Unholy Arts v0.2.2 Claw Update Changelog

Today's update brings an overhaul of the battle scene AI, new moves for Claw, and a new Story Event. Fighting the other Candidates is actually getting scary.

Story Events
- Added new story event involving Claw. You may get a scene if you find a way to pounce on her. There are a few different ways that might turn out though.

Scene AI
- Created new algorythm to be used by the AI during combat scenes. This algorythm identifies specific scenarios (Is a character being pinned down? Are they out of control? Do they have buffs? Are they losing control? Etc.) and alters the character's method of choosing their next action and target depending on it. This will be further explained in the devlog post.

Scene mechanics
- Added "usePain" and "receivePain" to list of sexual tastes, which have low values by default.
* Adjusted values: Padmiri has slightly reduced taste for inflicting pain and slightly increased taste for receiving pain. Valtan has moderate increases in both areas. Nashillbyir has moderate increase in giving pain, and Claw has a high increase in giving pain.
* Spanking is now considered a "usePain" action. No actions are tagged as "receivePain" yet.
- Added "pain" to battle affinities.
* Adjusted values: Claw has slightly increased pain strength, Nashillbyir and Padmiri have slightly increased pain resistance, Maaterasu has slightly increased pain weakness.
- Added extra checks that prevent actions from being used if the actor or the target has specific altered states. This will be used, for instance, to prevent the stacking of some altered states.

New scene actions
- Cat Aspect: Battle action, usable by beastkin, increases actor's agility, perception, control recovery and pounce affinity. Cannot be stacked.
- Bite Neck: Sex action, flavor tags are "domination" and "usePain". Deals lust, willpower and social drive damage.
- Scratch: Battle action, usable by beastkin. Deals lust and energy damage, has pain affinity. Provokes scratched altered state, which erodes agility, increases weakness to pain damage, increases energy cost and may be stacked.

Combat balance
- During combat, damage to energy, willpower or social drive that exhausts the target's energy, willpower or social drive, may now overflow and become extra lust damage. This may open up new strategies.
- When the target's control isn't depleted, pounce actions' evasion calculation take into account the actor's and target's pounce affinity.
- The "tease" combat action now deals small amounts of lust damage.
- Reduced Claw's pounce strength from 15 to 10 and raised pounce resistance from 0 to 10.
- Cold guts may no longer be stacked, but its scaling has increased.
- Control now increases evasion against pounce attacks even more (from 10 per control point to 15 per control point). This will make NPC characters (excluding Claw) generally more cautious about using them before their enemy runs out of control.
- Struggle no longer consumes 2 willpower points.
- Reduced base damage of struggle. Damage of struggle goes down as the actor's energy and willpower bars deplete. Damage of struggle is disminished if the actor has arms or legs and they are not free. Set struggle's minimum control damage at 0.8.

More balance
- Adjusted function that determines if a character accepts an invitation to chat to reduce the relationship malus to 0 if it's between -8 and 0, in order to make it easier to mend relationships that start on the wrong foot.
- Losing a liberation challenge as the submissive part will now extend the special relationship by an extra day. Try not to lose on purpose too much.

Scrolls
- Added "The Basics of Combat" scroll under the new section "Gameplay tips". Reading the scroll makes you learn the action "Cold Guts", which is no longer known at the start of the game.

QoL improvements
- Added short messages to battle scene actions explaining how weak was the target was to the attack's affinities. How efficient the actor was at using those affinities is not taken into account. The effectiveness thresholds are 0.65, 0.9, 1.1 and 1.5, and the messages are "Frail attack", "Resisted attack", "It was effective!" and "Devastating!".
- Fixed piece of code that was creating lag in scenes.

Configuration
- Added option at the settings menu to enable or disable pain actions, enabled by default. Still not sure if "scratch" should get disabled too, since it could nerf Claw.
- Autosaving is now enabled by default.

Supporter Rewards
- When starting the game on the second bookmark, all Candidates will have studied 6 scrolls.

Fixes
- Freeze Feet description will now properly show the inflicted energy damage.
- Hypnotic glance description will now properly show the inflicted control damage.
- Fixed a typo in one of the descriptions of Frontal Pounce P2P.
- Removed a script that increased the player character's empathy to 12 for no reason at some passage.