itch.io

That did the trick! Thanks! I promise to only use these powers you have given me for good...mostly {proceeds to use powers exclusively for saucy evil}

Ok, I figured out a way to get just enough corruption by the time of the theater scene. The cheerleader route gives a few more opportunities to get a bit more corruption here and there. Then when I got to the theater I said I probably would have preferred the superhero movie (+ 3 corruption) and brushed him away (+ 3 corruption, although it seemed a bit out of character for what I was going for) which seemed to be just enough to get the hand job scene (leaning into him gives a huge minus on corruption, making the hand job scene almost impossible to get if you've avoided Matt).

On my second playthrough. I'm avoiding Matt like the plague (slapped him on the first day), but I'm having trouble finding ways to increase my corruption score enough to give Damian a handy in the theater (I assume that's related to the corruption stat). The one thing Matt was great for was increasing my corruption stat, but he is way too much of an asshole for me to put up with. And it seems to be pretty much impossible to break things off with him if you do anything at all with him in the early game. There are even a few scenes where I have absolutely no input to make my character turn him down, all I can do is to keep yelling "STAHP!" at my screen.

I did try to cheat by increasing my corruption stat manually by seeing if I could edit my save file (opened the save file in WinRAR, and opened the log file in Notepad++), but it looks like the corruption value is set by adding up several variables* that I may or may not be able to access through the save file (I didn't scan ALL 22,044 lines), but it looks like there are lots of characters in the file that Notepad++ doesn't recognize so unsurprisingly any changes I make and try to package into a new save file end up resulting in a corrupted save file anyway. Alas I am relatively new to the elegant art of bashing my games open with a sledgehammer and clawing through their innards like a hungry vulture. TLDR: Cheating didn't work either.

*It looks like the way you are doing it is by adding each event which either increases or decreases corruption to a data structure (linked list?) and then tallying up all of their values to pass to a corruption variable. Is that about right?

My GPU is: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT

A country wide population adjustment sounds acceptable to me. It won't be fully realistic, but it ought to get good enough results for large scale attacks even if things are off in individual cities. 

My suggestion would that the first release of a population adjustment feature be the simplest possible version of such a feature (every pixel of population (do you have a name for your most discreet units of population?) gets a simple increase or decrease that is directly proportional to the country wide increase or decrease). But write it so it is easy to change later. Then, if you come across information on any historical trends for how rapidly denser population centers tend to grow vs sparser population centers then you can rework the feature so that the proportion of the population change that is reflected in each square of population is directly related to how populated that square already is (it is probably on some sort of S curve, with denser population centers increasing more rapidly than sparser ones up to a point and then leveling off). This still won't be 100% accurate, but ought to significantly reduce the error for individual towns and cities, and further increase the accuracy of large scale attacks.

Edit: Alternatively, is the resource that HerrTom provided compatible with whatever you used to generate the population map in the first place? How did you create that anyway? I assume it had to be automated in some way (feed the right data into the right program). I simply cannot imagine any human having the patience or lifespan to manually input the correct number for every discreet unit of population that you had. And mad props to you or whoever on your team worked on it if it really was done manually (actually, props no matter how they did it, that is an outstanding population map).

So first of all, bugs. For the most part things work fine. The game starts, missiles fly, civilization as we know it ends. The one issue I had was that casualty calculation doesn't work for me in the main exe, which is a tad unfortunate since the main exe is the most stable for me. The problem is solved if I use the OpenGl.bat, but opening the game that way seems to have some stability issues, in particular the game tends to crash if I run it in real time (I enjoy running it in real time rather than with any time compression since I can pretend I am experiencing an actual nuclear war and get a sense for how long that feels). I am running Windows 10 with DirectX 12.

On to suggestions. I don't want to suggest too much in terms of features, having learned a bit about game development and in particular the dangers of feature creep. But the thing that seems most urgent to me (after bug fixes and stability improvement) would be the addition of a Cold War scenario. I've seen what happens to the world in a modern nuclear war now, but what about back when nuclear stockpiles were at their height? This would mean a new map, with redrawn borders (divide East and West Germany, unite the Soviet Union) and population densities set to sometime in the Cold War (I'm thinking perhaps around 1985 when Soviet stockpiles peaked? Or 1965 when American stockpiles peaked? (according to Wikipedia, which may be a bit course, going in five year increments)), and of course everyone would have their 1985/65/?? nuclear arsenals. Does this sound feasible? I can understand if it isn't, since re-adjusting population levels to several decades earlier would probably be a lot of work.