Equivalent Exchange v017 (EDIT: v017a Hotfix)

GAMEPLAY CHANGES:

Adjusted the odds to successfully run from an encounter to be slightly more difficult.

CONTENT:

Progression with the Alpha Kobolds has been implemented.  The kobolds remember that you've been down in their forum before and they remember whether your previous encounter with them resulted in your victory or your loss.

There are a number of significant ways that the game tracks your progression with the Alpha Kobolds:

- As said previously, the kobolds remember whether you won or lost against them the last time you encountered them.

- There is a 'high score' tracker that ticks upward with every win you make the more you encounter the Alpha Kobolds.  As you continue to win against the Alpha Kobolds, they will gang up on you and increase their numbers in the fight in an effort to try and subdue you.  The more you win, the higher the tracker ticks, and the more Alpha Kobolds you must defeat at once.  If you can win against five Alpha Kobolds simultaneously, they will bow to your natural superiority and name you the Alpha of Alphas.

- If, at any point, you lose against the Alpha Kobolds, the tracker resets to zero and your next encounter will be against one lone Alpha, but it saves your progress: the next time you win, you will pick up where you started.  If you made it up to four Alphas at once, then lose, you will fight one Alpha on your next encounter; if you win against that one Alpha, on your next encounter, you will fight four again.

- You can fully submit to the Alphas and become a Beta's Beta: so lowly that, while you're in the kobold forum, you answer to even the lowly Betas of the community.  To do so, you simply lose against the Alpha kobolds five times in a row.  There is intentionally no progression with your losses: if you lose four times, then win once, you must lose five times in a row to submit.  While progressing upward is more challenging, it's also more forgiving, whereas if you want to submit permanently, you can just choose to submit over and over.

- All of the Alpha Kobolds you fight simultaneously have different sexes, which are all randomized.  If you make it up to five Alphas, you could be fighting three females and two males.  It could be five males or five females.  They all have different contextual content based on quantity and positioning: for example, if you're knocked prone, or submit, to five kobolds, the resulting gangbang will have different content based on how many kobolds there are and which kobold is which sex (if the second kobold is female; if the fourth is male; etc).  Because of this randomization, there are approximately 80 different ways the scenes could play out, and if you lose or submit, there are further possible different results and content barks based on, say, if the fifth kobold is male and he's the one that took your penis size, etc.  It is extremely unlikely that any two runs of the Alpha Kobold encounters will play out the same way.

- After fully subjugating the Alphas, or fully submitting to them, there is no longer any progression; any further content of you owning the kobold forum, or being a Beta's Beta for it, is currently in progress.

-- HOWEVER!  Because of this, and as a means of apology: after either defeating the kobolds or submitting to them, I've included a 'cheat menu' that allows you to replay the fight with as many Alphas (up to five) as you want, with any of their sexes in any position you'd like.  You can fully customize the scene to your hearts content.  Any progress made in the fights via the cheat menu, such as stat gains, EXP gains, and score progress, are not saved.  The cheat menu can be accessed after either subjugated/succumbing to the Alpha Kobolds by either choosing Journey Deeper in the Caves, or via the debug menu (backer's versions only).

-- Because of that last part, if you want to be the Alpha of Alphas when that content is finally ready, you still need to beat all five kobolds legitimately.  If you just submit a bunch to get to the cheat menu and you plan to beat them 'properly' in a later update, your save will remember what you've done.

- Approximately 12,000 words of new content, but many dozens of variables and hundreds of lines of code to randomize the content as much as possible.

EDIT: v017a Hotfix:

Fixed a bug in the Alpha Kobold Cheat Menu that could cause the resultant scene to display a mostly black screen.

Fixed an error that could occur if you had no stats to surrender to the Alpha Kobolds upon loss, which could result in a hard lock.

Fixed an oversight that locked progression and resulted in a mostly black screen (but not causing a lock) when choosing to Journey Deeper.

I'm getting a report that it's impossible to progress normally into the Alpha Kobolds via the Caves: no matter how many Beta Kobolds they go through, progression simply never happens.  I can't replicate this error; if anyone gets the same error, please tell me.