All right, going to solicit suggestions at this point. This is a big enough update that any thoughts/discussion on new features or updates on existing features are welcome.
Here's the general to-do list:
1. VIEW_UNITEDNATIONS and LAW_UNITEDNATIONS
Description: New law and view. Liberals support U.S. involvement in foreign military campaigns if and only if it is done with United Nations approval. If this law is liberal, then the U.S. will be using its military to support U.N. peacekeeping actions; if conservative, the U.S. will disdain the U.N.
Status: done
2. SIEGE_MURDERERS, SIEGE_INTERNATIONAL_CONSERVATIVE, and SIEGE_INTERNATIONAL_STALINIST
Description: Three new factions that can besiege you.
->2a. SIEGE_MURDERERS: consists of otherwise ordinary people who want to murder the LCS. There will be an offended_murderers counter that augments every time you do something that incites a murder. This includes having an affair with somebody's spouse, killing a friend or family member in a site action, having too much money, etc. The more heat reduction your safehouse has, the better-protected you will be, and the more conservative LAW_DEATHPENALTY is, there will be additional protection from them. These murderers will be generally poorly-armed, but there will be occasional well-skilled and prepared enemies in their siege.
-> SIEGE_INTERNATIONAL_CONSERVATIVE: international terrorists of an arch-conservative stripe (i.e. not bred on U.S. soil, not the CCS). If the president of the U.S. is himself C+, these guys will not bother to attack you. If the president is of either the Liberal or Stalinist parties, the military will fight them for you. The more conservative LAW_MILITARY and the more liberal LAW_UNITEDNATIONS are, the better the military will be at fighting these terrorists. If either LAW_MILITARY is C+ or LAW_UNITEDNATIONS is L+, these enemies will generally not be a threat. They also will tend not to notice you if you have heat reduction.
-> SIEGE_INTERNATIONAL_STALINIST: similar to the above, but of a Stalinist stripe. If the president of the U.S. is himself S, these guys will not attack you, and presidents of both the Liberal and Conservative parties will fight them using the military, as above.
Status: not yet implemented.
3. Player-created factions
Description: Players will now be able to define their own factions and add them to the game using a tab-delimited text file, much as they already can with lobbies. These factions will be affected by conditions in the game, and will ultimately be able to besiege the LCS. They can also fight with each-other.
Status: the way that factions are influenced by the world is implemented, but not how factions interact with each-other nor how they are added into the game in the first place.
4. Miscellaneous tweaks
-Re-vamp sexual treason mechanics (either intelligence 10 or health 10 qualifies you, but not both 9 and 9 as it is currently). Not yet implemented.
Discussion points
1. Nerfing violence - there has been a lot of talk about reducing the effectiveness of violence in the game. Although I agree that it would be a good thing to include, there is a problem with it: at present, the LCS cannot defeat the conservatives by pure military force. Instead, the LCS has to liberalize public opinion, swing elections, and then let the newly-elected liberal politicians enact liberal legislation. It seems to me that if we were to severely reduce the ability of the LCS to affect public opinion via violence, then there should need to be some alternative way to overthrow the U.S. government by violence alone. Although this sounds good in principle, I am less sure how to implement it. Suggestions are welcome.
2. Sewing dissent among the conservatives - again, I don't know how to implement this gameplay-wise. The idea is to turn the conservative media establishment against other conservatives. The thought that occurs to me is that perhaps there should be another set of media establishments that are determined by public opinion rather than by doctrinaire politics. Movies already sort of work like this: although there is a conservative influence on all movies and movies also are inspired by different events, movies are also impacted by public opinion. The trouble is that the conservative media, currently cable news and AM radio, need to be there.
3. More founder-creation options - the idea here is to have a founder that has been in the military, and may have been exposed to super-science that gave him or her (limited) super-powers (that can then be trained up). I'd like an entire storyline, like there are for the other five archetypes (master thief, violent gangster, brilliant student, gifted survivor, charismatic leader). I'm not sure what all of the options should be, though.
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Topic: Terra Vitae Fork (version 2.0 released!) (Read 339548 times)