Enter the Arena! - Changelog: 1.4.6

Greetings, one and all!

We've got an exciting update this month with the introduction of the all-new Arena Victoria; an offworld blood sport that showers the bold with glory & prizes. Send your followers to compete in your name, then see how they fare against the fearsome odds of brutal savages & wild beasts! Plus, we've got balancing updates, bug fixes, and more!

So, dive in, check out the changes, and let me know what you think. Feedback is always greatly appreciated. But, remember...

Above all else, have fun!

Max (Novus Operandi)

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New mini-game event: the Arena Victoria!

The Arena Victoria is a new mini-game event that can be launched from the follower inspection dialogue. It allows you to send a follower to an offworld locale where they compete in a dangerous blood sport for glory & prizes!

• A new mid-to-late game activity! After turn 50, Eva will now announce her discovery of the Arena Victoria and detail its benefits to the player. Following this brief, introductory event, a new option will appear in the follower inspection dialogue of SEND TO ARENA. Certain minimums of health & devotion are required for followers to participate, and only one follower per-turn can be sent to the arena (after which the arena will be listed as ‘closed’ until a new turn is advanced).
• Fight both beast & human adversaries! Lions, tigers, bears, oh my! And don’t forget those wily bandits and savage, bloodthirsty barbarians. All these and more await your followers with bated breath in the Arena Victoria!
• Use combat or courtship (lethal or non-lethal); the choice is yours! Every opponent can be faced using either combat (lethal) or courtship (non-lethal), for varying results. Do you want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women? Then use combat to see your enemies beheaded, disemboweled, or bathing the arena with their blood. But if you’d rather take the subtler or more seductive approach, choose courtship instead, and see your enemies lulled into an aroused stupor by song, dance, or musical display. They’ll then be left tied-up and tidy for the arena attendants to drag away.
• Gain silver, energy crystals, and skill advancements! Followers who compete in the arena can gain multiple benefits, depending on the number of rounds they endure & the skills they employ while doing so; these include silver, energy crystals, and the advancement of the skills they use.

Feature update: followers now react to age changes!

Two brief, new narrative events have now been added in which a follower either thanks you for making them younger, or questions you for making them older. (As suggested by user Dark on the audiogames.net forums.)

• If you make a follower 15 years or more younger, they will now follow up afterward to express their gratitude, and this may increase their devotion to you.
• If you make a follower 20 years or more older, they will now follow up afterward to express their displeasure, and this may decrease their devotion to you.

Gameplay balancing:

• Updated how muscular strength affects weekly performance results for Medical and Caretaking duties. Muscle strength will now be less important for these assignments, because while higher levels of muscular development will still boost performance as before, the lower levels of muscular development will now be less penalized. Medical duties now only apply a ‘slight’ penalty for the lowest category of ‘underdeveloped’ muscles, while ‘soft’ or ‘barely-defined’ muscles no longer have penalties applied under these duties. Caretaking duties now only apply a universal, ‘slight’ penalty for the categories of ‘underdeveloped,’ ‘soft,’ or ‘barely-toned’ muscles. This should allow a wider range of physical builds for followers successfully occupying these roles.
• Increased the cost for recruiting the MC’s bio-mom, plus the aunts & cousins who can follow afterward. The cost for liberating these women from their crushing debts has been bumped up to feel more appropriate to the narrative involved, but also to scale upward the further into the game you are, so the debt you liberate them from never feels too paltry. As a general rule of thumb, the cost to recruit them will now increase by 10 silver for every turn of the game completed (so if you’re playing on turn 100, their recruitment cost will now be 1000 silver higher than it was before).

Accessibility updates:

• Fixed issue that could cause Coaching menu confirmation pop-ups to not properly return TTS focus to the main interface upon closing. (Thank you to user Xvordan of the audiogames.net forum for reporting this issue.)
• Updated key bindings so that pressing the Escape key will now cancel / close any currently open pop-up menu in the application (including cosmetic modification & purchasing menus). (Thank you to users Xvordan and defender of the audiogames.net forum for providing feedback related to this issue.)

Misc. updates:

• Updated version numbering of app from 0.4.6 to 1.4.6 to better reflect industry standard numbering used for a released product (and also to reduce confusion among the player community about the game’s current development status).
• Fixed bug preventing follower from being detected as nude after undressing during event erotic_officeseated (in which a follower finds you at your desk, going over reports, and offers to give you a more pleasing distraction).
• Added an on-screen, visual break (a series of three asterisks) that will precede each new snippet of text inserted to an in-progress dialogue scene. (This will typically be seen when choosing to LOOK CLOSER during a dialogue event, or when selecting undressing actions.) This was done to make it easier to discern where the previous text ends and the new text begins.
• Added first name ‘Grace’ and last name ‘Harper’ to pool of randomly-chosen names for French & Nordic ethnicities.
• On choosing to back out of the OPTIONS TO FINISH menu (during sex dialogues), the text which previously stated “You change your mind about climaxing...” has been updated to read “You change your mind about finishing....”