After too many weeks of not a lot of news, I figure it's time for some good news.
Following being out of town to help family, then being too busy with other social obligations, then being sick and wracked with a case of the seasonals, training has finally been reworked, fully implemented, and properly tested.
It's been a while since I talked about training, and I know some things were still kind of up in the air during the time when I posted about these mechanics on Patreon, so now that it's done and implemented, I figure I'll take this post to talk about the way things are, rather than just the way I hope they'll be. Though like everything else with Redemption Harem so far, I've had a wonderful time of getting things to work out almost exactly like how I envision them, so there probably won't be many differences between the post I made on Patreon and this post today.
First, there are three options for all the Redeemers you recruit. Quick Drills, Sparring, and "Training."
Quick Drills is your "skip" option. The screen fades to black, randomizes the result, tells you what the result is, then fades back in and training is done for that character for the day, with a 1 in 20 chance that Eckhard is the one that learns something and gets a stat boost instead of your trainee.
Sparring opens up actual combat with the character in question. While you have to put in a bit more work, how combat goes determines which stat gets increased rather than anything being randomized. Which stats increase depends on your trainee, but if you're sparring with Nadua and combat ends with you Binding her and capturing her, it's always her Defense that will go up. If you want to raise her Max HP, you have to damage her enough to get her to surrender. The same applies if you "lose" by falling below 50% of your own HP - Nadua's Attack will always be the stat that increases. These stats might be different depending on the character, but a given outcome will always raise that specific stat. Sparring is exceedingly unlikely to raise any of Eckhard's stats, as you need to actually get yourself KO'd for that.
"Training" is the scene replay option, with the quotation marks representing the thinly veiled excuse you're giving. This is mostly just how you access scenes that have unlocked as part of that character's story, but if that character hasn't already trained that day, there can be other effects as well. For most, it'll just increase their Condition by some amount, but there may be stat increases, storyline progress, or even new skills that can be unlocked through "training."
This does leave out group training, but after giving it some thought, I think I'm going to leave that for another mandatory recruit later in the game. Eckhard isn't the only one with some experience planned to be in the game, and I've got other plans to have some characters that you can recruit (but won't necessarily be combatants) that'll help with tasks around the fortress, like auto-watering your garden and cooking meals for the whole fortress to help you manage Condition, so it doesn't feel like that much of a stretch to have a character who specifically oversees trainee-on-trainee sparring matches to help them learn techniques and/or a character who can sit down with other characters who know witchcraft to either learn or teach a spell to them.
You may think this also kinda leaves out Eckhard, but remember two things. One - Eckhard is meant to already have a fair amount of experience. There's not much left for him to learn as a combatant so much as he needs to remember everything he's forgotten over the past near-decade. Two - there are tons of opportunities for Eckhard to advance outside the fortress. Completing quests may increase his stats. Fully exploring hunt areas increases his stats. Even inside the fortress, you can raise Eckhard's stats through research. This will remain true throughout the game, and new areas mean ever-increasing opportunities to continue raising his stats. Giving him a hamster wheel at the fortress would be overkill.
Speaking of, I've got some news on the new area you'll find the character that was previewed on Patreon and Subscribestar in, but this post is long enough. You'll hear more about that another week.
