I added detection to lockpicking that is similar to what happens when you steal something off the ground; you start doing disguise/steath checks upon encountering Conservatives thereafter, and after 50 turns or so they'll get suspicious. To better distinguish this from smashing doors open, which already did this (though with a much shorter 'fuse' on the suspicious timer), I made smashing doors in cause the "conservatives suspicious" status to happen immediately. Because really, you just loudly broke a door down in a populated building. People are going to start getting edgy and looking for trouble right away.
Picked doors might start a suspicion timer, sure, but a random chance of "oops, someone unavoidably appeared and busted you when you were picking, nothing you could have done to prevent it" seems more annoying than worthwhile.
Although lockpicking will now put you into "you have started committing crimes" mode, I do not plan to make it immediately risky in that sense.
OK, so now I need to hack even less if I want to avoid my people getting caught? Lovely.
Depends on tuning, but systematically it should be a lot easier to manage with the revisions to how Heat works. The downtown apartments or business front will give you immunity to heat as long as heat is under 60%, which is actually a fairly high amount, since I reduced the rate at which heat accumulates and increased the rate at which it decays off of Liberals. If you have a group of five hackers all picking up heat from major hacks on a continual basis, you will probably get raided no matter what safehouse you're in, but a solo hacker shouldn't be too hard to manage heat on unless they're hacking from, like, the homeless shelter, which offers 0% secrecy.
Hacking is a weird thing because it's extremely powerful despite the fact that it takes place from the safety of your base. It generates a substantial amount of a juice, has mild to moderate public opinion impacts, and generates rare items that can be converted into big public opinion swings or briefcases of cash without any additional risk (unless Free Speech is C+, which makes any Guardian activities risky). Previously, the "leave slogans all over a military site" and "break into CIA networks" were the only major hacks that had a real risk of detection; the other 8 hacks, like those that picked up rare items, had detection avoidance difficulties that were actually
lower than the threshhold for doing the hack. Which means a solo hacker literally could not get caught doing them; if I were to take the old hacking detection difficulties and let you target only safe hacks, there would be no choice to be made in the decision of whether or not to use hacking because it would be completely overpowered.
Depends on how much you increased the difficulty of site checks though, since a lone liberal with uber stats still sounds god/superhero tier. The heat changes sound interesting, but I think that some crimes should increase heat indefinitely in small amounts. For example, someone who amounts to the Unabomber blowing up nuclear reactors everyday of the week, assassinating key CEOs, shooting up the Intelligence Agency will always be sought for by the conservative government.
I'm generally okay with stealth being very strong on high level solo Liberals; a big price you're implicitly paying there is bringing only one person on a mission.
If you're doing major raids frequently, the heat on your Liberals will continue to accumulate due to the ongoing addition of new charges, and the safehouse heat will pile up. Eventually you'll either get randomly raided or hit 100% heat and trigger an automatic raid. The "no indefinite accumulation" thing will only apply when you take a break; you won't need to abandon a safehouse temporarily to let it cool off, just laying low for a bit should be enough. Unless you're so hot that the safehouse overheats and gets raided before your Liberals can cool off, but the cooling process should be much more noticeable than it was before.
Author
Topic: Will you help me to understand the state of LCS? (Read 8420 times)