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Liberal Crime Squad: New Age

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Jonathan S. Fox:
I ported Liberal Crime Squad to make a web version named Liberal Crime Squad: New Age.

New Age serves as both a web port intended to work properly on any platform without any fussing with the terminal settings, and as a fork where I can do zany things with the game. Maybe someday it will become a total conversion where you play as a supervillain on the moon. For now, it's mostly just a port.

Because there is no touch UI and the game will not cause your virtual keyboard to appear, it is only playable on a mobile device if you have a physical keyboard. I would consider iOS and Android unsupported for this reason. However, if you do have a physical keyboard for your iOS/Android device, it should work.

Some of the biggest differences:

* The game starts in the year 2023. The founder was born in 2004.
* There are new character creation questions, they do different things, and you get feedback in-game about what the questions do and how your character is shaping up as you create them.
* Almost all melee skills are now part of Martial Arts. Almost all gun skills are now merged together into Firearms.
* You check the polls on the Liberal Agenda screen instead of as an activity.
* You can independently study any skill as a free alternative to taking classes in the activities menu.
* The homeless shelter has been replaced by a homeless camp. It has unique mechanics that make it a bad safehouse. You should find a proper safehouse.
* Killing anyone in a site action alienates everyone and causes the news to report your action as a rampage. However, rampages are less harmful than they are in the base game: they still affect public opinion positively on the issues, and only cause the public to dislike the LCS itself. Over the long term, a lack of public support will make all of your actions less effective.
* Conservatives you encounter who intend to run away are be treated differently than Conservatives who want to fight you. If you would attack but there are only fleeing enemies left, you will automatically use the intimidate action and run them off instead of attacking.
* Prostitution no longer reduces juice. Sex workers have unique mechanics when you're dating them.
* Significantly more emphasis on Heart and Wisdom. The Health stat has been folded into Heart, which can now increase maximum hit points. Seduction is now a Heart skill.
* You can manage multiple save games. You can export and import save games. So far I have never broken save compatibility between versions, even when the save format has changed.
* Just about everything is rebalanced. The game rolls d20s instead of dice pools for skill checks now.
* More bugs and different bugs.
Play link:
https://www.jonathansfox.com/lcs-new-age/

Source code:
https://github.com/jonathansfox/lcs-new-age

These days, I'm generally more active on the LCS discord server that IssacG created than on the Bay 12 Games forums:
https://discord.gg/HYbss8eswM

EuchreJack:
Awesome!

Duuvian:
Ahh, the homeless shelter camp is no longer unpoliced for skill training. Or was that just a Nightmare mode thing in older versions? Either way the first newspaper article goes off about LCS if the squad beats someone up there now, which is a good change or else the founder (or any other members) could quickly become a megabeast doing that for free.

EDIT: Oh wait, no that was the abandoned crackhouse, not the homeless shelter. I forgot to check that location out in this version, having confused the old skill training spot. EDIT2: An assault in the Drug House location does not result in a newspaper article, but does result in becoming Wanted for Assault charges.

A toggle for key repeats being interrupted when encountering people or other reasons to stop would be cool. That's because it would be great to have one when trying to run into a specific person like a low chance of encounter occupation or leaning, but it's also nice to not have when sneaking through the hallway towards the exit after an alert is raised.

Duuvian:
I have what's probably a silly question. How do you export the save? I found the import option.

I had a decent nightmare start going that I had to close without saving after failing to find the save export option. I had the full 7 supermutant recruits for the founder and everything, and they all recruited another supermutant for themselves before I sent these pairs off to other cities in legit pickup trucks, which in hindsight was a massive and unnecessary expense to equip 6 teams with their own instead of just having a driver in a sportscar drop them off. I did manage to have the founder chilling in a condo and most people wearing homemade expensive suits made by the time I closed it out. The other teams were in legit housing projects and apartments. I probably rushed that too fast, they can probably all sit in the same housing projects for longer, but I wanted to split them up quickly due to playing in Nightmare Mode. The worst crime committed: VANDALISM

A question: is DC supposed to have no rentals available? I found the only location was the homeless encampment there. It was Nightmare mode if that matters. Also the CCS bunker was visible right at game start, but maybe they do tours in Nightmare mode or something.

Jonathan S. Fox:

--- Quote ---I have what's probably a silly question. How do you export the save? I found the import option.

I had a decent nightmare start going that I had to close without saving after failing to find the save export option. I had the full 7 supermutant recruits for the founder and everything, and they all recruited another supermutant for themselves before I sent these pairs off to other cities in legit pickup trucks, which in hindsight was a massive and unnecessary expense to equip 6 teams with their own instead of just having a driver in a sportscar drop them off. I did manage to have the founder chilling in a condo and most people wearing homemade expensive suits made by the time I closed it out. The other teams were in legit housing projects and apartments. I probably rushed that too fast, they can probably all sit in the same housing projects for longer, but I wanted to split them up quickly due to playing in Nightmare Mode. The worst crime committed: VANDALISM
--- End quote ---

Sounds promising! I should clarify that the game still autosaves just like the downloaded versions. So you should be prompted to load that game if you go back to play again, unless you originally played on a different computer, or were in incognito mode, or cleared all your cached data, or have some other kind of elevated security that stopped the game from persisting data between sessions. If those situations are likely, that's where you can use the export feature to make sure you don't lose your saves.

Exporting is done through the save management page that is shown after the main menu. To export a backup save of a game in progress, refresh the page to go back to the main menu, and then you'll get a list of saved games. Select the one you want to export and you will get three options: One to load the game, one to export the save, one to delete the save. Your save will be from the start of the current day.

I'm planning to add the "X - Live to fight evil" option back to the game soon, which will manually save and drop back to the main menu without a refresh.


--- Quote ---A toggle for key repeats being interrupted when encountering people or other reasons to stop would be cool. That's because it would be great to have one when trying to run into a specific person like a low chance of encounter occupation or leaning, but it's also nice to not have when sneaking through the hallway towards the exit after an alert is raised.

--- End quote ---

I'll have to think about this; it's a little complicated to implement and there are other ways to handle searching for encounter than holding direction keys (if you tap "s" with no encounter present, an encounter will immediately occur).

I think the moving toward the exit thing during an alert shouldn't be an issue if you encounter anyone dangerous on the way, since it does interrupt you in that case. For example, if you cross a police officer during an alert it won't just let you press the arrow key to break contact, it'll force you to press "v" to evade first, since it's dangerous to run from that encounter. If you are able to hold a directional button down and you get attacked then that's definitely a bug. However, it's not a bug if you pass an unarmed Conservative secretary that just runs away as you pass; New Age tries to not force you to "evade" Conservatives that are trying to evade you. If this logic misfires and causes you to accidentally run past enemies that attack you, this is a bug.

But like, I don't want to use that particular kind of interrupt logic for non-dangerous encounters, because it's unnecessary friction if you can't just ignore harmless encounters but have to evade them. It would need to be new functionality where it ignores subsequent keystrokes until you release the key (which is what you're asking about).

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