1. Body types: I'm one of those rare fellows who enjoy big tits
And in a more serious tone: not to toot my own horn, but I think Vae Victis - Khan is one of the more diverse games in terms of body types. Muscular and plump, short and tall, flat chest and humongous knockers, it has it all. And I do this because I like all of them, not for trying to appeal to more players.
Yeah I have no issues with that. Your preferences are your preferences. Nor am I suggesting you increase or decrease certain body types, etc.
I was try to suggest that maybe you could do something similar to
Seeds of Chaos where it has a lot of diversity and fetishes, where for anyone who isn't interested there is always an option to opt out or take certain partners al carte rather than as a packaged bundle.
For instance going through the entire Odi scene I felt like you just took out like two lines that scene could of been a stand alone alternate choice.
For instance this one choice here could of easily been split 2 other alternate paths. One where you just skipped the second half with the daughter which wouldn't of required any dialogue changes. For second one you could of just skipped the first half of the scene with the mother and remove the 2 two lines of dialogue that Karder says referencing the mom and what happened the previous day / night.
Though I think you addressed this in your second point about it just being an older scene.
2. Choices 1: I try to make all sexual encounters skippable but that is more relevant to newer scenes. Older scenes are more prone to being mandatory. Perhaps I'll go back and make some of them optional, but that's not a high priority, to be honest.
3. Choices 2: As for choosing the sexual act, I try to balance freedom of choice with storytelling. Menus break the storytelling flow and make the experience more of computer application than a sex story.
I totally get that. There needs to be a balance between storytelling and gameplay options. Let me give you an example of where I thought it could of been better while maintaining that balance.
The dungeon scene with Nahir. How it set up right now is that Karder taunts her and fingers her, then you always go through the same forced repetive blow job sequence. Then you gave us menu to choose between the scene to cum in her mouth or on her face. Then afterwards you give us a menu to choose between the scenes to fuck her ass or pussy. Then the menu pops up and give option to switch between the two holes or to cum and where to cum.
The question is after the taunting and fingering her why not just pop up the menu right then and there and give us the choice between fucking her mouth, fuck her ass, fuck her cunt. Why make us always go through blow job scene before we're given the choice menu to only chose between fucking her ass or her pussy.
When Karder says "let the fun begin", just have this pre-existing menu pop up right away, instead of going directly into the blowjob.
Hopefully you can see how you still have the same number of menus, same scenes essentially, but by just having the menu pop up at the start instead of a third the way through the player now benefits in two ways.
1. It makes the blow job segment of the scene repeatable like the other two options without having to replay the entire scene from start to end. 2. Allows players to skip the blow job part if they are not into it, or just want to see the other one of the other two segments without having to click through a bunch of extra dialogue and an extra menu.
That is what I felt was a repeating pattern, where you eventually gave us a menu to chose in a lot of scenes, but you gave us the menu too late into the scene, where it could have seamlessly just been present at an earlier transition point, and made the part prior to the menu popping up part of the menu options.
4. All the building function properly, what often fails is how I explain their functionality... Gold mines add 1 gold per turn if you fail the random yield check. Since random yield check depend of the number of fiefdoms you have (the more you have, the more likely they are to fail since your empire becomes more inefficient), gold mines are hardly felt when your empire is small.
Okay that makes more sense. Cause I was expecting the gold amount to be reflected as flat value in the summary screens.
I don't think I would of ever guessed it was a yield on fail rather than a addition yield on successful dice roll.
5. A key element of the Khaganate management game is the "army whack-a-mole". You shuffle your troops around to curb uprisings and increase Obedience. If a player can muster unlimited troops, that aspect of the gameplay will become void.
I wasn't expecting a player to have unlimited troops, but at least enough to utilize the garrison mechanics for an incremental benefit. But when every settlement gives exactly 20 army cap which is 1 short of being able to stabilize the settlement then there is no point in engaging in the system at all. Its better just to take your troops to constantly attack, and spend money your money elsewhere.
Cause how it is right now, it seems you're better off never sending any troops to garrison any settlement except your starting one and maybe second one. Cause who cares if a border fief gets raided if you never build anything there? You lose nothing since there are no buildings for them to burn down. Who cares if the settlement has low obedience, cause there is no troops in the garrison to desert? Even if they start rioting, what are they going to do? Burn buildings that aren't there? The newest border fiefs has no buildings and 0 morale so it wasn't yielding any troops or gold anyways, the only benefit of holding on to a fief is the the additional army cap.
It seems you can just keep pressing end turn to gather up troops and gold from just 1-2 settlements while ignoring the rest. Isn't the whole point of empire management to min max your gain? The whole garrisoning system at the moment just seems like an all around loss, because now your troops are locked up for 8 turns, 4 to go to the fief, and 4 to return. It doesn't seem to really save you any money or help gain you any additional resources in any meaningful way.
Which was why I suggested that building the garrison building increases each fief's army cap by +5, so that way each new fief has the potential of gaining you +25 in total. That way it is just enough to just stabilize it, but still small enough to become destabilize from raids. Then you can grab the 4 extra soldiers (25-21) from multiple fiefs plus the 9 extra (30-21) that you have from the start to go stabilize other fiefs. That tiny extra amount of troops isn't enough to steam roll or attack any enemies, but it is just enough to make the system function on a small scale.
I am considering making the following changes:
- You *permanently* send troops into garrisons to fill them out
- You *cannot* transfer garrisoned troops out of their garrison
- Garrisoned troops *do not* count against army limit
In all other ways, garrisoned troops still act the same:
- Garrisoned troops still die in raids
- Garrisoned troops still help with obedience
This has a few effects:
- you no longer have to micromanage your troops to deal with obedience
- there is now a reason to invest in troop production, even in peacetime
- raids can be more frequent/damaging to troop garrisons
Wouldn't that cause exactly the problem as essentially having unlimited troops and gold? Cause you then can mindlessly keep pressing end turn, hoard endless amounts of troops in the garrisons and gold? Just keep sending all the excess troops to garrison the latest conquered fief, while waiting however many turns it takes to acquire like 360 gold so you can instantly build everything in the next fief
I feel like that would be a way too extreme of a change since it would completely negate that aspect of the game.
6. "Also wish that giving her the governorship actually offered some benefit" - actually, having her as a governor adds more gold Marbia's yield per turn. Again, me not explaining things clearly. I have added a note for this for 0.11, thanks!
Yeah guess this game really needs some tooltips or a benefits summary menu somewhere for all the different rulers and decisions you made.
I only knew about certain mechanics and benefits thanks to the walkthrough on the first post, and there wasn't any mention in the walk through or in the game on what the benefit actually was for appointing Fahda in the walkthrough.
1. At the beginning of the game, as long as you have only 1 fief, you will not be raided. This is meant to give players some adjustment time. But if a fief is not raided, nothing prevents the player from accumulating endless amounts of gold, hence the 70 gold cap. I never thought about the interaction with the Oasis quest. If there is indeed a problem there, it should be relatively easy to fix (raise the 70 cap if the quest is complete.)
To me the 1 fief gold cap doesn't make sense because you can essentially do the same thing once you get 2 fiefs when the cap is removed. Cause once you get the second fief nothing is stopping a player from just garrisoning 25 troops in both settlements to stabilize obedience, and pressing end turn ad infinitum till they have enough gold to take over the entire map.
Cause you can just spend your gold to counteract any intrigue the neighboring fiefs do, then use your endless gold to keep counteracting the negative effects of force yield each turn.
So it doesn't really seem that starting gold cap fixed anything other than delay the exploit with 1 extra step.
The gold cap would only make sense if it were a permanent thing like the army cap, where each fief you hold increases the gold cap. Possibly a base increase of +20, then maybe another +10 per building you build in the settlement. That way each settlement can increase your gold cap by +70.
