ALPHA 0.7.2: Lingua Franca

As announced in last week's post, I have not have time to playtest and support an update since 23 May. This does not mean that I haven't had time to add to FC, making this an unusual update in weight of content: it adds five events, language and accents, Paternalist marriage, several big descriptive expansions, and more. As always, my update schedule is at the mercy of my other commitments. Once I stop adding content, playtesting, debugging and finalizing an update (not to mention actually posting and supporting the wretched thing) requires an uninterrupted block of time I don't always have. Fortunately, smaller or less contiguous time can always be used to buff up descriptions or work on a new event.

Marriage between the PC and slaves is always going to be a tough thing to reconcile with the background I've built up for the FC world. I've taken a conservative approach, limiting it to committed Paternalist arcologies. Paternalism dismisses many of the more troublesome sticking points, allowing me to get a fairly straightforward marriage system out for public playtesting. Depending on feedback, I may extend its availability, but it will look very different outside Paternalism. As it stands, it serves as a reward for the virtuous oligarch, which I'm comfortable with in the short term since the industrial dairy added such a powerful incentive to be cruel.

If you can imagine a one-sentence incident in a slave's life, please submit it as a vignette. I'll be expanding the vignette system once I have a large number of vignettes to add. One of the many painful lessons this project has taught me is that it's often more efficient to make a smaller number of larger changes, where possible. So, I'm letting submissions pile up until I can add them in big waves.

Download: Dropbox, Mega. Latest hotfix is 0.7.2.3 (1545 PST 7 June), completely save compatible. Fixes since 0.7.2.0 include:

• Prevents NGP from switching Emotionally Bonded and Emotional Slut statuses.
• Resolves a minor issue with skipping the intro.
• Makes the end week report pruning option visible as intended.
• Addresses Degradationist renaming issues.
• Firing the Rules Assistant manually now respects RA exclusions.
• Restricted slave school sales to players reputable enough to take advantage.
• Numerous typos and descriptive bugs.

Saves from previous versions are incompatible, but 0.7+ saves are eligible for New Game Plus. Some new players have expressed confusion at the way I'm handling save compatibility, so here's a summary. FC saves are not compatible across major versions. Versions are distinguished by the third numeral in the version number, for example, 0.7.1 is one update, and 0.7.2 is another. I would love to maintain save compatiblity across updates, but it's a time-consuming task I decided to drop since it ate into time I could devote to adding content. I do my best to make the lack of save compatibility clear with every update I post, but apparently it needs to be reiterated.

To be completely clear, this means that if you start a game of FC using one version of the .html, download another version of the .html, and load your old save, it won't work. It might not be immediately apparent that it isn't working, but it won't work, and it won't work in interesting ways that will seriously annoy you. Don't do it, and if you do do it, don't report your comeuppance as though it were a bug. It's not.

When I release a new version, which has been happening roughly every week for some time now, you have three options if you're in the middle of a playthrough:

• Start a new game in the new version, losing your progress.
• Use the New Game Plus option to import up to five slaves into a new game in the new version by following the instructions in game.
• Finish out the old game in the old version. Old versions remain available here.

An important caveat is that very occasionally, a new version won't break old saves. When this happens, I call it out very clearly. But in general, all versions should be assumed to be mutually save incompatible.

0.7.2 Changelog

Language and accents

• The lingua franca of the arcology can now be defined at game start, and will default to the most common language of the selected continent.
• Any language can be used, though English, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic are currently better supported than others for accent generation.
• Slaves have one of four levels of accent: no accent at all, a light accent, a heavy accent, and difficulty speaking the lingua franca.
• Accents are generated based on the slave's intelligence, education, nationality, and in some cases, ethnicity.
• A light accent grants a minor bonus to attractiveness.
• Difficulty speaking the lingua franca imposes a minor penalty to attractiveness, and will prevent slave dialog in most scenes, forcing the slave to use gestures instead.
• Having a thick accent will make Head Girls less likely to pass most training checks.
• Being mute now imposes a significant penalty to attractiveness.
• Slaves will naturally learn the lingua franca and moderate their accents over time, both of which will happen more rapidly if slaves are intelligent and allowed to speak.
• Completing basic slave education will address difficulty speaking the lingua franca.
• The lingua franca can be changed from the arcology management menu, at heavy cost in ¤ and prosperity: doing so will reroll slaves' accents.
• Each Revivalist future society has a corresponding language, and failing to match the lingua franca to the Revivalism will retard its adoption.
• Added an accent elimination option for speech rules, and a rules assistant setting to support it.

Marriage expansion

• Added slave marriage to the PC. It is a Free Cities construct, and very different from traditional matrimony.
• In order to be married, slaves must be Emotionally Bonded to the PC and the Paternalism law must be passed, but there are no other limits to the number of marriages.
• Slaves can be married to the PC from their individual menus, or scheduled for one of several possible slave wedding events at the end of the week.
• Being married to the PC improves several effects of being Emotionally Bonded, such as the reputational impact of fucktoy duty.
• Assigning a slave married to the PC to public sexual duties will disappoint her and damage reputation.
• Selling one of your slave wives will damage your reputation and disturb your other devoted slaves.

Event updates

• Position event for Head Girls smart enough to be worried about the state of the world.
• Generic event for devoted slaves who want to give a little gift to the PC.
• Generic punishment event for slaves who are reluctant to accept punitive anal sex with the Head Girl.
• Assignment event for masterful public servants, who can encounter a MILF tourist who wants to meet the notorious owner of the arcology.
• Checkin event for slaves whose backdoors have changed a lot since they were enslaved.
• Checkin events are no longer mutually exclusive, so individual slaves can see as many of them as they qualify for.
• Slaves imported via New Game Plus can now requalify for checkin events during the new game.
• Added an option to send event criminals directly to an industrial dairy, if one is operating.

Cosmetic refinements

• Expanded anus descriptions, and added a stat that helps describe how slaves' anuses respond to vigorous use over the long term.
• Expanded breast descriptions, and added a breast shape stat that is only significant for certain ranges of boob size: for example, over 1500CCs, naturally perky breasts will no longer be described as such, though they will return to perkiness if their size is reduced.
• There are six possible breast shapes, of which perky and torpedo-shaped breasts add slightly to attractiveness, saggy and downward-facing breasts are slightly negative, and wide-set and normally shaped breasts have no effect.
• Postitive and negative effects of breast shape can be lost by raising or lowering breast size until the shape is no longer described.
• Slaves' natural breast shape may occasionally change with drug treatment, lactation, cosmetic surgery, or other radical breast changes.
• Simply having huge breasts can cause a slave's natural breast shape to become saggy, but at unnaturally massive sizes this effect may reverse itself with further growth.
• Alternatively, disabling description of implant effects will also disable most mentions of breast shape.
• These new descriptive stats can be checked and altered from the description customization submenu during starting slave customization.

Other changes

• The most routine and predictable parts of the end week report can be suppressed from the options menu.
• Rather than disapproving of all intelligent slaves, Degradationist societies now only disapprove if an intelligent slave is not Worshipful of the PC.
• Degradationist societies now approve of keeping slaves in an industrialized Dairy.
• Spare living conditions will now gradually suppress high trust even with high devotion, making universal Spare rules a way to keep the player's slaves from getting too comfortable.
• Added more detailed descriptions of slaves' relationships for certain interesting combinations of partner stats.
• Restored anal fetish acquisition and advancement from being cockmilked.
• Added surgical vagina removal, which is limited to hermaphrodites since the game cannot handle slaves without sex organs.
• Rebalanced the impact of height on beauty so that Tall rather than Very Tall is now the optimum.
• Rebalanced the impact of T&A on beauty to offer diminishing returns at very large sizes.
• Racial Supremacist societies will not disapprove of slaves of the chosen race unless they are assigned to whore, serve the public, or work a glory hole, or be in one of the associated facilities.
• Boosted the adoption speed of the age preferential Future Societies by giving increased impact based on age.
• Minor encyclopedia revisions to better reflect game mechanics.
• Various other descriptive expansions.
• Continued code consolidation.
• Bugfixes.