Progress Update - February 11th, 2021

I wanted to talk about pregnancy (or in the vanilla game, disease) changes that I’ve been brewing.

As pregnancies currently work, they’re not very different from the vanilla diseases -- sure they’re named differently and some of them have been reworked to give more flavorful bonuses and drawbacks, but not much else.

That’s going to change in the coming updates. :)

I’ve been working with the reaction act out files and there’s a decent amount of potential in there for “inducing” a pregnancy during combat. If any of you have used the optional “Estrus” affliction Lustiest Lair add-on from the Nexus, then the execution will seem a bit similar.

First I’ll start by explaining a bit about reaction act outs.

Reaction act-outs are triggers during combat in which a character will “act”. This is typically before the start of their turn in initiative -- like with an affliction, virtue or the Crimson Curse in which a character will either attack, perform a random action, increase the party’s stress or move -- they can also react to getting hit, and ally hitting or them being moved.

With reaction act outs, we can add a custom effect to each of these triggers -- so let’s say a hero with a certain pregnancy gets hit, the pregnancy can trigger and summon some creatures (either allies, enemies or some kind of object -- like an egg, for instance).

The only drawback back to this is if a pregnancy being induced will summon something, then if 4 monsters are present on the battlefield this would lead to nothing spawning at that moment until the trigger happens again with 3 monsters or less on the field.

So, if a character has a certain pregnancy, we can add these reaction act outs which will be unique to that pregnancy. So, when they go into combat, all sorts of surprises could be waiting for them the next time they get into an encounter -- with each pregnancy offering their own unique scenarios.

I’m excited for the changes and am hoping to utilize the pregnancies to their fullest potentials. 

I'm also hoping this changes the way players interact with the Sanitarium. As it currently stands in the base game, it’s usually best to just remove a disease (unless it’s something like the Crimson Curse) as they’re almost always strictly downsides.

In Lustiest Lair I’m aiming to encourage players to enter expeditions with pregnant heroes -- not only to see what happens, but to have the player have to make more interesting gameplay choices.