I reworked how you earn influence points in House Dominae. Influence is an important resource that you spend on things that money can’t buy. It’s like a social currency and you need it’s to gain access to the in-game bank, as an example.
Previously you would passively earn influence points based on your current reputation score. As long as your reputation was high, you’d gain some influence every day.
In testing I discovered that this mechanic just doesn’t work. You’d start the game earning no influence at all and once you’d get a little bit of reputation you were swimming in it. I tried balancing the numerical values but it became apparent the system was fundamentally flawed.
The new system will assign influence points to individual customers. To claim that influence you must satisfy their request. You can imagine these customers being influential people that will spread word about you even after visiting your brothel. The likelihood of a customer being influential depends on their social class.
I really like this way of doing it because it directly ties into the rest of the gameplay. When an influential person shows up in the customer queue I really want to make sure that I assign them to a slave that has the greatest chance of satisfying their request.