20 times on these tiny arrows to get the right amount. When the counter changes from 9 to 10 the arrows go a bit to the left and you will select the item below and have to start anew...grrrrr. (Same goes for the crosses when you hire the workers for the upgrades at the forum.) A button 'buy all the stuff the vendor has for this quest' would be much appreciated. Or at least a textbox where you can enter the amount you want to buy.
- At the 2nd upgrade quest for the bordello all the space in the log is used to list the materials. If you acquire some of the necessary items, a check will appear and increase the hight of the line and push down the items below. Scrolling in the questlog only lets you scroll down the quests on the left but not in the window on the right. You're essentially pushing the Ornate Fittings out of the window, regardless if you already acquired them or not.
- The cases in the basilica seem to be totally random (concering the monetary reward). E.g. at the beginning you get 19 sestertii for a case from a slave. Later you can run into the same case with a senator and get the same amount of money even if you pushed rhetorics up to 90 which is pretty frustrating (and I would personally punsh the senator guy in the face if he gave me so few coins). Perhaps it's possible to build classes, like working on a case of arson with a slave gives x and a case of arson with a senator gives y as a base.
- Currently you can only bargain one time for every item a vendor sells thoughout the whole game. Thats really evil considering that you start with a very low trade skill. Would be nice if you could bargain with the guy every time you buy something from him. Or at least bind the bargain for the item to the vendor so that you can discuss a new price for the same item with a different merchant.
- If you don't shave or trim Inka she will have a shaved pussy during massage training.
- "Alfidia is being trained" remains when you talk to her even after she is no longer trained by the old woman in the slums.
- Fasti's bathing scene still occurs in the run down brothel room of the mC after you upgraded it.
- The overlay of the bed when you hover over it after the brothel is upgraded does not match.
- I think it would be a good idea to 'force' the first 'review of the week' on the player so that there is no possiblility that it is overlooked and give an explanation of how it works.
- Using figures of speech is nice but 'ironing out' and 'give and inch and take a mile' doesn't appear to fit into the time of the roman empire
- There is a rumor called 'test'.
- When you socialise in the bath and they aren't willing to talk to you, you get the massage 'They ignore
s you."
- You're probably aware of the possible screw up in Inka's quest line. I bought Inka, got the quest, didn't buy Parmida, advanced to the drinking challenge, challenged her more than two times and bought Parmida later on. The quest is now stuck at "I need to find a way to cheat Inka in a drinking game". If you now start a drinking challenge Parmida will appear in the morning and tell you you should probably cheat but thats it. I'll add my savegame in the appendix if you want to take a look but it seem that you are already changing the quest
- Found three cases where the game crashes. I put the traceback.txt in the appendix and wrote the conditions down in it. You can validate them with the save file.
- Buttjob from Inka doesn't go above available and Parmida's doesn't go above acceptable.
- You are using the terms Master and Dominus in the game when the slaves adress the MC interchangably - it makes the whole thing a bit inconsistent. It would be nice to be able to choose one of them.
Now a few questions:
- Does grooming the slaves (bushy/trimmed/shaved) have any effect in the game or is it just personal preference?
- How does knowing people in the bath influence the cases in the basilica and the customers that visit your brothel? (No formulas, just a general idea would be nice)
- Why is Inkas hair grey (I think she is described as blonde, which would make much more sense for a young woman?) but has black hairs under her armpits?
- Is there currently any way to influence the emotions of the slaves (except for health and without using the cheat menu) outside of Fastis (and possibly Inkas) questline?
- Slave resistances: What's the difference between Submission (Female) and Submission (Female to Female)?
With all that being said, keep up the good work and I'm looking forward to the next updates!