I just got this game today and played through some of it. First I want to say I like it in concept, it reminds me quite a bit of CoC and TiTS, which I'm sure were partial inspirations given your own acronym. I really do want to applaud the game as a whole.
Having said that I think I'm resolved to put this game down for now and come back in a year or two. There are just a few too many places where it felt incomplete and ruined my immersion for me to feel like committing to the game in it's current state.
ld.
1. Lust combat just feels wrong. Every lust ability increases my own lust as well, at this point I'm honestly not sure if this is an intended feature or a bug; but if it was intended then it needs to be made much clearer that it's happening. At first I was very confused why I kept loosing fights to excessive lust damage despite not the enemies rarely using lust attacks because I didn't know about all the self inflicted lust damage happening until I took time to more closely monitor my stats and experiment to figure out what was happening. *if* this is an intended feature then when I use an ability tell me that I've inflicted lust damage on myself and how much so I know it's happening, similar to how forced kiss does it.
1B. Speaking of forced kiss if the intent was for lust abilities to increase your own lust then this leaves forced kiss a bit broken. it was advertised as doing high lust damage at the trade off of doing lust damage to the user, but since it often only does the listed amount of damage, without any of the 'hidden' lust damage that comes with all the other lust abilities, it often ends up doing less total lust damage to me then weaker abilities like Body Showoff.
1C. it appears that critical failures with lust attacks increase your own lust damage. Again this needs to be better communicated,, as the fumble message says I did 0 damage to myself, it should mention lust damage dealt so I know I'm taking damage!
1D. as a side effect of the above two issues lust combat feels rather worthless for any other then possibly the whore (and then only because the forced kiss ability seems broken in it's effectiveness) as it's quite possible for me to do more lust damage to myself then inflicted on my enemy when weaker lust abilities barely do more damage to the enemy then the backlash lust damage, and all the constant fumbles add a bunch of additional self-inflicted lust damage.
2. I have no clue what is going on with the days! They seem to skip randomly forward with quests, a quick visit to the blacksmith takes two days for some reason, and one of the early quests (picking performers for abbadon) seems to jump time forward by weeks. However, many things linked to time, like healing, don't happen during these sudden leaps through time. Since it's impossible to 'lose' an RPG (grind enough and you win) I have always judged my effectiveness by how *quickly* I win, ie how few days it takes to accomplish things, so the fact that I suddenly lose weeks of time with no warning or understanding how (or any of the benefits like healing or gold earned by slaves) takes away from my enjoyment and ability to well 'role play' my role playing game
3. Many features lack documentation in or out of game or any real way to determine how they actually function. I don't fully know how all my states contribute to combat and when, if ever, they are doing something out of combat. I don't know how slaves respond to the various rewards/punishments or if they are, the erotic damage issue above etc. I'd really recommend creating a wiki with at least basic descriptions of how the various mechanics are intended to function (which can be linked to in the intro of the game somewhere) so people can better understand what their decisions mean. If your really oppose to documenting the exact mechanics then at least give better hints in-game so someone stands a chance of deducing what's happening. as it is I'm not even sure how, or if, stats can increase in the game.
4) as you already know there are a number of places where minor bugs happen that by themselves wouldn't bee to much of a problem if not for issue 5 below:
4a. I've seen the wrong scene play on a number of cases (for instance I believe that all erotic rewards for slaves default to message, while sexual punishments default to a dummied out 'grope' option).
4b. a few abilities don't seem to work, the alchemists debilitating Fumes ability literally says "this is a bug" in the middle of it's description every time it's used while the arousing fumes always does exactly 0 lust damage and I don't think the poison actually poisons anyone.
4c. Many of the sold potions don't seem to change the character's attributes
4d. I *think* I'm suppose to get 3 actions I can do with my slaves a day, but it seems if I load an old save after doing an action the action is already 'exhausted' despite having reloaded to the start of the day.
5) kind of a reiteration of the above two points, but the real issue for me is the combination of point 4 and 3 leaves me feeling lost when I come to a new mechanic. If I don't immediately know what an option or choice does is it because the option is bugged, this is a dummy out feature that isn't really intend to work at all yet, or it's working as intended and I just can't determine the intent because there is poor indication of how the functionality behaves. As an example when I won a fight I had noticed that the "vaginal sex" option was grayed out. I believe that was due to this particular version of the feral didn't have a vagina to have sex with, but my first thought when I saw it grayed out was that I wasn't allowed to have the furry have vaginal sex with me because the game didn't realize my futarni character had a vagina; something that seemed plausible since I'd seen similar mistakes before. Another example is that I'm still not sure if it's intended or bugged behavior that my lust abilities cause me lust damage, I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere else in this littler review I've confused bug for feature or feature for bug. The net result is I don't feel immersed in the game or able to play it satisfyingly. sure I could still in theory complete everything, I have cheat codes and no time limit to just click around to do things, but It's not satisfying to feel I'm stumbling around a game lost and playing poorly with an incomplete understanding of what I can do and only winning because the game is too forgiving to me.
All of these comes down to a single larger comment, I feel the game is being a bit too ambitious for it's own good. A CoCs style game with slave management, a complicated intermixing of numerous stats, and city management all in one? that's allot of cool stuff I would like to see and play with. The problem is that none of them feel complete to me, I can't get invested into the game play of any one of them when I don't know how they work and have to constantly wonder if the functionality is even doing what I think it's doing. I'd rather see a less ambitious, but complete, subset of all these features, with promise of new features being added as they are completed, the an incomplete conglomeration that it currently is. I'd strongly encourage going back to the basics and making sure all the core functionality is cleaned up. understandable, and generally solid before trying to add in even more features or content.
I know that your patrons are likely constantly pushing for new content to the point that you may feel the need to constantly prioritize now content and feature over cleaning up the existing mechanics, but please remember to consider survivorship bias when you consider that feedback. The patrons you have now are the ones who were willing to ignore limits in gameplay to focus on content and so of course they want more content, but how many potential patrons, like myself, are being lost before you even hear from them because the incomplete nature of the gameplay drives us away before we can get to most of the content? I barely finished the first two noble quest lines, that's as far as I could get before I ended up being too distracted with sparkly features I wanted to try out only to be frustrated by them. I'm not going to care about new characters added or furthered plot in chapter 2 if I can't get invested in chapter one. I believe if you take a bit of time to clean up the core gameplay and make it more intuitive you would actually significantly increase your potential patrons by including patrons with a heavy focus on gameplay instead of only getting patrons interested in content to the exclusion of gameplay.
And again I want to reiterate that this is meant as constructive criticism. I am very interested in the game and the potential it hints at and have every intent to coming back and check it out in a year in the hopes that by then the gameplay feels a bit more complete so I can get properly invested in it so I can see more of that content.
