More appreciation and observation!
I think it's neat that your fighting slaves can have day jobs!
Research Subject doesn't factor in race, seems like a missed opportunity
Because their racial healing bonus is strong but fixed, with a good Nurse and an occasional Sedation, an Endurance 2+ Orc could be a research subject almost indefinitely. While Endurance 3 would be good, more than that and you start hitting the risk that an injury will be more than you can recover from, since it's 1/3 their Health.
While the way the racial and specialization bonuses interact is cool, the Market job is awfully underwhelming. A Merchant Tanuki Commoner with capped Wits earns a bit less than 90 gold on an average day, and that's with selling almost 15 supplies. For reference, your average level 1, slave grade bunny makes over 100 as a fully trained exotic (which just takes energy, and therefore food). I know that a Merchant Tanuki is effectively a money mill, since it usually sells supplies at a profit to market prices and never at a loss, but it's not really worth the slave slot to manage it, IMO.
It was neat to note that, assuming you've unlocked everything, the unlock bonus for Whore and Exotic come out to the same amount.
It surprised me that the Nurse job checks for supplies, but doesn’t actually seem to use any.
The Library is just cool overall - a great way to knock out those first few levels if you can afford the food and luxuries while they're studying.
I overall really like how Hunter is balanced.
- The Courage requirement to never fail is fairly steep (and Slaves just have to live with that chance they'll fail), but the fact that it also gives Courage really eases the sting.
- On one hand, a fully leveled, specialized, augmented and tattooed Arachne Hunter brings in a comical amount of food and supplies. OTOH, you can't sell food and supplies sell for pennies, and that's a ludicrous amount of resources to spend on something that doesn't bring in money.
It’s a bummer that Forage is as terrible as it is. Between the fixed amount and the chance of failure, it’s only worthwhile for the worst possible slaves to do it - and why would you keep them?
I was kinda surprised that having 0 energy doesn’t seem to affect Awareness. As it is, Awareness awfully powerful, letting you skip any fights you don’t want, so with a good scout you can mostly wander around without any trouble, even at zero energy.
Invigorate + Sedation is comically powerful. As long as your slave has at least 2 Magic Affinity, it will usually pay for itself. Even at Magic Affinity 0 it only produces 5 stress on average, and by Magic Affinity 2 it will never produce stress. OTOH, by Magic Affinity 3 you can generally get two Invigorates before Sedating. If you're a cheeseball like me and play a race with a cap of 6, at cap it's around 10 (!) Invigorates before Sedating. The only reason I don't think it's completely ridiculous is that mana gains become a lot harder after Sedating, so it puts a soft cap on just spamming it endlessly.
I like the fact that Dominate has a flat chance of failure before Magic Affinity 5, but its effects don't scale much with Magic Affinity. Since you have Fear as an alternative, it's not unkind to have a risky, powerful version, that players who went big on Magic Affinity have an extra benefit from. Really, two Fears is generally better than one Dominate at half the cost - but it doesn't get you that big chunk of Loyalty
It seems funny but appropriate that the only slave stats that matter for selling are Beauty, Level and Grade, especially since starting Beauty is based on Grade.
I really like how the Elixir of Regression looks powerful, but is actually kinda niche. The 'no social jobs' restriction of Regressed is really limiting, and the five-day period to train out Regressed makes it kinda a rough trade-off to more manual methods of removing Captured from all but the highest grade slaves. It's also pretty difficult to justify using it to remove Uncivilized, as opposed to just sending them off Foraging or to the Library while you wait for a Tamer to work it out (around 6-7 days for 50% odds, 10 for 2/3). However, it's the only way to get Devoted/Slutty onto a slave, which is really good.
Executor seems to be a bit underwhelming.
- It already requires Rich and Confidence 75+, so you're not that far from going the extra step and just raising them to Noble. Noble is even slightly cheaper.
- OTOH, lots of good effects for Executor-type jobs use Wits and Charm as well, especially with a Kind headgirl instead of a Strict one - in fact, a Kind Headgirl gains nothing from being an Executor except for the Obedience limit.
- A Confidence-maxed Noble Executor doesn't gain anything other than the minimum Obedience, and Headgirl and Jailor raise Confidence naturally
It's a bit of a bummer that the only way to raise Charm is through sexing. Problem is, I'm not sure where else it should belong - Public Entertainer is already pretty strong, no other jobs seem appropriate
It's a nice touch that lab augments for beauty have reduced effects for 60+ Beauty. The fact that Beauty potions last long enough for their Toxicity to wear off, and negate Scarred, is also pretty neat.
It doesn't seem that having a Lab Assistant assigned overnight does anything, but it seems exploit-y to assign them temporarily, then move them to their day job. It would be neat if having one assigned overnight had a chance to reduce the recovery time from procedures by a day.
Thanks again for all your hard work! This game is terrific!