Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mazur]

Having just found LCS three days ago I researched the character creation process to help me optimise the answers to the initial questions and found some answers on the web that did not quite satisfy me.

So I wrote a quick Perl script to help me.  It essentially simply generates all possible characters virtually,  so I could start refining the massive list to find what I would prefer to start with.  Having read the Beginners part of the Wiki and similar advice elsewhere i started out with finding the maximum SUM for heart, intelligence and charisma, which turns out to currently be 27.

Then I chose to maximize the total score for all the base characteristics, which is maximally 49 at the moment.  Then I realised the best option was to have balanced heart, intelligence and charisma at 9 each, so that became a condition¹.  The resulting list I then grep for preferred starting skills, refining to some 8 remaining choices.  I think one is persuasion starting at 4, another was tailoring for easy money making, though I now realise perhaps art might be better for the Founder.  Music is easy, too, but requires a guitar for optimal result, which costs money if you don't 'find' one.  I've since realised minimal Security is rather helpful, too, to at least be allowed to try and pick locks.

Anyway, I thought someone here might be mildly intrigued about it, perrhaps even like to see my script to compare it with their own scrript/knowledge/what have you.  lcs_calc.pl

Mazur.

¹ Actually I now have a maximum difference between any pair of the three as a condition.

[ed boy]

A point of note - it is usually better to have one skill at eight and another at ten than two at nine. Your maximum effective skill is 1.5 multiplied by the base stat (i.e. no juice) rounded down, so making your base stats even numbers is highly recommended.

[KA101]

FWIW skills tend to cap at 20, so having starting stats greater than 10 eventually becomes counterproductive.

[Darvi]

Stats no longer cap at 20, that part of the code is commented out.

[Mazur]

A point of note - it is usually better to have one skill at eight and another at ten than two at nine. Your maximum effective skill is 1.5 multiplied by the base stat (i.e. no juice) rounded down, so making your base stats even numbers is highly recommended.

My problem, as a novice, is that I don't know yet the relative importance of heart, intelligence and charisma.  I know intelligence is the basis for the majority of skills, but from reading around I guess that charisma is the basis for some key skills , used when brainwashing conservatives.  The best attrinute scores are along the lines of:
HRT: 10   INT: 8   WIS: 1   CHA: 9   STR: 5   AGI: 8   HTH: 9   and
HRT: 10   INT: 9   WIS: 1   CHA: 8   STR: 5   AGI: 8   HTH: 9

You can get int to 10 with the basic three close together, but that costs a point in agility. which I'm as yet loathe to do.

I suppose apart from an initial point for Security to avoid needing lessons to start picking locks all skills are trainable in one way or another, so choosing which to start with is purely a matter of taste?  And some teaching is handy, for transferring obtained skills to recruits.

Mazur

[ed boy]

A point of note - it is usually better to have one skill at eight and another at ten than two at nine. Your maximum effective skill is 1.5 multiplied by the base stat (i.e. no juice) rounded down, so making your base stats even numbers is highly recommended.

My problem, as a novice, is that I don't know yet the relative importance of heart, intelligence and charisma.  I know intelligence is the basis for the majority of skills, but from reading around I guess that charisma is the basis for some key skills , used when brainwashing conservatives.  The best attrinute scores are along the lines of:
HRT: 10   INT: 8   WIS: 1   CHA: 9   STR: 5   AGI: 8   HTH: 9   and
HRT: 10   INT: 9   WIS: 1   CHA: 8   STR: 5   AGI: 8   HTH: 9

You can get int to 10 with the basic three close together, but that costs a point in agility. which I'm as yet loathe to do.

I suppose apart from an initial point for Security to avoid needing lessons to start picking locks all skills are trainable in one way or another, so choosing which to start with is purely a matter of taste?

Mazur

It depends on what you want your founder to do. Here's what you use the skills for:
Strength: Axe, club and heavy weapons. A pretty useless skill - if you want a melee weapon, swords uses agility (a much better skill) and heavy weapons are so much harder to get and supply than rifles.
Agility: sword, knife, martial arts, all non-heavy firearms, stealth, dodge. This is an extremely important skill if your leader is doing anything dagnerous. High agility people are by far the most combat effective, due to the combination of so many weapon skills and dodge. The stealth is also extremely good.
Health: No skills. It is how hard your founder is to kill. I find it mostly useless, because if your founder is damaged enough for the difference between 8 and 9 health to be important, they're likely to bleed out or die from conservatives shortly after.
Intelligence: Lots of things. Of note are tailoring (a good money source) first aid, computers, security, and the interrogation skills. I usually try to get very high intelligence.
Wisdom: You don't want this.
Charisma: Only has three skills - disguise, persuasion and seduction. All of them are extremely important. Charisma can render any fighting unnecessary, as a good disguise and high charisma can mean bluffing out of every situation. Persusation varies in its usefulness - high values only come into play if you're trying to recruit conservatives, and there are plenty of good liberal recruits. I don't use seduction, but others use it to great effect.
Heart: Music and Art. A very high heart (15, achievable with 10 base) can allow you to pacify and recruit things like guard dogs. Given how good they are at detecting you, pacifying them is very useful.

Keep in mind that you can recruit other people to fill in for you leader's deficits, but none will have as high base stat total as the founder.

What stats you want to give depends on what role you want your leader to play. I don't like to risk my leader, so I go for high INT and CHA, recruiting others to do the dirty work and tailoring to fund them. If you want your leader to do solo missions the safest bet is to pump CHA for disguise and bluffing, with at least 10 heart. If you want your leader to take part in death squads, then pump agility all the way - your leader's heart doesn't have to be 10 base to be able to pacify dogs, as long as someone else in the squad has sufficiently high heart.

Also, the initial point in security isn't that hard to get - university classes at low skills are effective. You can also have meetings or dates with someone who has points in the skill to get trained in it.

[Mazur]

You get trained on dates?    Not my usual style for dating, but I'm game if they are.   

With meetings you mean recuirment talks?

But the implied question in my previous post was, given scores of 9 and 8 for Intelligence and Charisma, what would experienced people advise:  like you said, CHA is important in confrontations, too, but if Charisma 8 is enough to allow for the relevant skills to be trained to skin-saving point, I'd give the 9 to intelligence, since htere as so many skills linked to.

Also, if Security is not that important to start out with, which skills are best selected to have some starting score in?

As for my style, as a novice and a pacifist I'm starting out learning the game with avoiding violence as much as possible and in Classic mode.

Mazur.

[ed boy]

You get trained on dates?    Not my usual style for dating, but I'm game if they are.   

only a small amount, but you do.

With meetings you mean recuirment talks?

Yep.

But the implied question in my previous post was, given scores of 9 and 8 for Intelligence and Charisma, what would experienced people advise:  like you said, CHA is important in confrontations, too, but if Charisma 8 is enough to allow for the relevant skills to be trained to skin-saving point, I'd give the 9 to intelligence, since htere as so many skills linked to.

Also, if Security is not that important to start out with, which skills are best selected to have some starting score in?

As for my style, as a novice and a pacifist I'm starting out learning the game with avoiding violence as much as possible and in Classic mode.

The starting skills are pretty unimportant. It helps to have your first skill points in things like stealth and security so you can train easier, and it helps to get points in things like religion and business that are hard to train at all, but if a skill you want conflicts with a stat you want, go for the stat.

Given that you'll be going for a pacifist run, then drop agility. You'll want to maximize intelligence (at least 10, I'd recommend at least 12) so you can get maximum profit from tailoring (it's pretty much the best legal fundraising option available) for funding your other members (make sure to keep them in a separate safe house from your founder. That way, even if your entire squad is wiped out, at least the leader will have his/her nose clean and can avoid getting killed in the crossfire. If you do that, the leader will never see an inkling of danger, so every dropping every stat except charisma and intelligence is the efficient way to go.

But I'm an unashamed power gamer, what I say is by no means the one and true way of playing LCS.

[Mazur]

I wrote "avoid violence", but sometimes you have to crack a hard egg to let some light in, you know?   
So I won't be dropping agility, especially since sneaking past an armed conservative after the alarm can be harmful to ones health.

More importantly, beteen the time I created this thread and this post I have been finding errors in my script with respect to  assinging points by creating new characters along the formulas people's reactions inspired me to.  Those are now fixed.

So anyone who dowdloaded the script before now, do so again before you rely on it.

Mazur

[KA101]

Hmm.  I'll need to grind up an extremely overleveled skill then, Darvi.

Without the CCS you're missing a great reason to have and way to train combat skills.  Agility thus seems more like a secondary trait in that situation--you only need so much Stealth, especially if you're wearing Black gear.

Mutants (C/C+ Nuclear and Pollution laws) can also have supremely high stats; in fact, better than the Founder IIRC.  They're an excellent reason to play Nightmare once you get a grasp of the basics.

[Persus13]

Mutants (C/C+ Nuclear and Pollution laws) can also have supremely high stats; in fact, better than the Founder IIRC.  They're an excellent reason to play Nightmare once you get a grasp of the basics.

However they can also have terrible stats. I recently met with a mutant who had 1s in every single stat.

[Darvi]

That's why you meet half a dozen at a time and send anybody back who doesn't have good stats.

Am I discriminatory for saying that?

[Persus13]

That's why you meet half a dozen at a time and send anybody back who doesn't have good stats.

Am I discriminatory for saying that?

No, that's what I do.

[Mazur]

The starting skills are pretty unimportant. It helps to have your first skill points in things like stealth and security so you can train easier, and it helps to get points in things like religion and business that are hard to train at all, but if a skill you want conflicts with a stat you want, go for the stat.

I don't know, I trained business up from 2 to 3.87 by selling T-shirts for I think it was 2 weeks.  And how about the University?  They teach economics...

But I'm an unashamed power gamer, what I say is by no means the one and true way of playing LCS.

Sure, but I'm handicapped with a deeply ingrained abhorrence of violence, so I'll have to grow into it. 

Mazur.

[Cheedows]

I religiously use Seduction, datenap is the way to go people.