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[Eagleon]

Had an idea to give different games more flavor. I dunno if something similar has been suggested before or not. What if we could pick issues to specialize in?

Most real-life propaganda/terrorist organizations have some particular set of ideals they want to see adopted by the world at large as soon as possible. Specializing in issue(s) would make moderates less inclined to take the LCS seriously if they conflicted with their own interests - an engineer might be less likely to join if nuclear power is a big issue. In return, actions relating to that issue would get more attention resulting in a faster change, and of course, easier recruiting amongst people that are interested in the same things. Specializing in many issues at once would make it become less meaningful, and the effects on gameplay would be much less pronounced.

Taking it further, you could have recruits that are particularly passionate about one or two issues (call them Zealots when their juice is high enough), and they would have some benefits against conservatives that go against their views - interrogations would go easier, wisdom attacks would be less potent, etc.

What do you guys think?

[Yanlin]

That'll get kind of silly. I vote yes.

[E. Albright]

It's been discussed before. The (simplistic) way I argued for it in the past as to allow the LCS to apply "weights" to each issue, and general, unfocused influence would be distributed accordingly. E.g., there's to be a shift of +1 to 14 issues, but instead, half are weighted 0, and half are weighted 2, so the former don't change and the latter get +2.

If anything like this (crude, over-simplified system) were to go in, I'd cap the potential gains from focus at 100%; i.e., in the above example you couldn't set 13 issues at 0 and the last one at 14 to get it to shift +14 for every +1 of general influence; in that case you'd just get +2 and the rest would be wasted. This actually feels right; one-issue zealots tend to feel far more strongly about their pet issue than random passers-by could ever hope to . In fact, it might be good to generalize this notion of diminishing returns, in that any issue weighted above the average would have their extra gains e.g. halved in addition to the +100% cap.

E.g., I really want to see Guard Dogs get the vote, so I'm all about Animal Rights. I set AR to 4 and everything else to 1. All other issues shift 0.82, and AR shifts (0.82 * 4 / 2) = 1.64. If I want to shift it all the way to 2, I need to weight it to, say, 5.5. In that case, AR would go up 2 and everything else would go up 0.75. If I don't care about those Guard Dogs' right to unionize, bark as they please, and marry other Guard Dogs of the same sex, I could set Labor, Free Speech, and Homosexual Rights to 0, and get +2 to AR and +1 to all others with an AR weighting of 4.

I don't have time to code dive to see how compatible the above mess is with current issue tracking, so ignore it if it's totally out of line.