This fixes a crash that could happen during the arrival of the second Chosen of each city depending on the city's personality distribution.
Click here to download.  Mirror.

This update adds the sixth and final Distortion path: Despair.  As the Morality/Innocence Distortion, it involves convincing the Chosen and their supporters that they're doing more harm than good by fighting the Demons.  Unlike the previous five Distortion paths, this one targets the entire city, and if you're able to activate it, then you can defeat even Chosen who haven't been corrupted at all.  The overwhelming power of the Demons simply causes them to give up.

Against a regular team of Chosen, the Distortion is activated by going into the final battle with at least 1000 Evil Energy.  This represents the fact that the Chosen have been committing evil acts and being more of a menace to the city than the Demons themselves.  The requirement goes up with Morality and Innocence Breaks against the Chosen: they each get two "free" Morality or Innocence Breaks, and after that, every additional Break increases the energy requirement, as the Chosen become less restrained by their conscience and less connected to reality, making them care less about their own sins.  On top of this, Chosen of advanced species increase the requirement further.  On the other hand, the campaign mode achievement for beating Chosen with Despair will sharply decrease the required Evil Energy, potentially even allowing you to automatically win against weaker teams once you have enough momentum.

In campaign mode, most Chosen defeated by Despair will completely lose their powers, joining you as civilians who provide small passive buffs just like Spared Forsaken (although Chosen defeated by Despair have an extra x2 multiplier to the bonuses they provide).  The bonus provided depends on their highest corruption parameter, so even in a loop where you can activate Despair at zero Evil Energy, it's still worthwhile to selectively break their Vulnerabilities before pulling the trigger.  (When Despair is set as the Distortion plan, the Forsaken Preview function will show you which bonus they're currently predicted to provide.)  Boss Chosen also have some unique interactions with Despair.  If Splendor is defeated by Despair, she won't be able to do her usual sabotage.  And Victory actually has two separate Despair traits she can get - one if you beat her normally while using Despair, and another if you manage to activate Despair without ever actually breaking any of her Vulnerabilities.

Chosen who are under a Distortion, or who have experienced Total Morality Break or Total Innocence Break, cannot be defeated using Despair.  However, you can still activate Despair in order to use it against their allies, and Chosen who have had their Distortion cancelled by a "forbidden" Vulnerability Break will once again become valid targets for Despair.  So, even when aiming for Despair, the other Distortion paths can still be used as well.

This was a major gameplay addition, and much of the month was largely spent on playtesting.  As such, there's also a big batch of bugfixes in this release.  On the sexual content side, this release also includes another vignette in the Significant Morality Negotiation chain commissioned by Kalloi, which is special in that it unlocks the "streaming studio" location which allows you to livestream your custom sex scene to the city's populace.  The livestream action has some special mechanics where the partner wears a mask to conceal her identity.  Presently, unmasking her to the public doesn't do much beyond causing her to stop worrying about concealing her identity in future livestreams.  But once the next vignette in the chain is added, there will be a bit more to it.  Of note is the fact that Forsaken can access the location and action by default.

Now that all the Distortions have been added to the game, the next step is to add the rest of the bosses and species.  I'm eager to get started on putting together the endgame!

Click here to download.  Mirror.

As with everything else about the Despair Distortion, the way that it handles Forsaken is very different.  There is no "standard" +50% INJU/EXPO trait given to Despair Forsaken.  Instead, most Chosen defeated using Despair instantly lose their powers and are treated as being Spared, providing double the usual bonus for Spared Forsaken.  At first, this may seem like a pretty boring way for them to end up, but it has the potential to be very powerful.  Spared Forsaken offer bonuses to basic attacks, surround damage, Motivation regeneration, evacuation, and extermination which scale much better than the sharply diminishing returns of the Sacrificed Forsaken achievement.  It prevents you from holding onto your Forsaken until you've pumped up the Angelic Forsaken achievement, but the innate x2 bonus multiplier makes up for that somewhat, and the Despair Forsaken will begin providing bonuses immediately instead of just sitting in your roster and potentially causing Motivation problems.

For Chosen who wouldn't have any other use, Despair can offer a way to make them contribute (even if just a little bit) to your playthrough.  And for Boss Chosen, the Despair Distortion grants an entirely different set of bonuses.  When Splendor is defeated using Despair, she also loses the Forsaken powers that allow her to sabotage you, and so she's completely neutralized - she no longer imposes any penalties, but she won't provide bonuses later in the run either.  This can be a good option if you want to start fighting Devils early, but you don't have the necessary tools to handle them while also dealing with Splendor's debuffs (and this option will also serve as the entry point to Splendor's "route" once the branching endings to campaign mode are implemented).  Meanwhile, Victory actually has two possible Despair traits - if she's suffered any Vulnerability Breaks, then she'll be able to fight for you as a powerful Forsaken with a bonus to INJU and EXPO damage and a unique Defiler.  But if you're able to activate Despair without actually breaking any of her Vulnerabilities, then she'll refuse to fight for you, instead providing a bunch of extra progress toward the Despair Achievement bonus.  Future boss Chosen will follow this pattern, and the highest-tier Chosen species (Elemental and Mechanical) will also have some unique interactions with Despair in order to compensate for the fact that they're generally too valuable to be converted into a simple numerical buff.

The x2 Spared effect bonus from Despair is multiplicative with the species bonus and the Angel achievement bonus.  Because of this, it might be tempting to plan on only starting to use the Despair Distortion in the later loops of campaign mode.  But because the later species require more Evil Energy to activate Despair, and because the later loops give you fewer days to build that Evil Energy, it's practically impossible to activate Despair in later loops unless you've been building up the achievement bonus in earlier loops.

With this, there are now several ways to "spend" Forsaken you don't intend to use.  The default option, sacrificing them for starting EE in each loop, becomes very inefficient past the first few.  Megalomania allows you to cycle through them to make the Second-in-Command position stronger before casting them aside.  Despair allows you to turn them into small numerical bonuses (and makes future Despair activations easier).  The various Distortion-related heavyweight items have different ways of making large numbers of Distorted Forsaken useful in their own ways.  And of course you can just take warp routes, effectively "giving up" opportunities to recruit Forsaken in exchange for better items.  The more you use one option, the fewer Forsaken are available for the others.  Hopefully all of them will be viable depending on the items you get and on your personal tastes.

As promised last week, I'll now explain the workings of the Despair Distortion in more detail.  When using the previous Distortions, achieving a set of conditions at some point in the loop would unlock a new defeat method in the final battle.  But achieving the Despair Distortion is simpler: it happens entirely in the final battle.  As long as you enter the final battle with enough Evil Energy, it will be obvious to the public and to the Chosen themselves that they've utterly failed in their task of protecting the city.  This will unlock the "Accuse" action which, like Megalomania's "Recruit," instantly defeats the target Chosen.  Because this all happens over the course of the final battle, the associated relationship scenes for Core Morality/Core Innocence Chosen also happen mid-battle, so that was pretty interesting to implement.

I've been playing with the exact amount of Evil Energy that should be required here, and I believe I've found a good balance.  The requirement starts at 700 EE, and then each Chosen increases it according to her species, corruption, and boss status.  The base amount per Chosen is 100 for regular Chosen and Undead, 200 for Superior, 300 for Animalistic, and 600 for Angels and Devils.  These values are doubled for bosses.  Furthermore, every Morality or Innocence Break suffered by the subject increases the requirement by one-quarter her base amount.  Chosen who are suffering from another Distortion, or who have experienced Total Morality Break or Total Innocence Break, cannot personally be targeted by Accuse - but you can still activate the Distortion and use it against their allies.

So, the minimum Evil Energy for beating a team of regular Chosen comes out to a nice, even 1000 EE (or potentially 1050 or 1100 depending on pre-broken Vulnerabilities).  But beating a team of Angels and Devils requires at least 2500, and it will quickly climb even higher for bosses, broken Vulnerabilities, and the coming last tier of Chosen species.  And the number seems even less reasonable when you consider that later loops in campaign mode can have deadlines as short as 20 days.  So, how are you supposed to reach such huge Evil Energy values?

The answer is that, like Megalomania, much of the value of the Despair Distortion comes from its Achievement bonus.  Every level of the Despair Achievement gives (tentatively) -400 Evil Energy required to activate the Despair Distortion.  At the maximum level of 5 (which both warp users and players who fight every loop should be able to reach by the endgame), this comes out to -2000 Evil Energy to the Despair requirement.  Demon Lords who become especially renowned for inspiring despair will be able to overwhelm weaker teams, bringing the Despair requirement to 0 Evil Energy and thus leaving them no chance to resist.  And depending on which Evil Energy-generating items you have, reaching the threshold even against Angels and Devils might become trivially easy.

Just make sure that you have a plan for the endgame.  Achieving Despair against the final two species (and their associated bosses) will be especially challenging.

This is another big update, so I'm not counting on making any progress on my side project this month.  The Despair Distortion has even more unique properties than the Megalomania Distortion did, and while some of those might make it easier to implement, I don't want to get halfway through the month only to realize that one of the mechanics is more complicated to implement than I had expected.  So, without further ado, I'll tell you how this Distortion will work!

Despair is the Morality/Innocence Distortion, which means that it's focused on breaking Confidence and Dignity.  It can be considered the opposite of the Megalomania Distortion, in that while Megalomaniac Chosen retain their full power while losing their sense of right and wrong, Despairing Chosen retain their sense of right and wrong while losing their power.  And while Megalomania can only affect a single Chosen at once, Despair affects all three of the Chosen - along with the entire city.

In order to be affected by Despair, the Chosen and the public must be convinced that there's no point in continuing to oppose the Demons.  Morality Break makes this more difficult because the Chosen will continue to fight out of pure spite, and Innocence Break makes this more difficult because the Chosen will want to keep fighting just to experience the pleasure that comes with being defeated.  Confidence Break (causing the Chosen to lose faith in themselves) and Dignity Break (causing the public to lose faith in the Chosen) are not strictly necessary, but in practice they'll be important to actually meet the conditions to trigger the Distortion.

The critical step of the Distortion is to demonstrate that the Chosen are doing more harm than good.  And the weight of the harm the Chosen have caused to the city is measured in Evil Energy.  The more sins the Chosen commit, the more power the Demons can exert.  But if the Demons don't actually use that power, then the public will rightfully recognize that the Chosen are the ones who are actually threatening the city.  Even Chosen with unbroken Confidence will realize their inadequacy, and even Chosen with unbroken Dignity will be considered guilty by association with their partners.

The game balance here has been very tricky to work out, because the amount of Evil Energy generated across the course of beating a team can vary widely, especially between different loops in campaign mode.  I have some ideas for dealing with that, but this writeup is already getting long, so I'll save it for next week.

This fixes a couple of minor bugs as well as implementing the very simple QoL improvement of showing how many Demon Commander captures remain on the button itself rather than just on the tooltip.
Click here to download.  Mirror.