I forgot the most important change -- there is now a soft cap on the number of recruits you can have. Each Liberal can now manage a specific number of people, determined by their juice. The founder gets an additional 6 recruitment slots. You CAN still have an unlimited number of recruits, but now you'll need a deep and branching organization with lots of highly experienced lieutenants to manage the lower level people.
Characters recruited by seduction use up relationship slots instead of recruit slots, of which you get 1 for every 2 levels of seduction skill, plus one free. Only sexy people are allowed to be polyamorous. Love slaves effectively have 1 fewer of these slots, since relationships are two-way; their recruiter uses up the first slot.
Characters recruited through interrogation do not take up any room in the organization. You may recruit as many as you like of them.
Sleepers take up slots just like regular recruits. If you need to, you can turn convert sleepers into regular recruits at any time from the sleeper menu. People in prison also take up room. Dead people, however, do not; so you can free space by sending people on suicide missions. Just be aware that police sometimes take critically injured Liberals into custody rather than killing them.
Also very important is inheritance -- the LCS will disband if the founder is killed, but only if nobody is able to step up and take control. To be qualified to lead the LCS, someone directly under the founder in the organization needs to have at least 100 juice. Make sure you have someone like that, and you can be assured of a succession plan if the worst happens.
And when you're looting apartments, TVs don't just spawn in the hallway any more. You have to actually break into apartments.
And people inside apartments are very likely to be alarmed. You can't just wear decent clothes and pretend to be a houseguest while burgling homes. You *may* get away with wearing a police uniform and bluffing your way through, but you'll need a great disguise skill, since you're still rolling at a big penalty. The encounter rate is quite low in apartments though, and there's a new skill, stealth, that can help you avoid detection entirely and evade hostile encounters without getting shot at. Stealth works best when wearing clothes with "black" in the name, or the ninja suit; fancier stealth clothing (like the ninja suit, or the black catsuit) boost your effective skill. A thief founder will start out with a black turtleneck instead of normal clothes to help with this. Stealth works best for solo missions and is very inconsistent when you have a full party. Everyone knows a ninja's power is inversely proportional to the number of friendly ninjas in the area.
Skills are now much more important than stats in determining the outcome of your actions, but skills are capped by the stats they're linked to. So you can't level persuasion higher than your charisma score, for example. Stats increase as Liberals gain juice, but they no longer level up evenly; a character that starts with 1 intelligence may only reach 7 or so at max juice, while a character with 10 intelligence will cap out at 20 intelligence.
If you engage during a siege BEFORE they force the issue and actually assault the compound, you'll meet a large group of heavily armed enemies in one big encounter and they'll have first strike if you try to run for it. They probably have automatic weapons, which fire multiple shots per round in this version. Needless to say, this is not a favorable encounter. You can avoid this by extending the siege and luring them into attacking you inside the safehouse.
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Topic: upgrading my LCS, any heads-up advice? (Read 1613 times)