Hello, Candidates! Today's release day for the Supporter versions 0.3.21 and v0.3.20 of their respective Patreon tiers, and v0.3.20 Free, here on itch.io. On this post, we will be talking about further defining the kind of relationships that are formed between characters, as well as two recent changes in this regard. Let's start by identifying a few issues that were clear some while ago:

- The relative ease to form a peaceful environment between all Candidates if you know what you're doing since day 1. While this should remain a valid goal, it shouldn't be a state the player should be able to mark in stone since the early game.
- The lack of possibilities regarding exclusivity with romantic interests. While some players are happy to build a chaotic polyamorous little temple with everyone going in and out of personal rooms, other players want to establish clear exclusive romantic/sexual relationships, which is difficult and counter-intuitive to achieve with the current mechanics.
- Lack of transparency regarding the intentions of other characters during generic conversations. I want some obscurity to exist in this area, as finding out that someone had less than friendly intentions when they suddenly backstab you isn't an inherently negative experience if properly framed, but people who hadn't been closely following the development of the AI could remain frustrated as the game itself didn't give you as much of a hint in this area.
- Lack of long term goals for players to achieve: simply raising another character's romance/submissiveness/sexual tension towards you from 3 to 20 may not be all that appealing for extrinsically motivated players.
- The difficulty of doing certain acts becomes trivial after a few in-game weeks without tweaking some functions.

Thus, let's discuss the solutions introduced in the last few versions.

Version 0.3.19 introduced intimate relationships, which is pretty much a direct upgrade from companionship, and is the first special relationship to make use of a new mechanic: intimacy. Intimacy is a special value linked to special relationships that indicates exclusivity: having high intimacy with another character will make passing certain checks easier for you, but will also make it harder for other characters who do not also have high intimacy with them. Through this mechanic, it will be possible to create a ranking of special relationships that range from "exclusive lovers till death do us part" to "sure, we like each other" with plenty of intermediate steps such as "definitely girlfriends, but it's an open relationship".

And this goes hand in hand with the new graduated special relationships! What if you want to make sure you have a strong friendship with Ate, but only want to be romantically involved with Padmiri? Then you'd aim for an higher tier, positive, egalitarian special relationship that raises intimacy with Padmiri, such as "lovers", but a different one of the same tier that wouldn't raise intimacy, such as "allies" with Ate. Note that these are plans for future types of special relationships to illustrate the direction where this mechanic is headed to, not currently implemented special relationships.

Higher tier relationships are considerably more difficult to achieve.

On a different direction, "rivalry" was introduced in version 0.3.20 as the first tier antagonistic special relationship. Why would you want to initiate antagonistic relationships, however? Rivalry relationships make you receive less infamy for attacking your chosen target, and on top of that, you get extra merit for defeating them. The purpose here is to open avenues that incentivize conflict, both in the short term due to the mentioned advantages, and long term by solidifying hostility between certain characters the same way it may currently happen with romance and sexual tension.

NPCs will evaluate the possibility of declaring rivals at the start of each day.

Naturally, NPCs take a lot of variables into consideration when deciding how to make use of these options. Take a look at the changelogs for versions 0.3.19 and 0.3.20 if you want to learn in deeper detail about it.

And speaking of the obscure machinations of NPCs, version 0.3.20 also introduced a minor mechanic to actually bring some light into this issue. NPCs normally have some goal when they initiate conversations (be it flirting, raising friendships, having sex, etc.), which some perceptive players might have noticed if they paid attention to the whole chain of actions used by NPCs, but this wasn't something the game ever directly communicated to you, which leads to the point at the top of the post regarding confused players. From now on, each turn you spend in conversation with a character will bring you a bit closer to fully understanding their current goals. This mechanic is influenced by different factors such as your empathy and perception, and the target character's charisma. The information you get will be split into three tiers, but be careful: the first tier is fairly liable to give you wrong information, such as telling you that someone might want to flirt with you when they're actually aiming to dominate you.

Sillan is surely too innocent to come up with such convoluted plans, however.