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[KA101]

How would one get security 20?  My founder caps out around 13, and the 12->13 comes from cracking safes.  Doors seem to cap out at 11 or so.

I'd agree that stealth/disguise might be straightforward to train once one has 6-7 or so, but Programmers generally don't start with that much.  The difficult part is crossing the skills: getting the programmer to sneak or the sneaker to hack.

As for getting out alive, that might actually come down to Driving.  If I understand bluffing correctly, it's one Disguise check v. one Conservative, so it might actually be easier (albeit more tedious and stressful) to bluff rather than disguise/stealth.  Then the tricky part is escaping the car chase in one Bug v. Agent cars.  Call for 10-12 Driving in that first month--unlikely at best.

Would certainly be an interesting project, though.

[EuchreJack]

-Recruit a good programmer from the net cafe (8+ is ideal and not hard to achieve if you spread the net wide enough), have him grind via hacking or credit  card fraud

Actually, I'd suggest having the programmer grind stealth or disguise if their starting computers skill is 8 or greater.  Both members of the squad need enough stealth/disguise to get to the computer.  Note that you'll probably have to infiltrate the Intelligence HQ and attempt to hack the computer multiple times before you're successful.  Thus, greater stealth/disguise will ensure both members can safely leave after a failed attempt.

[Snowblind]

Idk, I think the game should represent something like a real insurgency. Dragging up dirt on an insurgency movement, like the CSS might hurt them or their popularity, but it would not kill them, anymore then having some hippies in the LCS arrested and telling everything.

I think it should keep them quiet for a little while, 1 year sounds good, the first time it is done, that's it. Additional revelations should have diminished returns.

[EuchreJack]

Idk, I think the game should represent something like a real insurgency. Dragging up dirt on an insurgency movement, like the CSS might hurt them or their popularity, but it would not kill them, anymore then having some hippies in the LCS arrested and telling everything.

I think it should keep them quiet for a little while, 1 year sounds good, the first time it is done, that's it. Additional revelations should have diminished returns.

Actually, the LCS is the insurgency, while the CCS is government-sponsored counter-insurgency.  So once the CCS is exposed as a CIA plot, they're dismantled to avoid further loss of face.

[Snowblind]

Idk, I think the game should represent something like a real insurgency. Dragging up dirt on an insurgency movement, like the CSS might hurt them or their popularity, but it would not kill them, anymore then having some hippies in the LCS arrested and telling everything.

I think it should keep them quiet for a little while, 1 year sounds good, the first time it is done, that's it. Additional revelations should have diminished returns.

Actually, the LCS is the insurgency, while the CCS is government-sponsored counter-insurgency.  So once the CCS is exposed as a CIA plot, they're dismantled to avoid further loss of face.

Yeah, but it all depends on popular support for such actions. The yokels, rubes and rednecks that supported the CCS would really care less if the organization was a CIA plot. It might even grant their popular movement legitimacy, being such a bad-ass american thing as it is. Revealing the CCS as a CIA action would shock and offend many folks, but not enough to kill the core of the movement.

Also, the CIA is adept at turning failures into victories, they'd blame the CCS thing on some 'rouge agents' imprison a few as scape-goats and then just wait till it faded from memory to do the same thing over again.

[Soadreqm]

Yeah, but it all depends on popular support for such actions. The yokels, rubes and rednecks that supported the CCS would really care less if the organization was a CIA plot. It might even grant their popular movement legitimacy, being such a bad-ass american thing as it is. Revealing the CCS as a CIA action would shock and offend many folks, but not enough to kill the core of the movement.

Also, the CIA is adept at turning failures into victories, they'd blame the CCS thing on some 'rouge agents' imprison a few as scape-goats and then just wait till it faded from memory to do the same thing over again.

What kills the core of the movement is an FBI raid to all three CCS safehouses a few months after you blow the lid on the operation. They certainly don't just voluntarily give up after losing popular support, if that's what you were thinking. And CIA itself is more or less unaffected, of course.

[Neonivek]

It would force a corruption investigation within the CIA... again...

[Aquillion]

I don't think it's possible to make it harder for a pacifist run without turning it into a grind (which is undesirable.)  I definitely don't see what's fun about dividing it up into multiple pieces, since that just amounts to doing the same thing over and over to a boring degree -- with almost guaranteed success, since if you could hack the supercomputer you can easily get into anyplace else.

Instead, I suggest making it harder for non-pacifist runs.  The more violence the LCS has engaged in over the course of the game, the longer it takes for the CCS to be disbanded (because the CIA can better-justify extreme measures if they were up against a violent insurgency); beyond a certain point, the backers list no longer disbands them entirely and just weakens them, because the CIA argues that it needs something like that to save the country etc etc.

I don't feel that pacifist games need to be balanced against non-pacifist games; they're just different ways of playing.  As long as you can't go for the list in a non-pacifist game, it's not going to be directly comparable to the violent solution, and part of the challenge of the list then becomes the fact that you have to play a pacifist game the entire time in order for it to work.

[KA101]

Recall that violence within a CCS safehouse is not public knowledge because the CCS knows that it isn't legal (despite the Government/CIA backing).  The initial publication blurb notes that they're basically intended as an extrajudicial hit squad and political Designated Enemy--basically, they're the evidence that "[Jerks]", as my Nightmare Mode game called 9/11, just might be a Government plot in LCS-world. 

Even under C+ Police Regulation and Death Penalty (where the Death Squads are), the CCS is beyond the pale.  I don't think there's any way to publicly justify the Government or the CIA having both the justice system and the Conservative Crime Squad.

IMO the primary downside to the Backer List CCS-kill is that it doesn't leave the CCS safehouse(s) available (they disappear or never exist), nor does the LCS get the 200 Juice bonus for killing the last safehouse.  If you plan on using a lot of Sleepers, bumping them all to Urban Commando (and thus, being able to recruit additional sleepers) can be pretty powerful.

So far as I can tell the optimized solution is to get the list early, publish it, kill the first two safehouses, and milk the last one for Juice and combat XP.  Once the first paper comes out (arresting C+ legislators and moving Police Regulation to L, both of which are very nice benefits early in a Nightmare game), you've got 4-6 months to kill the last safehouse, but you do want to kill it yourself.

If the FBI raid actually did go to all three CCS safehouses, well, they'd have caught my seduction squad at one and my hackers at another, each reasonably well-armed & armored and with non-attached LCS members present too.  The CCS was holed up at the third.  Making the raid actually hit LCS-occupied safehouses would be one possible way to make it less advantageous for a violent LCS.  Whether sleepers anywhere could provide notice is a separate question, but I'd hope that someone (possibly military or CIA sleeper) could issue a raid warning.