Gonna skip this Update anyway... let's see other people test this sacrifice mechanic, I get the feeling it won't stay for long
i tried it and it's not very unbalanced, and not in "too OP" or "too big a nerf" way.
before the update,
all you had to do was go to the slave-market, and raise the Growth stat in exchange for a lot of money,
and the other stats you could raise simply with XP instead of using money or anything else.
now here's how it work:
let's say you have a slave with Average Growth and Average Magic stat, you want to upgrade it's stats.
you need to catch a slave with better Growth and/or better Magic so you can transmit the stat to your first slave.
let's say you caught a slave with both Excelent Growth and Excelent Magic while exploring a dungeon,
you will have to sacrifice the new-slave to raise the stat of the first-slave plus a totaly ignorable ammount of money.
Problem is: you can't raise multiples stats at the same-time, only one.
so you will have to decide whether you want to raise Growth, or Magic, you can't do both at once.
i understand what they're trying to achieve here,
they probably wanted a way to slow-down progression to avoid having a entire army filled with characters with maxed-stats.
which is also the reason they changed how XP work, because in previous versions you could easily get characters to high-lvls.
they tried to tie the reworked stat-raising system with their new "capture" system you get from exploring dungeons,
which on paper is a great-idea, but in practice it remove agency from the player's choices.
in previous versions,
If i wanted to raise the stats of a slave, all i needed was to pay the cost,
now i need to find a character with EXACTLY the stat i'm searching for, despite it being completely randomized.
the Slave-Market and Guilds won't be that much help unless they've been upgraded to show up characters with higher stats,
and capturing slaves in dungeons entirely depend on RNG, for example i struggled a bit to find a slave with Excellent Magic.
(tho' they said it depend on the region and difficulty, and i still need to check in differents dungeons beside bandits den/forts)
anyway, here's my final thought on the current itteration of this system:
i think it has a lot of potential, they're trying to make a gameplay-loop that ties all the submechanics together,
which is really ambitious and sound great on paper, and it's working pretty well for now.
but the main-problem is that it heavily force players to focus on the dungeon-exploring part of the game,
at least if you want a reliable source of slaves to upgrades the ones you're planning to keep.
and i'll be honnest, not only dungeon-exploring is the least interesting mechanic of the game, as it's very barebone,
but it also end-up removing some freedom from the player as they now have to rely on RNG to get what they want instead of currency they can get albeit a bit too-easily.
Dungeon-Exploring still need somes additions to become really fun, things like events and skill-checks.
because for now it's just rooms and rooms of enemies with the occasionnal slave, chest, trap, and ritual place.
I can definitely see something really fun come-out of their new system tho' once it's been polished a bit more in the future.