TL;DR download link below for subpar modifications to the game that will allow you to mate with maiden followers if their new stat loyalty is high enough. And a bunch of other whacky mechanics.
Thank you for your quick and insightful response (
(just a heads up; this is the start of a bunch of bs. Might want to skip. Basically: full fledged romance? Nah. Scraps of doki doki and moe and most degenerates including me can fantasize the whole picture together though)
Having read what you wrote and after giving it some thought, I do understand where you are coming from. As you have said, to include fleshed out romance in this game (in particular, storytelling) would be... far-fetched, to say the least. While certainly possible, it would require an overhaul of the likes that are far beyond what can be reasonably asked for within years, and asking for an overhaul spanning beyond years of work, for a mmm let's say questionably constructed game about mountain-sized dragons plowing fairies is... head-scratching. In many ways.
However, likely due to me being rather vague about it, there might have been a misunderstanding. I never asked for a fully fleshed out experience. First of all, again, that would require a lot of effort, too much realistically speaking. Secondly, I myself do not even believe in romance being "fully fleshed out" in media, much less in a source like this game. It is too constrained by trivialities, too shallow, too etc. Until the day we can perfectly harmonize virtual reality and real life and call such union a game, we can only dream (and crawl our way toward said dream).
Having said that though, I do believe that if a game is giving the right nudges, the user's imagination can carry the dream quite far actually. While the quantity matters of course, it is also important that you slip the right pieces. If provided such pieces, the human mind is remarkably good at filling in the voids in-between to complete the puzzle*. The solution might not be what the author had in mind, but result can be fascinating in its own right.
So, instead of painting a Van Gogh (or rather trying to, but finding out halfway that we are not, in fact, Van Gogh and we did not draw a flower but a dog with three ball sacks and a hooter for snooter), we just splash some paint on the canvas, recommend a palette or two, and voilà, the viewer is finishing up a masterpiece of their own (in their own mind, for only their eyes).
How on earth does this all tie back to Deviler Wings though? Well, we can implement certain actions the player can do. Doesn't have to be neatly done, doesn't need a whole lot of flavor to it, but as long as it's there and is not too stale, we're good to go.
However, should Defiler Wings have romance to begin with? Like, at all? Mmmyeah no, not really. The game wasn't originally about that, and neither is it right now. Not even a bit. Even if I fantasize like there's no tomorrow, romance just is not in the game currently, unless I outright rewrite some parts that are happening in the game and essentially go completely off the trials. If you were not looking for hugs to begin with, no problemo. If you did, or were kinda hoping for some, you're either steering clear from this game, or against better knowledge you dove in on a prayer (like me) and got sorely disappointed. Big shame, because I really do like a lot about the game. So much so, that I am here writing my buttcheeks off to begin with.
(end of bs)
So there's that, that's basically how I view romance in Deviler Wings, and implementing it; Doesn't have it, doesn't need it, but it can, and I lowkey desperately want it, and it's totally fine if it's a little bit shite, if it means I can have it.
Now, regarding balance, the way I see that, is that it's a lost cause to begin with. It's either too challenging here or too easy there, often both at the same time and for all the wrong reasons. Might as well throw in a bit of fun into the mix, and while this is certainly, most definitely, extremely subjective, I think the changes I proposed (or rather the idea behind them, i.e. not the exact numbers/methods I provided) are quite promising. It adds a bit of a different kind of character building, a still grindy but less RNG-focused way of progression that yes might be too OP or too dumb or too whatever, but perhaps it will be a nice stepping stone to greener grass, and if it sprinkles in some hints at romance, the more the better
I'm neither "really" serious about it, and I wouldn't call it something as grand as a sub-mod (though I suppose it technically is), I actually already put something together (and sorry about the "discuss the specifics and details in private" part. I uh, I guess maybe next time? Lemons :/ )
If you want, try it out. Then tell me why it's bad and you hate it and I'll give up. Or tell me why it's good and why this should be further developed, and I'll tell you why you are the perfect guy to make the harem dream come true. Or someone else. Anyone but me (if you still don't get it, this is pretty much how far I go. Was interesting to get to shake hands with Renpy, but I think I'll call this a one night stand).
Or don't try at all because romance is not in Defiler Wings and it shouldn't because you're a fucking dragon the size of a mountain with a dick the size of a truck trying to snoo snoo with lotsa force and not so much consent, with Eragon's late wife and side tussle among others. Might have opened a bottle of champagne over a candle-lit dining table on a Saturday evening for that, but now? Just lemons. Also, I'm new to the site and lowkey concerned I am breaking some rule by for example uploading files. Not sure, will see.
*Though to be fair, usually it is not that our brain actually filled in the gaps, but pretended that it did and convinced us to really stare down the pieces we do have. A fun little test you can do (as long as you have the ability to form mental images. That is, you do not suffer aphantasia lol. Rip in that case) is to visualize a memory that you believe you strongly remember. After doing that, ask yourself about trivial details in that scene, like what shirt is person X wearing? What color? Was it a shirt to begin with? How about the desk? What color? How many drawers? Etc. Unless you have eidetic memory (a.k.a. photographic memory), you're very unlikely to be able to answer many of them faithfully if any at all, and yet as you continue to pile these unanswered questions about the memory and realize just how little you actually remember, the visual image probably still remains coherent, or at the very least it was/you believed it was when you recalled it. How is that possible, if 95% of the information is just not there? It is because our brain is a criminal mastermind at bamboozling us
No problem. As I've said before, you can do your own mods without my explicit approval, or even over my refusal. If you want them included in the main mod, though...
It's... barebones. I don't particularly hate it or like it, but if I wanted to do something like that, I have what I think are better and more balanced ideas. They're at the bottom of the list, if at that, though.
Which is the complete opposite of my intentions with the mod. If something is too easy, I'll tweak it to make it harder. If something is impossible, I'll make it less so. It might take a while for this to filter down into a release, and I don't catch all of it (which is why you fine people are here to tell me about exploits ), but that's not a reason to give up.
As I said, I don't believe in a big bad dragon inspiring loyalty. Fear, absolutely. Bootlicking, definitely. Some SS-style affection, maybe. Worship, possibly. Genuine loyalty? That has to be reciprocal.
Anyway, if you're happy with it, good. I find this loyalty mechanic wholly artificial, and, as I said before, would make an actual 'affection' mechanic instead, if I had the time and motivation.
That would actually be something I could use, even if not in the immediate future. If you have a design doc or something, I'd be interested in seeing it.
Given that you can have dozens of pregnancies, and thus exponential growth, that is stupendously unbalanced. Not to mention that I'm trying to make girl minions less attractive overall...
As I said before, I'm moving to a 'hatchling' model, and egg quality therefore matters less than it used to. You still get a more useful hatchling that matures more quickly, and maybe even a grown one, but the stat caps are still there, lower than before, and the maturing process takes perhaps a few months. Having more random eggs that average a little higher is largely just flavour.
Not years. I think I could do something like that it in a week's worth of work. A full week, that is. It would have crappy writing, limited art, and postpone all the more interesting stuff on my todo list. That's why I'm not doing it.
Ravager also does it better, doesn't have the same art constraints, and is generally superiour at making you care about the womenfolk.
Secondly, I myself do not even believe in romance being "fully fleshed out" in media, much less in a source like this game. It is too constrained by trivialities, too shallow, too etc.
I don't think so. That same imagination you were talking about can fill in a lot of gaps, but you have to give it considerable material to work with if you want the result to be memorable. I'm very much not into romance (when I still watched TV, I used to take a break when a Hollywood-mandated affection scene was happening), but I've read several books with romance I really liked. For instance, the Sharing Knife series by Lois McMaster Bujold. There's nice world-building, interesting social customs, everyone had agency and the romance didn't feel tacked on, shallow or sentimental. On the contrary, it was the larger half of the motivation the protagonists had to do what they did, they faced problems due to it and persevered. Another one I recall vividly was Brother's Price by Wen Spencer, which was basically a gender-swap version of Cinderella, except the prince was a harem of princesses, some quite tough. And Cinderella was the eldest of four brothers among 32 siblings, which was considered a very good ratio.
The thing to note is that both the above authors are women, and this generally tends to hold true for anything that has interesting romance in it. While this dragon-rape thing is very much something most women would have a very hard time connecting with.
It'd be a largely cosmetic thing, but why not... But what do you mean by 'm'? One 'bottle', 1 HP worth of milk, 1 silver worth of milk, something else?
I've just started playing the game and was a massive fan of Defiler Wings but whenever I launch I don't see the menu I just start in game as Big Brother. Does this happen to anyone else? And if so how did you fix it?
Disable debug mode from the options. If that somehow fails, nuke your save directories, both in the game directory and the Ren'Py user directory (usually something like 'users/[user]/AppData/Roaming/RenPy/Time_for_Dragons'; consoling config.savedir will tell you exactly where it is).
You're so bad at the game that BB decided to not let you faff about and took over.
Occasionally. Most likely cause is undeleted settings from a previous installation of Time for Dragons.
Disable debug mode from the options. If that somehow fails, nuke your save directories, both in the game directory and the Ren'Py user directory (usually something like 'users/[user]/AppData/Roaming/RenPy/Time_for_Dragons'; consoling config.savedir will tell you exactly where it is).
So I'm doing a playthrough as a terror dragon and might have broken my game.
At large size and with a fair number of fear-raising evolutions (shadow scale, etc), I do a significant amount of hp damage when attempting to rape or torture captives. Most nobles, burghers, and nuns (with 20 or so hp) cannot not survive mating unless I lock them up first and grind affection to 50+ first. It's not a hard lock but this is gimping my progress pretty hard. Using console magic to change the shadow scales to something that does not generate fear drops the damage during rape to something more reasonable, like 2-5 hp damage.
On the contrary torture does a bit less damage than rape, but only raises affection by a trivial amount (1-2 points) so it does not seem like a useful mechanic even though it's one of the reasons you want to have high fear.
Is this intended behavior? I feel like high fear should result in less damage during rape (less likely to resist), but since fear gives you free girls without having to fight for them I suppose there's a chance this may be WAD.
On the contrary torture does a bit less damage than rape, but only raises affection by a trivial amount (1-2 points) so it does not seem like a useful mechanic even though it's one of the reasons you want to have high fear.
Rape does a lot of damage with high fear because it's four checks instead of one (going with each phase of the rape), and fear is applied for all of them. I implemented it that way mainly for simulation, not as a deliberate design choice.
Affection changes are directly tied to HP loss and the hidden dignity stat, so they're largely the same for 'regular' torture and rape. Raping and most torture mean 1.5 HP lost per affection/dignity gained (that's division, not just a slash ). Poison and clawing are 2.0, lightning and terror torture are 1.0.
Torture does little damage because this way you can 'dial' the appropriate amounts of torture and leave her alive. As a bonus, severely weakened gals have a lot of trouble trying to run away.
High fear means the 'fear' torture becomes stronger (per lust point spent), and that is the most efficient one besides lightning. And not all dragons have lightning.
Is this intended behavior? I feel like high fear should result in less damage during rape (less likely to resist), but since fear gives you free girls without having to fight for them I suppose there's a chance this may be WAD.
Well, sorta. The free girls aren't that good ROI per stamina spent. But high fear isn't about immediately eliminating resistance, it's about being better at scaring them to compliance or even death. Like all the other enemies who can also have heart attacks mid-combat. Resistance itself is measured through affection.
In any case, I'm not terribly attached to this model. If someone has better ideas, I'm willing to listen.
Quick note: On the character inspect pane, it would be nice if there were a 'heal with milk' button that just auto-uses your cheapest milk to full health. Long torture and healing sessions become incredibly tedious with the Torture > Back > Treasury > Milk > Item > Victim > Captives > Victim > Torture loop. This is especially bad on weaker targets. Trying to get a princess from 50-100 fear takes 35+ trips into the treasury. It doesn't have a role play value to navigate the menus, its just frustrating.
You mean an adult game? Sengoku Rance and similar games (Alicesoft has a number of them), perhaps. I have another insane mod like this for a simbro game, but that one's dead ATM (the mod, not the game). Kingdom of Deception, Pytfall, Renryuu Ascension, Roundscape: Adorevia, Goblin Burrow are somewhat similar in various aspects. I'm sure there's more.
Non-adult, lots and lots. Any in-depth RPG. Darkest Dungeon and Battle Brothers, possibly. There are even dragon games, Hoard is conceptually very similar, although real-time and has multiplayer. I also recall there being a semi-popular Japanese dragon game, but can't put a name to it right now.
Still wrapping my head around it, but I'm most frustrated by thieves since their mechanics seem the most obfuscated of the early game threats. As in, whilst they keep getting past my traps and guards, they don't have easily available statlines like knights do for me to gauge how much stronger I should be to take them on. Read earlier in the thread that they may be cheesed by having them procure a cursed sleeping powder, but is there a way to know whether or not it's cursed from the event itself?
Also, there's mentions of how some Poverty is desirable since it helps keep Mobilization manageable, but too much of it can have it spiral out of control. Makes sense, but I was wondering about the rough numerical estimates of what constitutes 'too much'. Any rules of thumb on that regard?
All of this on what I surmise to be early game still, on Normal difficulty.
As in, whilst they keep getting past my traps and guards, they don't have easily available statlines like knights do for me to gauge how much stronger I should be to take them on.
Well, there's no such easy gauge against thievery in RL, either. You either get them, or fail and improve your security. The smuggler report does tell you what they're particularly strong or weak against.
Read earlier in the thread that they may be cheesed by having them procure a cursed sleeping powder, but is there a way to know whether or not it's cursed from the event itself?
sorry for late reply, my laptop get strike by blue screen right after that last comment and just recently it finally fixed, i dont know is it get changed or not now, but i think you misunderstood some of my comment that i dont think i can just left it as is, so i make this reply, the rest i can accept your reasoning.
- Bonercat said:
food warehouse
your reply - Dragons aren't really into that 'farming and granaries' thing, you know?
thats true if we only focus or talking about the dragon, but since we also have troops and prisoner to take care off, food supply is essential for them realistically, and our lair is literally the front bastion/outpost out of the mother territory thats mean we cant use the excuse that the mother deliver food supply to our place.
- Bonercat said:
why not implement it for the lair itself, and it can help some micromanagement
your reply - It'll 'help' in the sense of 'introduce meaningless micro where there was none before'. I'm still not seeing any great improvement over the current situation.
well if you think so, i personally think this can add more immersion and challenge to balance between how many troop/servant and prisoner to micromanage.
- Bonercat said:
but i hope this mod can at least make the choice matter, rather than no matter what i choose the queen spawn fuck the queen in the end.
your reply- Both Gwidon and the dragon can fuck her in the end. Having a Gwidon-exclusive scene in the middle when the dragon has already had his turn is of no great consequence, unless you have some sort of strong 'anti-NTR' fetish. I don't care about the latter at all, and anyone who wants all women in the game to be exclusively theirs can either make a submod for that, or accept the mod for what it is.
this part is not what i mean, theres a two option when we met them, one never mention to gwidon to fuck the queen and another force gwidon to fuck the queen, when i choose to never mention it, later on gwidon turns out still fuck the queen like i have order it. making that choice pointless and meaningless, do you get what i mean now? i dont mind NTR if its optional, but i definitely dont want it when it force on to me, especially when it somehow put into the important part in the middle of the story at or to unlock important place without any reasonable meaning , i wont mind if its some small unimportant quest/event that we can ignore, and even more so that we suppose to play as some strong dragon, which you can argue if the dragon still small or weak, but when the dragon is the biggest and strongest you still get that, then i dont like it, its the same feeling i get when the fairy event in the original times of dragon no matter how big my dragon is he get intimidate by a glare of a fairy, thats make him pathetic.
your reply- Edit: Youre too focused on Gwidon being a greenskin. Gwidon is not an orc, he's an immensely powerful magical creature that looks like an orc (because of the original script and Sabia fucking orcs all game long
dont take that too seriously, its just a jab/joke, and even if he actually a half dragon or something, him breeding the queen to get some unique monster spawn the dragon cant get make more sense to me, rather than simply just a whim.
-That's your problem. I feel like the dragon is spending quality time with his son. And I don't have unlimited poses available to Sabia, I can only use what's there.
there exist where the dragon original form fuck sabia though, if you want to reuse that for the second one, considering when you fuck him at first in the castle with that form result in fighting the arc mage.
- Bonercat said:
also i forgot to ask this, and this one kinda offtopic, may i know the cartoon name for the gwidon event?
your reply - Which one? Most of the Queen-related stuff is from Kingdom of Deception. The 'fight' images are some sort of generic Warcraft orc, I think. Might be a named character, I'm not very knowledgeable in anything Warcraft past WC2 or so
the cartoon where the king order the men to throw them inside a barrel to the sea.
-Bonercat said:
thanks will try to check it, hmm....well as much as being milk by the witch is fun, it just kinda disturb the dragon pride, would be nice to have alternative way to learn magic, maybe finding magic book like necronomicon or something.
your reply- Dragon magic and human magic are kinda different, though, so purely book learning is likely not going to work. And you can stop the milkings after you've done the initial 10 buckets. I might add the Witch to the endgame sometime in the far, far future, so you'll have revenge to look forward to, as well.
pretty sure theres a scene where the dragon read all the witch book to learn magic though after the milking, regarding book drop i was thinking the arcmage can drop his book or something after you manage to beat it, his book probably have dragon magic in it, he his the capital arc mage that can contest against a dragon after all, or you can make the dragon require many book before he learn magic through trial and error, this one probably get from treasure or normal wizard or mage event i guess outside of require the arc mage book to complete it if you want.