As an aside, I’ve had an idea for the sake of game flow, that may or may not be actually actionable. I don’t mess with RPGMaker, because when it comes to game design I like to do systems architecture and pretend to be smart rather than actually get to coding lol.
You have the stated design goal of making eating people, actually being part of the game’s systems, right? You want it to function in combat. Players, are of course complaining that it’s kind of slow and hard to deal with, and obviously you don’t want it to just happen as a result of combat ending.
Why don’t we play with the systems you’ve added then? One of the key design emphasis you’ve placed on the game is skills, and making the most of them. What about a way to “Upgrade” an offensive skill? (Which would really just function as replacing the skill with an alternate registry).
Get ex amount of relatively few mercy points, roll around to the fat fairy. Trade in points for the upgrade. Now, when it gets an enemy in that threshold, it autocompletes the action associated with the Upgraded skill, whether that be capturing, sparing, or eating a foe.
As a result, you get all the benefits of enhanced emphasis on skills, players can speed up combat without totally making the system trivial, and it satisfies the design requirement of making food collection part of the game loop.
You can even use this with the collected information you’re getting from players about their respective game play throughs, and use it to enable the play styles you’re trying to carve out. Say, having other additional upgrades that increase the exp or mercy granted by such skills if the player is in a group, or having it grant stat bonuses like in the older designs but for the solo player, to compensate for the concerns you have about the player experience.
