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[Liberal Elitist]

Well, I haven't implemented the Stalinist Comrade Squad ITSELF yet but implementing Stalinist elected politics is complete, since revision 816 on July 31, 2014. If you play in Stalinist mode there are 2 dimensions of political viewpoints, the left-right dimension from Elite Liberal to Arch-Conservative, and the authoritarian-libertarian dimension from Stalinist to Libertarian. Stalinists can get elected to any office as well as appointed to the Supreme Court, and will try to repeal the Constitution once they have enough members of Congress. So if you have questions about how that is implemented just try out a recent SVN revision since then (preferably as recent as possible). It's fairly straightforward.

As for the Stalinist Comrade Squad itself, I haven't even started on it. Right now if you play the game in Stalinist Mode it gradually moves all issues in a Stalinist direction... every month a different third of issues get moved 1% in a Stalinist direction, making all issues get moved 1% every 3 months. So every year the issues all get moved 4%. That might not seem like much but it adds up over time. It's a fairly low number so that the game is still playable without Stalinists taking over quickly and so you can still beat them. That is just temporary code until the Stalinist Comrade Squad itself is implemented.

Also, I started implementing this before this thread was started... or rather, before I had noticed this thread's existence, since I hadn't been checking the forums in awhile. At least I think I did... it's hard to remember the exact timeline.

Anyway once the Stalinist Comrade Squad itself is implemented that temporary code to move public opinion by very small amounts in a Stalinist direction every single month will be removed, and instead public opinion won't move at all in a Stalinist direction until the Stalinist Comrade Squad is activated, and then it will do all of the moving of public opinion. I have thought about various backstories for the Stalinist Comrade Squad. My favorite one is as follows: the Stalinist Comrade Squad was assembled in the 1930s by Soviet leader Josef Stalin out of his most elite fighters who were most loyal to him, and various experiments were done to artificially enhance their fighting abilities, along with advanced brainwashing to ensure their eternal loyalty to Stalin. They carried out many dangerous missions including the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. Eventually in the late 1940s, Josef Stalin grew paranoid and thought they might overthrow his country, so he sent them to Siberia and personally supervised having them frozen in the arctic tundra, but he wanted it done carefully so he could have them unfrozen again if he ever needed them, and they were buried alive deep within the permafrost after being flash-frozen. Many decades later after the fall of the Soviet Union, a former KGB agent turned Russian President named Vladimir Putin has all of the old Soviet intelligence and military archives searched to see if there are any secret programs that might be useful to Russia, and the Russian intelligence services uncover this top-secret program. At this time, Russia is involved in many foreign policy disputes with the United States, which is its greatest global strategic adversary, so Putin orders that cryogenic experts defrost the Stalinist Comrade Squad and bring all its members back to life using state-of-the-art Russian cryogenic technologies. About a third of them survive being defrosted, and none of them have aged a day since they were frozen in the late 1940s, and after Putin informs them about the current state of affairs in the world and convinces them of his own loyalty to Stalin's legacy, they agree to work for him on the condition that they get to promote Stalinism. So they are sent to the United States to destabilize the government here and promote Stalinism, and thus weaken Russia's most powerful adversary. They receive large amounts of arms and funding from the Russian government, and start actively recruiting new members, to replace the ones who didn't survive the cryogenic process. They also use brainwashing, drugs, and genetic engineering to turn the new recruits into loyal Stalinists that have almost superhuman fighting abilities. Also, they have 3 leaders: a clone of Josef Stalin, a clone of Vyacheslav Molotov, and a clone of Lavrentiy Beria, with the Molotov and Beria clones loyally serving as lieutenants to the Stalin clone.

Well that is the backstory. And the story continues from there... either the Stalinist Comrade Squad succeeds in taking over the United States and making it into a Stalinist nation that annexes Canada, or they are defeated by the forces of Liberalism or possibly even Conservatism. To defeat them you have to defeat them in armed combat at 3 of their bases... at the first base, you have to take out the weakest of the 3 bosses, the Vyacheslav Molotov clone, who will also have some Nazis guarding him in honor of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with everyone armed with souped-up Molotov cocktails in honor of Mr. Molotov himself. Then at their second base, you have to defeat the cunning and stealthy Lavrentiy Beria clone, guarded by a bunch of ninjas from Japan who had been captured as prisoners of war during World War II and reeducated under him. At the third and final base, you'll have to defeat the superhuman upgraded half-robot Josef Stalin, guarded by a bunch of half-robot, half-genetically-enhanced-human cyborgs, that have powerful weapons built right into their bodies.

In addition, because cloning can be done more than once, if the Stalinist Comrade Squad retakes a former base of theirs, they will have a new clone to replace the old one, at least with Molotov and Beria. But once you kill the Stalin clone, you'll immediately face the more powerful ORIGINAL Josef Stalin as a 2nd boss in a row, in a shocking twist, who had himself secretly cryogenically frozen in 1953 and barely survived being defrosted and needed the cybernetic enhancements to survive, kinda like Darth Vader, well once you also kill the original Stalin who actually wasn't a clone, the Stalinist Comrade Squad will be completely done for. Also, as an added bonus, all Stalinist politicians in elected office will regain their sanity and no longer be brainwashed, and resign immediately to be replaced with new officials (elected for the executive and legislative branches, and appointed for the judicial branch), and the Stalinist Party will no longer exist, because Stalinism is kinda like a zombie epidemic and the original Josef Stalin is like the Patient Zero of the Stalinism epidemic.

These are just some thoughts about what might be cool and awesome to implement, I'm not sure if I'll actually implement them this way, it is maybe a little too farfetched, I'm not sure. And maybe some of it needs to be thought through a little more. I also want to find a way to work in space aliens but that would be totally unrelated to Stalinism, the space aliens would be found near a UFO Crash Site which would be a new location. The aliens would be liberal and there would be all sorts of military troops, eminent scientists, intelligence agents, and secret service guarding them and holding them prisoner to experiment on them, it would be one of the places where you Liberate Oppressed, just like liberating prisoners or garment workers, and the aliens would be "Wanted for Experimentation" and if they ever got arrested you'd lose them forever. Aliens would be extremely easy to recruit because on their planet everything is done the same way as the way Elite Liberals want to do things, and because you are fighting against the same folks who captured and were experimenting on them and they want revenge. In the multi-city mode the UFO crash site would be near Los Angeles, like in the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space by Ed Wood.

Maybe not all of this will be implemented, maybe it will, I wonder what people think of these ideas, this is brainstorming for the Stalinist Comrade Squad itself now that the elected politics side of Stalinism is done. I am still open to changes in anything I said in this post regarding stuff not implemented yet, it's just brainstorming for now, I'm trying to be somewhat creative but also add in various common tropes that you see in other video games (for example there is a half-robotic cyborg Adolf Hitler you fight as the final boss in Wolfenstein 3D, a lot of these ideas here are derivative but deliberately so). UFO crash sites with either live aliens or alien corpses, I've seen in multiple games. Nazis, ninjas, cyborgs, those are in lots of games... my thinking on Nazis is from the Wolfenstein 3D games, ninjas appear in many Japanese games I've played such as the Final Fantasy series among others, and Nod/CABAL cyborgs are from Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and its Firestorm expansion, so mostly my inspiration for this post is other video games. The cyborg is also a bit influenced by the Protoss unit Dragoon from the original StarCraft and the story of Fenix who was gravely wounded as a Templar but came back stronger as a half-robotic Dragoon cyborg, as well as Wolfenstein 3D like I mentioned. Also I have ideas about Stalin and Stalinism from the Command & Conquer: Red Alert series, especially the first Red Alert that actually featured Stalin as a character. I've also been playing NetHack recently and it has almost every conceivable possible type of monster, especially NetHack variants that add even more stuff... you name it, NetHack or one of its variants like UnNetHack, NetHack 4, DynaHack, Slash'EM Extended, etc. has it.

Another thing I've thought about is maybe an old cathedral on the East Coast that's several centuries ago and has underground catacombs full of all sorts of monsters... in the multi-city mode this would be St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City although I'm not sure whether or not we should explicitly name it as such, but that would be for people who want to do some dungeon crawling and fight all sorts of cool monsters for equipment, that would be sorta like NetHack or Diablo (the original Diablo, where there was just 1 dungeon you went down rather than a whole bunch of different ones).

And in Seattle we could add the headquarters of a major software company... I haven't thought of many details for this one yet...

Ah I just thought of something, we should have 4 Stalinist bases, not 3... one in every city, in multi-city mode (we currently have 4 cities). That way the Stalin clone can be in the 3rd base and the REAL Stalin can be in the 4th and final base. But the game can make it seem like there are only 3 bases and the last one can be made harder to find.

Oh yes and we need to be able to commit atrocities. If a Conservative is a prisoner, there should be a way to, instead of interrogating them, not only kill them but do it in a barbaric way and on videotape and make the video public in order to frighten the populace. This would make people very very aware of the Liberal Crime Squad but also very very frightened of it. If you committed atrocities people would be much more likely to surrender to you or run away but you'd also provoke a much much bigger response from the military and probably Seal Team 6. You could also broadcast an atrocity live from an AM Radio Station or, better yet, a Cable News Station. One thing I've noticed about this group ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is their primary strength is not military power or numbers of terrorists or anything like that, their primary strength is fear, they truly terrorize people, we ought to add more options in this game not only to terrorize the populace and be evil but to be RECOGNIZED as such by the populace, have them frightened and think of the LCS as evil, and provoke a massive response against the LCS that even most Liberals would support. Of course the evil-LCS strategy would be totally counterproductive in terms of public opinion, but it would make certain things in the game easier. And of course the game ought to expand in the other direction as well, and make there be more good-LCS options for an LCS that wants to be peaceful, nonviolent, and pursue its ideals without harming anyone. A good-LCS strategy would be good for public opinion without relying much, maybe even not at all, on illegal activity, but it would also have many pitfalls too, like nobody would be afraid of the LCS and it'd be perceived as weak. I know the game already has this to a certain extent, I'd just expand it even more, to accommodate different playing styles. If you were perceived as really really evil, moderates would automatically consider you the enemy just like Conservatives, at sites, whereas if you were perceived as really really good, moderates would fight alongside Liberals to defend you if you got attacked by Conservatives at sites. Usually though, if you were in the normal range on perceptions of how good vs. evil the LCS is, moderates would just act like moderates and act politically neutral in site mode.

And there would maybe be a 2nd, less violent way to defeat the Stalinist Comrade Squad, perhaps this one would involve finding out the story of its origins and publishing it. I would make this a bit less effective than the other method, namely, if you defeat the SCS by publishing a story instead of wiping them out by force, the Stalinist Party and Stalinist politicians would continue to exist, although there would no longer be anyone increasing their popularity anymore, so you'd have to defeat their politicians at the ballot box instead, but they'd never go away 100%, they'd still run in every election.

[SuicideJunkie]

Wouldn't excessive atrocities make people less likely to surrender?  As in "better to die running than be inevitably tortured to death by these guys"?

[Servant Corps]

*Liberal Elitist comes off as slightly insane.*

Liberal Crime Squad is a satire aimed at very specific target: the American political system. Trying to add in too many stuff like cyborgs, Nazis, clones of dead Russian politicians, and aliens would be rather counterproductive. It wouldn't really even be cool, as the game would lack any sensible "theme", just a huge mish-mash of random stuff.

That doesn't mean weird stuff can't exist: we do have talking dogs, mutants, and Genetic Monsters after all. The difference is that these things "work" because it's making fun of the worldview of extremist Liberals. So any addition to the game has to be done Liberally, and not trying to copy from other video games. Any "inspiration" should try to come from politics.

The only reason why the Stalinists wanted to abolish the US Constitution and place Joesph Stalin in charge was because the Stalinist Amendment was supposed to be a mirror image of the Arch-Conservative Amendment, which also want to abolish the US Constitution and place Ronald Reagan in charge. When I started work on the Stalinist mod, Reagan was long since dead, so I loved the idea of the Stalinists digging up Stalin from the grave and claiming to give him absolute power, even though he's dead and can't actually use it. It was not meant to lead to Stalin secretly being a clone/cryogenically frozen. It was just a throwaway joke that probably just spiraled out of control.

Even if Stalin was alive/cloned, we would have a slight problem with the Abortion issue. Your Stalinists are pro-abortion, while Stalin actually outlawed abortion in the USSR (abortion was re-legalized after Stalin's death). Now, in a world where Stalin wasn't actually alive, we could just claim that the Stalinists simply adheres to Stalin's authoritarian ideology and does not slavishly follow every one of Stalin's whims. But if Stalin is alive, he'd probably be able to pressure the Stalinists to follow his whims, so the Stalinists would have to be anti-abortion. That would be fine, as my Stalinists were also anti-abortion, but it might cause you to rejigger the issues a bit.

If Stalinist Mode actually works as designed (and I do need to consider trying it out), then maybe there may not need to be an offensive "Stalinist Comrade Squad" that does raids? Maybe the Stalinists would essentially 'turtle' in safehouses such as the New Pravda with their super-soldiers, and you have to shut down their safehouses to reduce or take away their +4%/year bonus. The pacifist approach would be to simply ignore the Stalinists and just do political activism to counteract their political activism. It might be interesting to have different crime squads use different mechanics: the CCS uses extreme violence to intimidate society, while the Stalinists covertly manipulates public opinion as the "vanguard of the revolution".

I do have an idea for a backstory for how the Stalinists came to be, but I have spent a lot of time typing up this critique, and after all, this is your mod, not mine. If I do get time and patience to code in LCS, I might make a "fork" of the current Stalinist Mode and implement that backstory.

[KA101]

Yeah, Servant Corps seems on a better track here.

[Liberal Elitist]

My experiment, to put some ideas out there and see what the response would be, is a resounding success! Now I conclusively know that what I said in that other post in this thread are some BAD IDEAS! That's why I posted it, to test those ideas out, see what other people would think. I like to do that before implementing anything major in the game.

So now that we're basically back to square one as far as this Stalinist Comrade Squad itself is concerned, I see you don't want me copying ideas from other games. The actual reason the Stalinist Amendment is a mirror-image of the Reagan one is I couldn't think of any better way to do it and I was a bit uncreative. Basically I just don't want the Stalinist Comrade Squad to be identical to the Conservative Crime Squad, they have to have some sort of difference in a way that matters to players. I don't really know what that is yet. I could probably implement them but they'd just be a carbon-copy of the CCS and totally uninteresting as far as anyone who plays the game goes. That's why I was throwing around weird ideas. OK so one difference is they would have their own newspaper unlike the CCS. I don't see why it'd be called New Pravda... Communists don't usually go around sticking "New" in front of things, they'd just call it Pravda. There are several newspapers and websites called Pravda right now. Yeah, the game would be more realistic if we didn't have clones or people cryogenically unfrozen or other stuff like that.

So uh, I guess this means for now adding more Stalinist Comrade Squad stuff to the game is on hold for me because I'm having writers' block, problems with creativity, the only ideas I can think of are absurd ones. The only thing I can think of doing is implementing it as similarly to the Conservative Crime Squad as possible, and then once it's done, change stuff about it AFTER that. But I don't really think that's a very good artistic vision for me to have when I do this. It would be unoriginal, repetitive, and boring, if I implemented it now without doing anything wacky, since I don't have any good ideas on what to do.

[SlatersQuest]

I assume that it's possible to counteract the spread of Stalinism in the game, through site actions, Liberal Guardian issues, etc., isn't it, or does this put the player on a timer?

I would think that one way to deal with the SCS from the player's prospective might be to subvert their membership. The thing that I'm thinking of is that Liberals and Communists often share or shared a lot of ideologies historically, and there is a great deal of similarity between the SCS and LCS. Thus, rather than invading and taking over SCS safe houses as you would with the CCS, you would instead infiltrate them with sleepers and ensure that the LCS is more popular than the SCS in game, which would in turn cut of the SCS' membership, thereby allowing you (or even the police) to defeat them through attrition. The CCS, by contrast, has all of this support from the government, so destroying them by cutting off their support requires a very different strategy.

Might this make them different enough?

[Liberal Elitist]

In the game the SCS and LCS don't share very much ideology, other than both being anti-corporation, pro-worker, pro-abortion, pro-high taxes, anti-high CEO pay, and pro-flag burning. Other than that, the Stalinist faction disagrees with the Elite Liberal faction on pretty much every issue in the game. They are really much more closely aligned with the Arch-Conservatives on about 80% of the issues. There may be some structural similarities though... both the SCS and LCS are ideological organizations that aim at conquest (much like the group ACROSS in the anime show Excel Saga, which I highly recommend watching, it's very funny and ridiculous). Both have charismatic leaders (although the charismatic leader of the SCS, Josef Stalin, has been dead for 50 years). Both want their ideology to reign supreme in the United States and around the world and are willing to use violence. Both are also willing to use other more peaceful means like publishing a propaganda newspaper. And both would be classified as left-wing, although the LCS is left-wing anti-authoritarian while the SCS is left-wing authoritarian, so this authoritarian vs. anti-authoritarian divide is the major disagreement, the reason they disagree on so many specific issues. As for the CCS, while on the surface it appears to be an ideological activist group with a charismatic leader, in practice they are actually a corporate-and-government-sponsored group and all they ever do is engage in senseless acts of violence and slaughter, and their leader is most likely a CIA agent assigned to that task by his superiors. The SCS, on the other hand, is a legitimate grassroots organization like the LCS, rather than being sponsored by anyone. Or maybe they are sponsored by someone, like the North Koreans or Russia or China or something. I'm not sure yet. Haven't worked out all the details. If they aren't sponsored by anyone then there wouldn't be any equivalent to the CCS Backer List. Obviously they would have bases and a leader.

I suppose the simplest way to implement them would be as follows: they'd have 3 bases just like the CCS. They'd start out dormant just like the CCS and activate at some point. But instead of engaging in senseless violence as their only activity, they'd publish a newspaper, called Amerikanskiy Pravda (American Truth), spreading their ideology and message, and they'd have a more activist approach. And as the game is already programmed, Stalinists take votes away pretty much equally from Liberals and Conservatives... the Stalinists want to reach everyone with their message and convert everyone, and find an issue someone agrees with them on and use that as a basis to convert them to embrace the rest of Stalinism. Marxist organizations always have youth wings and plenty of students involved, and always have newspapers, so obviously a lot of college students would be SCS operatives, and they would publish their newspaper everywhere. One thing I have noticed from looking at Communist websites now and then is that Communists are very opportunistic and no matter what happens in the world or what the current major issues are, they will always find a way to tie that into their ideology and very cleverly explain how this shows that they are correct and people should join them. Of course in the United States, Communism has been a failure as a movement for several reasons. First of all, propaganda by the government during the Cold War demonized Communists and made them seem evil. Secondly, anything bad Communists do, like Stalin's atrocities, are highly publicized in the U.S., giving people a very negative view of it. Third, the U.S. government has often had its agents infiltrate activist groups, such as with COINTELPRO, in order to disrupt them, make them less effective, turn the public against them, and get members to fight amongst each other or leave the group. Anyway, the Cold War is a distant memory now and let's say for the sake of argument the government isn't doing anything like COINTELPRO anymore. So nowadays it's easy for people to rewrite history and revisionist history is more popular than ever, just look how common Holocaust deniers or people who deny the Moon landing or deny that Tupac Shakur died are. In fact we even have revisionist news about current events, like in Russia the news refuses to report that Russian soldiers are dying in Ukraine, and instead the Russian government and media make up false stories about the causes of death for Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine because Russia is strangely denying that it is at war with Ukraine and lying to its own people about this. And some of Russia's current propagandists actually have long careers and used to work as Soviet propagandists years ago, this is why they are so skilled. Anyway, a Stalinist Comrade Squad isn't QUITE as ludicrous as it sounds, I mean this country really does have Communist youth... when I was a freshman in college they tried to recruit me to their Communist youth organization but I turned them down... they wanted me to pay them money to buy their cheap Communist newspaper, I thought Communists didn't believe in money or capitalism yet there they were hawking their overpriced newspapers like true capitalist businessmen. Anyway, my thinking is, the Conservative Comrade Squad is brawn, brute strength, a bunch of fighters who kill people. The Stalinist Comrade Squad is intellectual, full of young people who are idealistic, and they are all about spreading ideas, specifically the ideas of Stalinism, and whatever methods are most effective, the ends justify the means to them. Their specialty is propaganda, winning over people, changing public opinion, and they can easily get large numbers of young recruits, but they can also get recruits who are members of other organizations... Sleeper agents. They don't have any one leader that you can kill to get rid of them, the way to get rid of them is to uncover their network, find their Sleeper agents in positions of power, and expose them. So in other words, instead of the government, corporations, media, and Conservative politicians supporting the CCS, the SCS will have its own Sleeper agents infiltrate all institutions of power as well as try to infiltrate the Liberal Crime Squad itself. A typical way they can infiltrate is if you recruit a new member by talking about the issues and someone agrees to join. Or you go out on dates with someone and they appear to be in love with you and are seemingly a love slave. Only if you interrogate someone would you find out the truth, that they are a SCS agent trying to infiltrate the LCS, but this would not normally happen since they would appear to be Liberals rather than Conservatives so you'd have to Alienate Liberals and then kidnap them in order to get to the bottom of it. I suppose that is another tactic they could use: they'd appear to be Liberal in site mode and then you couldn't fight them. And if you try to recruit them they'll willingly join but only so they can destroy the LCS from the inside. To defeat them you'd have to Alienate Everybody at a site, including fellow Liberals, and then kidnap them, and then interrogate them. Well I suppose I could make it slightly easier, by identifying for the player who is an SCS agent and who isn't in some subtle way, maybe leaving some clues. Well OK maybe this could work. Yes, after you alienate everybody and interrogate a liberal who turns out to be a Stalinist you'd get the location of one of their hideouts, and at their hideout they wouldn't pretend to be Liberal, they'd be openly hostile and be the color red instead of green, and they'd have some fighters they managed to recruit using propaganda, armed with AK-47s of course, since that was the rifle of the Soviet army and the one the Soviets exported all over the world to guerrilla fighters. There'd be a certain number of intellectual elites responsible for writing all the propaganda the SCS publishes, and once you find and kill enough of them, the SCS would be gone for good. There would be a certain number of intellectual elites you'd have to kill at each of the 3 bases. And they'd have very strong persuasion-based attacks rather than using weapons, but be surrounded by people with AK-47s. Once you kill the people who write the propaganda, gradually the whole organization would fall apart, since the constant stream of high-quality propaganda to keep them indoctrinated as Stalinists would end, they'd start leaving the organization one by one, and soon the entire organization would crumble.

[SlatersQuest]

Hmm... this requires that the LCS takes an aggressive stance toward the SCS and attacks them in their safe houses. I think that the player should be able to beat the SCS at their own game.

I would suggest that there should be warning signs that an attentive player should be able to pick up on if the LCS is infiltrated by the SCS. For instance, if a Stalinist is writing for the Liberal Guardian, it should Stalinize the effect of the LG, and a player carefully watching public opinion when an LG news story happens should be able to notice, and thereby be able to work out that one of the authors is a Stalinist. Also, Stalinists may lower the Wisdom scores of liberals in the same safe house, so a player may be able to watch the Wisdom scores in different safe houses and work out by elimination who is the mole (of course this gets complicated if there are more than one mole).

Once you identify a mole, you can interrogate them. It should do bad things to the LCS if you interrogate the wrong person.

I'd also suggest that it be possible to directly convert Stalinists - say, if your Persuasion or Seduction rolls are really good, you can de-Stalinize and even get sleepers in the SCS who are actually loyal to the LCS. You just never know for certain.

[Liberal Elitist]

Hmm... this requires that the LCS takes an aggressive stance toward the SCS and attacks them in their safe houses. I think that the player should be able to beat the SCS at their own game.

I would suggest that there should be warning signs that an attentive player should be able to pick up on if the LCS is infiltrated by the SCS. For instance, if a Stalinist is writing for the Liberal Guardian, it should Stalinize the effect of the LG, and a player carefully watching public opinion when an LG news story happens should be able to notice, and thereby be able to work out that one of the authors is a Stalinist. Also, Stalinists may lower the Wisdom scores of liberals in the same safe house, so a player may be able to watch the Wisdom scores in different safe houses and work out by elimination who is the mole (of course this gets complicated if there are more than one mole).

Once you identify a mole, you can interrogate them. It should do bad things to the LCS if you interrogate the wrong person.

I'd also suggest that it be possible to directly convert Stalinists - say, if your Persuasion or Seduction rolls are really good, you can de-Stalinize and even get sleepers in the SCS who are actually loyal to the LCS. You just never know for certain.

Yeah that's a good idea, I just don't want to have things get too complicated. I'd like to implement it in a simple, straightforward way that isn't very complicated. And yes, give the player plenty of warning signs about the mole, as well as who the mole is. I was actually thinking of a much simpler implementation where they'd get you in major trouble almost immediately, trigger raids, expose your Sleepers, and such, and the first chance they got they would leave the LCS, both for their own safety and so they could infiltrate a more powerful (in their view), larger organization like the government or maybe a corporation or something, where they could more easily fit in as an undercover Stalinist agent without getting caught. The game would keep track of as little information as possible, to avoid adding too many variables, and the implementation would be as simple and straightforward as possible. They probably wouldn't be in the LCS a very long time. If they ever got arrested, for instance, they'd rat you out to the cops and join forces with the police... they'd never actually get in legal trouble or be put on trial. I was also thinking there would be other clues. They would all be fairly young, a little younger than you would expect for the jobs they have, prior to you recruiting them. Their time in the LCS would be very short in any case if they joined.

Or maybe I should just forget that and have them always appear as RED in site mode, as the enemy right from the beginning. I don't know yet. I just don't want it to get too complicated. Having them write Stalinist stories for the Liberal Guardian, that's too complicated. I'd be trying to follow a K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) design philosophy for the Stalinist Comrade Squad. I could add in fancier features that are more advanced later on. But I think in any case, it would be implemented in a simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand way at first... easy for both programmers and players of the game to understand. What you are talking about is a little bit more advanced than what I'm aiming for at first, a bit too ambitious to code all that. See, the Conservative Crime Squad is quite simple, they just use violence and attack people. The Stalinist Crime Squad would be equally simple (or ALMOST as simple anyway), except their main tactic wouldn't be violence, it would be propaganda and infiltration. I'm not aiming for it to be all as complicated as what you're describing. Or if I did describe stuff that was really complicated in previous comments, well I was just brainstorming ideas, but when it comes to actual coding and implementation, I like things simple and straightforward and easy to understand. Like the current implementation of Stalinists in politics, with the Stalinist Party and public opinion towards them and them getting elected, is simple, straightforward, and easy to understand. What you are describing sounds like it would require a lot of effort to implement and be really complicated. Maybe eventually it might end up like that but not when it is first implemented.