Yeah I enjoy the game quite a bit in a sort of abstract sense but I find the act of actually playing it to be incredibly painful. The numbers need tweaking to make it feel better to engage with the RPG mechanics.
Yep, you nailed the description perfectly. Quite a few of the concepts behind the game keep me coming back even though playing it seems to cause more frustration than enjoyment. The numbers could certainly do with tweaking, but I find that any number of mechanics are issues as well.
There's a ton in the game. A lot of it feels pretty slick. But then there are all kinds of little things that take away from all that is really great like:
So I'm at my home and I have a bunch of slaves. Well some I want to keep and some I want to sell. So I check out various people's stats, but oh... can't sell them from home. So I go to the slave market. Okay, so I'm at the slave market and they are ready to buy my people, time to say who to sell. Wait, I can't see much of any details to know who I'm selling (I can't even see last names, only first). I need to either be able to sell/mark-who-to-sell from home when I can see details, or I need to be able to access all the details from the slave market.
Then there's the slave request system. As it is presented, players should go and accept a request, then in the timeline allowed, go out and collect a suitable slave and train them to compliance. The thing is, the timeline is way too short and available slaves way to random to actually play this way. Really, one needs to have a slave already in possession that fits the bill or is most of the way there. But the system doesn't give any good feedback before selecting one and only one request as to which requests your current slaves may or may not be suited for. The system would do better with no time limits and/or multiple-requests allowed at a time. It should also show (both before and after accepting) which slaves comply/partially-comply and by how much with all of the requests. (As it is now, a player basically needs to memorize all the possible requests and work towards specific request goal without actually having the quest. Then once the request goal is met, keep checking the message board until that quest resurfaces. Which is basically cheating the hard way, but that's the only way to even succeed.)
Slave obedience, I've been in the code at times and so I know that a captured slave has a sort of 50% hold/lock on obedience for a time. That has never been clear to me from actually playing. In game it shows up as the "Due to recent events... rebels..." line in the slave's display. The thing is, that requires drilling down into the slave. And even there is not very enlightening/informative. The slave list shows all the slaves at a glance. It has health/obedience/stress all right there in the GUI with a limited info display of red/yellow/green. Sounds good. The thing is, these penalty slaves that won't do anything I say and run away if I turn my head often all show "green." The display TELLS ME they are highly obedient when they are anything but. It would be so easy for the developer to simply use 2 different icons for obedience. A rebelling slave has a thumbs down obedience that goes through red/yellow/green (even though green on a rebelling slave isn't all that great and I have no idea if there is any difference between a red-rebelling and a green-rebelling). A non-rebelling slave has a thumbs up that goes through red/yellow/green. It makes no sense that my most loyal and devoted slave and my slave who hates me the most and wants to run away appear to be in identical states according to the slave-list overview.
There are other things like really sex jobs are the only ones that earn any money. To some extent that's fine (I mean, it is an adult game after all and if the developer wants to focus on that aspect, then that's what the game is about). But then the game creates NPCs like Trisha who has a special trait whereby she earns bonus money doing any non-sex money income job. That's pointless. No matter where I put her to work she doesn't earn enough to make that trait worth anything at all. Same with (what is it, Tanuki's?) that have a bonus selling at market... I need to go out and hunt to get supplies (and get very few per hunter). Then they sell for next to nothing. So basically it requires 2 people to accomplish the task of selling at market, yet I'm not sure that I've ever even earned 1/10 the profit of a single person working the second worst job out there. But features like this are, as was stated, a numbers tweaking issue more than anything else.
But that's enough rambling...
