Finally ready for a full 1.0 release! Adds a new cursed class, the Latex Drone, and a couple new sets of enemies you can encounter in the Lab and Swamp! I've put a lot of work into this one, give it a look!
Mod page: https://luei.itch.io/latex-drone
Discord thread: https://discord.com/channels/1144933990676041768/1314319490976321536
Hey, not sure if you're taking feedback, but the enemies added by this mod are absolutely brutal. Their ability to self-buff their entire party with stacking defensive buffs (dodge, block, and riposte, all of which not only fail to decay, but seem to stack indefinitely) while applying multiple stacks of debilitating debuffs on your entire party makes them miserable to face. Oftentimes, I wind up with my entire party locked in an endless series of missed swings and one damage attacks while their HP is slowly drained away, which takes forever to actually play out. They just... wipe your group, making them more frustrating than lewd, as most don't even convert your party members, though they do seem to (very rarely) equip an item as an attack (maybe once per encounter, in my experience).
Also, the visors that attach themselves to your party members to convert them don't work on cursed classes at all (such as cows rescued from the labs). They'll simply abduct the party member in question and hold them indefinitely, trying to remove their gear but being unable to do so. As far as I can tell, they never let them go, either, they'll just keep trying and failing until killed; it almost feels like an unintentional softlock. While the cursed gear issues seems consistent with the way the game works otherwise, it's pretty frustrating when you're trying to switch characters into the drone class (or if the conversion aspect is... you know, your kink and the reason you're in the labs to begin with), and it can kind of deflate the tension of a character getting nabbed when their cursed gear just renders them completely immune to the attack.
There's also a similar issue with the drone conversion chairs that you can find as events in the dungeon, with the event simply doing nothing at all if the character in question has slots occupied by other cursed items, rather than replacing the gear with drone gear. It also seems to pick the item it wants to equip randomly, rather than filling whatever equipment slots haven't yet been filled, as I've had characters with 4/6 pieces of drone gear and nothing in their other equipment slots do the event and receive nothing at all. It could probably use some kind of sanity check to see which slots it can equip to before it chooses which piece of gear it's going to equip to the character.
Great mod otherwise, some of my favorite content in the game. Thanks for all your hard work.
Hey, thanks for the feedback and the interest in the mod! I do absolutely love feedback haha
As for the difficulty of the enemies, it's something I feel too. In my game my characters are pretty high-level by now, so I balanced a lot of enemies off of how it felt for ME to play against them, but that of course skewed the difficulty. Also part of the problem is I only have one version of lots of the enemies; I'm planning in the next release to make "easy" and "elite" versions of the enemies for each kind of drone, or something like that, so I can balance the encounters better, while still letting people experience all of the mechanics on any difficulty. Apologies for that, though, it'smy first time making enemies for the game, chalk it up to a learning experience!
As for the buggy mechanics, sigh, I was hoping that they wouldn't be an issue, and things would work how I wanted just by the game's code, but it looks like I need to spend some time reworking how all of those mechanics actually work within the game's code. I'll definitely spend some time on that in the next update, and I'll make sure things are rock-solid.
Hey, I came back to play the mod again now that it's been updated to 2.5, and you did a great job! The encounters are much more manageable now (though me finally getting the hang of the game this time and getting a real party going also helped), and the new Elite drones have cool visuals (I dunno if their equipment can be acquired, but it'd be neat if that were the case).
That all being said, I still think it struggles with cursed items, which... I have to imagine might be a limitation of the game itself. I've still had party members grabbed by the visors and stunlocked indefinitely while they try to strip/equip cursed items that they simply can't.
There's also still a minor issue with enemy targeting, wherein the enemy drones will repeatedly try to strip/assimilate characters who are already drones (even those characters who have become drones during the same fight and who are attacking your party), including the visors, which will, again, lead to the aforementioned issue of them getting stunlocked by being infinitely grappled until freed.
The Drone class itself also seems a little better, though it feels as if it lacks options for different character statlines. This might be something that's addressed by alternate Drone equipment (if such a thing exists), but generally speaking it feels like the Drones themselves (the Null Drones, at least) are lacking a good breadth of skill coverage to make them usable within a party in the way that, say, Cows or Slaves are, though I might also not be looking at them from the right perspective. At the very least, giving them access to a single magic-based attack or some broader support skills would be nice for Clerics and Mages that wind up turned into Drones.
Again, I haven't managed to actually beat many of the higher difficulty Labs, so maybe there's Elite Drone equipment or alternate sets that change their skills, so if that's the case, please disregard.
And uhm, thanks for listening to me! I really appreciate it!
Yeahhh, unfortunately, the thing about trying to strip cursed equipment is just something that I have no good way to deal with... I don't think I even have any way to CHECK if a given piece of equipment is cursed. I'll try noodling around with some more complicated solutions, but it might not be something I can solve, in the long run, unfortunately.
As for the new enemies, I'm glad you like 'em! I don't have any way to give the player drones the new elite set items, at least for now those are enemy-only. I certainly am considering adding other variant weapons for the different drone types, but my first focus is on adding the other drone types before that.
And lastly, for the Drone class itself, I don't think it's my intent to have the class be able to do everything for everyone. They kinda have their own niche that they fill within the party, that mainly being support and control. I don't know if any of the classes in the game can fill more than a couple roles in the party, I'm not aiming to make the drone class OP! That said, I am looking to make each flavor of drone better in different areas than each other. The Hive drones are very good at defense, the Null drones at control, and it's likely the Alien and Harem drones will be good at physical and magic offense, respectively. I'm super exceited to share them with everyone, I've made a lot of good progress on 'em!
And I'm glad the encounters are much better haha. I'll continue to tweak and balance, I just need to playtest more and more. I just wanted to finally get the update out!
I have to say that I am a fan! Ero Dungeon needed more forced conversion content and this mod was put together pretty nicely. I particularly like how you went beyond simply adding new enemies and also worked hard on the programming and hypnosis aspects. The drones are probably some of the more interesting encounters in the game, and I say that as someone who isn't usually a big drone fan. It's a little sad that this game doesn't have much in the way of permanent bad ends and mishaps to reshape the hapless adventurers, but at least mods like this can come close to making up for that.
Please keep up the good work!
