Quick update while I wait for the playtest reports for 0.24.
So, when I first set up the 'talk to Roulette and/or Catwoman' routines several months ago now, my thought process on this at the time was to give players a chance to get a feel for how much money each performance type was making, so that players could get a feel about how much difference tier 3 gals might make vs tier 1, etc..
I also wanted to have a 'live feed' of the dancing/etc. performances via Lex's laptop screen should a player wish to watch them, without making a trip to the GS/MB. This is still possible, I just haven't 'transplanted' the associated code as frankly there are more important things to tackle first. This idea is mainly just for flavor.
In any case, yeah 95% of the time players are just going to want to bypass all of this stuff and move on to the next evening.
So I'm in the process of moving the 'Talk to Roulette and/or Catwoman' question to the 'do you wish to end your evening' menu. This will shorten the nightly routine by one step.
The main reason for the 'end your evening' question is to give players one last chance to abort. before moving on to the 'end of night' routines. Sure, RenPy has rollback, but a lot of people don't use rollback, and occasionally glitches can be introduced when attempting rollbacks.
One other thing I've noted in my playtesting is that occasionally I set up heists and captures, but forget to set the contracts. So I'm pondering adding a check to see if you've set up a capture and/or heist attempt, but didn't 'approve' these, which would pop up when you hit the 'end of night button to remind you about this, but only if you have them 'ready to go', to give you a quick chance to 'lock in' said contracts/heists.
There are reasons that you might leave a contract 'pending', such as maybe you want to hire another villain first in a tier, or maybe you want to let the threat level cool down a bit more first.
Another reason for the end of night sequence is to check for events and apply adjustments/reset various variables, and also to note when new Heroines should be added to the recruit lists.
On that note, right now Heroines are automatically being added when conditions are met (i.e. the previous set of Heroines have all been captured) but of course will eventually be changing this to 'add these Heroines to Tala's/Roulette's list of girls to talk about, which would activate the associated conversations and heists, which upon completion would 'unlock' that gal to the 'potential targets' list.
Anyways, yeah, just things I've been pondering. Shortening the nightly routines by one step and adding a 'pending heist/contract' check is fairly easy to do.
BTW, if someone wanted to add some events that happen during the 'conference calls' with Catwoman and Roulette, this could ba an interesting option to 'spice up' the end of the evening...
Back to work!
Edit: So here are the adjustments that I've made to the 'Do you wish to end your evening' menu, which I'll share in the next patch or update.
The 'approve pending contracts & heists' button will only appear if you've set up a contract and/or heist but haven't approved it yet. Clicking on that will send you to the appropriate Legion Interface screen. Same for the Catwoman options, those menu options will only become available when the Meta Bordello has been purchased.
The next thing that I'm pondering atm is the 'Unassigned' vs. 'Resting at Home' situation. I'm considering automatically 'sending unassigned girls home' at the end of the night, if the player hasn't done so.
Right now, girls that are sent home to rest recover 5 stamina, while girls that are still unassigned recover only 4.5 stamina.
My thought process on this was that 'mentally waiting around to wait for Lex to decide whether to put a girl to use or not' was mentally taxing, and hence worth a 0.5 stamina hit vs. just letting the poor girl sleep.
But in practice, having to manually assign girls to rest each night is probably asking a bit much.
BTW, the reason 'Unassigned' even exists is because currently if you try to move girls between slots without 'unassigning' them first, out of range error messages happen... I'm sure that a new 'move girls between slots' routine could be set up, but the entire assigning slots thing is already hurting my brain, and I'm just amazed that my code even works in the first place.
So yeah, not happy with the current situation. I may automatically 'Unassign' gals that aren't scheduled or that aren't hanging out in the Lexcorp quarters at the beginning of each night, or I may just remove the 'resting at home' state and simply change the 'Location:around" to 'Location: resting at home/in Lexcorp quarters".
So yeah, thinking about this. As it stands, it still feels rather clunky.
I also have the idea of assigning gals to 'fight crime'. They are doing this already, but this would encourage the gal to pull a night shift fighting crime on the streets of Metropolis 69... This would mainly be to help reduce threat level.
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I'm also pondering Mercy's insta-capture situation. Right now, her odds of a successful capture for Tiers 1-3 are 55%/35%/15%. In some cases, Mercy's odds of an insta capture are higher than a regular capture, so I'm considering going to lower this (again) to 10/30/50 or some such. A 10% chance is a bit too random though, 15% isn't much better but at 10% it's VERY frustrating if you've tried say 20 times...
So I just came up with the idea of lowering Mercy's odds, but if a capture attempt was scheduled the previous night, to give Mercy a 5-10% adder. The idea here is to 'tag team' said capture attempt. So Mercy's role here is a 'Mulligan gal' of sorts...
BTW, I gave Tala a 10% bonus to capture attempts to make here a bit more useful than Mercy in such attempts, not taking favored targets into consideration.
On the Favored Targets thing, I still want to show these on the Captured screen, I just need to pick a spot to put these...
Things that make you go hmmm....
