I'm not sure taking ~95% of the player's income is as necessary as A&O says. This is the crux of the problem we have right now, not the occasional random swings that charge more or less and may or may not go over 100%. That's just the cherry on top.

I think main problem it's how and where spend gold.
If player have to buy something or pay for something (idk for ex. better meal for klients, better decoration for dancer show) then we can have lower taxes. 95% taxes it's real evil.

Yeah, I would also like to see some different gold sinks that'd give more of a sense of progression.

Furniture is probably the biggest and most effective 'sink' in the game right now from that POV. Sadly, no gold involved there.

Quote from: Jman on Mar 10, 2025, 02:09 PMFurniture is probably the biggest and most effective 'sink' in the game right now from that POV. Sadly, no gold involved there.

Yes but for 1-3 chapters it's hard to build. Mb only some kind of furniture should cost gold. Or mb u can chose how to buy it (resources or gold)
But i think that's not enough
Mb some kind of special furniture for high price with special effects may help

Oh, and 4th point I forgot to mention :

Since you need to have the money available on the 1st of each month, it is mandatory to save huge amounts of money, meaning threat skyrockets at the end of each month, and you can't do much about it. On BK difficulty, even a maxed security with all furnitures is not always enough to keep the threat low endgame.

And the treasure chest furnitures only secure a laughable amount of gold compared to the millions you earn and need to safe.

There some ways to handle this specific problem :
- highly increase the value chest protect
- have a much higher diminishing return of gold on security along the lines of like log10(gold)
- collect automatically at the end of each day/week so that there is no ned to save so much gold (which would also help players to know how much they can invest without risking a gameover)




On the maximum 95% tax break :
The >95% (or even >100%) tax has a much higher impact on play pattern than a simple <=95% could ever have.
If we set a higher bound of 95%, it is very easy to balance the expected income with intended investments per month.

For exemple if at endgame the player should be able to buy equipment for ~2 x-rank girls :
weapon: 60k (Magicblade +10 Def)
body: ~15k (rank 6 clothing = ~50*300)
neck: ~10k (rank 6 necklance = ~50*200)
finger: ~10k (rank 6 ring = ~50*200)
accessory: ~6,5k  (rank 6 panties = ~50*125)
~100k to fully equip 1 girl with endgame equipment

So the brackets could be balanced that it is easy to get 100k / month, challenging to get 200k / month and hard to get more with working/whoring. Quests and selling would be extra non-taxed income on top.

I will draw up some graphs and bracket ideas to show which bracket values would represent that

So, you're effectively saying players need to minimise the amount of girls and other expenses to make more or less the same amount of money 'allowed'?

I mean, this is not an unsolved problem. Lots of games make the player pay for new items, invest in shops, buildings, techs and whatnot, hire new people, etc, all to 'keep up'. Few outright tell them 'you made X, but we're taking away most of it', and for a good reason.



As to security vs gold, you can invest into girls, resources, items. Perhaps some means to make these investments more effective, especially during a two-week timeframe?

BK is unbalanced. Optimized brothels can easily earn 10 times of what unoptimized brothels can earn.


Taxation is a means to change that to making optimized brothels earn maybe 2-3 times the money unoptimized do, instead of >10 times. 

Nowhere and never will having more girls and more income ever result in having less money at the end of the day.

So why taxation ? So that the game can be balanced more or less around some values that are currently placed arbitrarily, because some players have "infinite" money after some months ingame, and others struggle to make ends meet.


Give me some time to draw something up, hopefully I can make it in the next 2 hours before I have to go AFK

And why is that an issue? This is not a competitive game, so all the balance is internal and in the name of a better single-player experience.

Excessive gold is already kinda useless and only makes your brotheling experience messier, it's not as if you're reaping some grand benefit from this.

Also, the point of a management game is to become better at managing, i.e. optimisation. Punishing people for playing the game well is a ham-fisted solution that's already being perceived as a problem.

Finally, a high-profit brothel is also likely much more micro-intensive. So if your return on investing ten times the time into playing the game is far less than ten times the result, well, I don't think it incentivises people to play more.

Quote from: Jman on Mar 10, 2025, 04:46 PMAnd why is that an issue? This is not a competitive game, so all the balance is internal and in the name of a better single-player experience.

True!
High taxes can be for hard mode for example.

Quote from: YPJ on Mar 10, 2025, 05:06 PM

Quote from: Jman on Mar 10, 2025, 04:46 PMAnd why is that an issue? This is not a competitive game, so all the balance is internal and in the name of a better single-player experience.

True!
High taxes can be for hard mode for example.

I think that is exactly what Goldo wants to have our feedback about. Just as taxation is in 0.3, it is far too harsh.
In easy difficulties it should not have the same impact it has in the current test version.


I have here a simulator on how taxation works at the moment in 0.3
Anyone can modify the values in the cells C2 to C5 in the Dashboard to see how much money remains from our hard working girls. Spoiler: far far too little even for a defender of the taxation idea like myself

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z2t_j2YVBWnZ_-eEY_tud9_bJE-mBIDxmOp1RNNzzqU/edit?pli=1&gid=0#gid=0

Edit:
Here some exemples :
Normal difficulty :

Spoiler

Difficulty	/ Chapter	/ Time in chapter	/ Income	/ Max gain	/ Avg. gain	/ Min gain
Normal	Ch4	1st month	100 000	+63 550	+51 400	+39 250
Normal	Ch4	6+ months	100 000	+48 550	+31 400	+14 250
Normal	Ch6	1st month	500 000	+265 850	+187 800	+109 750
Normal	Ch6	6+ months	500 000	+190 850	+87 800	-15 250
Normal	Ch7	1st month	1 000 000	+484 600	+312 800	+141 000
Normal	Ch7	6+ months	1 000 000	+334 600	+112 800	-109 000

[close]

Brothel Prince difficulty :

Spoiler

Difficulty	/ Chapter	/ Time in chapter	/ Income	/ Max gain	/ Avg. gain	/ Min gain
BP	Ch4	1st month	100 000	+56 050	+41 400	+26 750
BP	Ch4	6+ months	100 000	+41 050	+21 400	+1 750
BP	Ch6	1st month	500 000	+228 350	+137 800	+47 250
BP	Ch6	6+ months	500 000	+153 350	+37 800	-77 750
BP	Ch7	1st month	1 000 000	+409 600	+212 800	+16 000
BP	Ch7	6+ months	1 000 000	+292 300	+56 400	-179 500

[close]

Brothel King difficulty :

Spoiler

Difficulty	/ Chapter	/ Time in chapter	/ Income	/ Max gain	/ Avg. gain	/ Min gain
BK	Ch4	1st month	100 000	+48 550	+31 400	+14 250
BK	Ch4	6+ months	100 000	+33 550	+11 400	-10 750
BK	Ch6	1st month	500 000	+190 850	+87 800	-15 250
BK	Ch6	6+ months	500 000	+146 150	+28 200	-89 750
BK	Ch7	1st month	1 000 000	+334 600	+112 800	-109 000
BK	Ch7	6+ months	1 000 000	+288 700	+51 600	-185 500

[close]

This is great job man

Quote from: Alpha_and_omega on Mar 10, 2025, 05:39 PMHere some exemples :
Normal difficulty :

Spoiler

Difficulty	/ Chapter	/ Time in chapter	/ Income	/ Max gain	/ Avg. gain	/ Min gain
Normal	Ch4	1st month	100 000	+63 550	+51 400	+39 250
Normal	Ch4	6+ months	100 000	+48 550	+31 400	+14 250
Normal	Ch6	1st month	500 000	+265 850	+187 800	+109 750
Normal	Ch6	6+ months	500 000	+190 850	+87 800	-15 250
Normal	Ch7	1st month	1 000 000	+484 600	+312 800	+141 000
Normal	Ch7	6+ months	1 000 000	+334 600	+112 800	-109 000

[close]

Brothel Prince difficulty :

Spoiler

Difficulty	/ Chapter	/ Time in chapter	/ Income	/ Max gain	/ Avg. gain	/ Min gain
BP	Ch4	1st month	100 000	+56 050	+41 400	+26 750
BP	Ch4	6+ months	100 000	+41 050	+21 400	+1 750
BP	Ch6	1st month	500 000	+228 350	+137 800	+47 250
BP	Ch6	6+ months	500 000	+153 350	+37 800	-77 750
BP	Ch7	1st month	1 000 000	+409 600	+212 800	+16 000
BP	Ch7	6+ months	1 000 000	+292 300	+56 400	-179 500

[close]

Brothel King difficulty :

Spoiler

Difficulty	/ Chapter	/ Time in chapter	/ Income	/ Max gain	/ Avg. gain	/ Min gain
BK	Ch4	1st month	100 000	+48 550	+31 400	+14 250
BK	Ch4	6+ months	100 000	+33 550	+11 400	-10 750
BK	Ch6	1st month	500 000	+190 850	+87 800	-15 250
BK	Ch6	6+ months	500 000	+146 150	+28 200	-89 750
BK	Ch7	1st month	1 000 000	+334 600	+112 800	-109 000
BK	Ch7	6+ months	1 000 000	+288 700	+51 600	-185 500

[close]

Sorry for the self-quote

For those who do not want to play with the sheet, here are some important takeaways :

1) The fact that the randomness is applied on the total amount of tax and not on the brackets BEFORE the 95% check has a huge impact, even on the normal difficulty.

On normal difficulty, stating at chapter 6  the player can be asked to pay back more than they have earned the previous month 

This is very harsh in my eyes for a playthrough that is not hardmode.

The randomness could be applied to each individual tax bracket at the computation, while respecting the limits of 0% and 95%


2) The flat modifiers hit HARD, as on higher difficulties even the lowest bracket is taxed 60% instead of being free. And everything above 16k monthly income is taxed 95% on BK difficulty. And from these 16k only 2.4k are really gained. Everything above gives only 1/20 of return...


3) The "time in chapter penalty" (up to 20% flat) makes a huge impact on anydifficulty, especially for casual players that just want to hang out in the last chapter or take the time to max out every chapter.
This modifier should maybe be limited to Brothel Prince difficulty or higher.


4) Overall the max taxation limit could be linked to the difficulty. 95% for BK, 90% BP, 85% Normal, etc. This way there would be less feel bad, as the mechanic is definetly overtuned at its current state for all non-highest difficulties.



If someone wants to have edit rights on the sheet, please message me. I bocked almost all cells on the sheet so that the formulas are not broken by some missclick.

I have to go now, maybe I will take the time later on to draw some graphs for income/net-gain to see how much you really earn

Neat work!

But it was clear from the beginning that the brackets climbed too high too fast, the time pressure penalty was excessive, and playing with RNG when the player is hovering within just breaking even was not the best idea.

Quote from: Jman on Mar 08, 2025, 12:52 PM@Albatross: Your solution also has the problem of not fitting different playstyles and either being excessively punishing or not doing enought to address what taxes were meant to address: your overflowing coffers. Anything that doesn't scale with income will have that problem, and while your proposal does scale, it scales in a very non-granular manner, leaving it open to abuse (everyone wants to live at the upper end of each bracket) and either capping out and losing its teeth, or running into the same problem as the current system at some point. And it'll also require the kind of playtesting data Goldo really doesn't have at the moment, in order for the tax values to line up with typical player income.

Well, you need to have at least some notion of the typical player income no matter what solution you implement. I never had the overflowing coffers "problem" I was just getting by and the taxes were a very sudden hit. I have no idea if that is the default experience or skill issue on my part, and it is hard to make any suggestions without that.

With flat values you can scale infinitely without it being too punishing, and if the data isn't clear or some people think it's too low or too high the flat value can scale with game difficulty. Even with limited data it should be doable. Something like a value that works for a experienced player like you would probably the high difficulty value, one for me the easy value and the default somewhere in between. It's a small sample size and probably won't be exact, but the rest could be adjusted over time based on feedback. It would be nearly impossible to find a perfect value in one go no matter which type of scaling Goldo chooses to go with.

As for the abuse potential I don't think it is a real issue. Most people will not do that and even if they try income is not that easily controllable so the closer they try to stay upon the top of the bracket the higher the chance of they're going overboard and end up in the bottom of the next bracket. And if they're meta enough to be able to snipe that perfectly then IMO they are not the players the game should be balanced around since they will find a way to exploit any reasonable system.

A potentially fun system I thought of would be varied tax rates for different sources. This would of course be way too complicated as is so a gamified version could be something like monthly quests.

At the start of the month there is a decree that the government wants to make the city classier. To achieve this if you make more than 50% of your income from geishas your tax rate will be reduced by 15%. Or maybe this month they want to curtail nobility so if you make more than 10% of your income from fetish whoring you will get hit by an extra 20% tax rate.

This would give an actual reason to move your girls to different tasks rather than have them just rank up in one and keep doing it forever.