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[SuicideJunkie]

I've been looking into the dating code, and the hard cap on seduction was a bit unexpected and disappointing.
From what I see, the main issue with changing that to a softer limit is the Boombox Serenade trick which essentially allows you to one-shot almost any date.

Thus, my plan is two part:
1) Removing the cap, but forcing a skill check each day: after the first romantic interest, it gets increasingly difficult to hide the other lovers from intelligent, wise and/or psychologically trained partners.
2) Dates no longer become loveslaves immediately, but instead lose juice into the negatives before they break down psychologically.

Effects:
1) The boombox serenade will only eliminate about half the dating work instead of all of it, and leave plenty of other lover rolls to challenge the seduction process.
2) With infinite attempts, you could theoretically seduce one more slave no matter how many you've already got.  More dating after you hit the limits isn't completely pointless, but the chances drop off quickly.
3) This also means that ex-conservative love slaves will need to do some extensive community service to restore their self-worth, and will have to be coddled if assigned as sleepers.

[KA101]

Just so we're all on the same page: the Boombox Serenade is playing guitars at someone to raise Heart/Lower Wisdom, so they become more vulnerable to seduction, or is it something else?

Apart from that (never done it, seems dangerous of itself given tough/armed conservatives), I'd be fine with a hard cap at 7 lovers.  One per day-of-week seems thoroughly scheduled.  (14 Seduction = 8 lovers under the current system.)

For me, one of the major points of seduction was to get sleepers.  Having all my infiltrated folks be Crappy because they had to go into negative juice/infamy is an awfully big Nerf.

And infinite attempts seems like it'd encourage grinding.  I'm not really fond of this.  Sorry.

[SuicideJunkie]

Yep.  IMO it is closer to "complete" than "more"; you get their heart well past the current love slave point.
There is only one human in the entire country immune to the B.S. and that's the President himself thanks to the bodyguards assassinating him if you try.

You would still have the sleepers for maps and side effects, but they wouldn't be able to pull off embezzlement and advocacy right away.  The highest power sleepers would get to a safe % quicker, while the lower powered ones would have much less of a juice debt to work off once they become safe.
I don't think it would delay your actual use of them by more than a few months, and once you do get them active, they do juice up pretty quick.

A desire to grind out another slave would be there, but you'd have to consider the value of the target for the effort.
And when it gets to be too much effort to love slave, you can simply switch to enlightening them with no limit.
(Also I spent most of a month trying to grind out one more Hanging Judge slave before my Leader was due in court for a serious list of charges, not realizing until the end that it might be a hard cap, and then checking the code to know I was wasting my time)

[KA101]

I don't think it would delay your actual use of them by more than a few months, and once you do get them active, they do juice up pretty quick.

A few months is a fairly long time in LCS, given that every day is manually played.  So that still seems an awful nerf.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I can see the negative juice mechanic. It wouldn't actually affect sleeper infiltration levels; that is independent of Juice in all respects, so negative juice seductees won't hurt most sleepers very much. The one case that comes to mind where it'll be really devastating is sleeper lawyers, as they depend on their stats and skills to be effective in the courtroom, and one of the best things about seducing lawyers is that love slave lawyers are always available to defend their recruiter. If they're really crap, that's pointless, because they'll be worse than the public defender. This could be compensated by giving sleeper lawyers a large bonus.

I wouldn't lift the hard cap in favor of a soft one. I think it actually worsens the problem you experienced. A designer I often work with, Nathan McCoy, often cites the idea that if your game has a choice between an effective way to play and a fun way to play, your players will pick the effective way to play and then complain that your game isn't fun -- and they'll be right. A large number of the balance changes I have made to LCS are done with this principle in mind. When I nerf strategies or impose restrictions, the goal isn't to make the game harder to win, but to ensure the best strategies are enjoyable ones, and to create interesting and colorful failure conditions that are fun to experience in their own right.

Both the seduction cap and the recruitment cap are mechanics I put into the game to eliminate the practice of grinding more and more recruits in lieu of playing the game with your existing ones. I chose hard caps for these because soft caps don't eliminate grinding so much as make the grinding even less fun and rewarding. With a soft cap, there is a tendency to repeat the same actions over and over again like you're in a casino, hoping that the RNG blesses you, with increasingly unlikely results. It might seem like that's more realistic, or that it's interesting for there to be some chance of success rather than none, but the playstyle it invites isn't a pleasant one.

The experience you had with trying to grind out a critical sleeper you needed and getting frustrated after a month of trying is an example of the sort of behavior that the hard cap is meant to avoid; you chose a frustrating course of action based on the belief that the game had a small random chance of rewarding you, the belief that you just had to keep trying and eventually it would work. It wasn't fun to have your efforts repeatedly fail. I agree that we should avoid creating the frustrating experience you had, and that we can change the game to prevent it from occurring, but rather than having those actions occasionally pay off, what I would do is double down on the fact that they won't. If you knew from the beginning that you were hitting a hard cap, you wouldn't have kept trying, and the unpleasant experience you had would be prevented from the outset rather than just mitigated by an eventual success.

LCS currently communicates that the cap exists and what the cap is on the character profile screen (something like "X of Y lovers"), but the message you get when you run up against it doesn't do a good job of explaining that you're running into a cap and that the cap is inviolable. The standard recruit cap is very explicit -- the button to offer a recruit a job is grayed out and replaced with the text "Amelie Sho needs more Juice to recruit." There is literally no way to even try to ignore it. The seduction cap is not so explicit; it just causes your actions to fail with a fairly vague message about the person leaving after finding out about other lovers. Rather than switch to a soft cap, I would change the way the cap affects dating to make it extremely obvious that you can't succeed.

[SuicideJunkie]

LCS currently communicates that the cap exists and what the cap is on the character profile screen (something like "X of Y lovers")

I don't recall ever seeing a hint of a limit before, and as of rev 830:

Code: [Select]

...
1 Recruits / 7 Max          Law:           0.28  7.00
1 Romantic Interest         Business:      0.15  7.00
...
For a hard limit that would have to be changed.  Perhaps have the talk option be greyed and changed to something like " already has too many dates to juggle."
The otherwise obsolete "discovery of the other loves" text could then be an alternate explanation for the "can see this just won't work out" when a bad roll causing the date to leave.

The oddest thing with the hard limit is that dating becomes easier and easier until it is suddenly impossible.
Perhaps have the character's effective seduction skill on the date be (skill - slaves*2) to match the cap?

[KA101]

Huh.  My understanding of negative juice for sleepers is that if they fail a sleeper action, they're auto-caught and booted/arrested from their position.  So doc-snooping or embezzling funds would become much more dangerous under this approach.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I don't recall ever seeing a hint of a limit before, and as of rev 830:

Code: [Select]

...
1 Recruits / 7 Max          Law:           0.28  7.00
1 Romantic Interest         Business:      0.15  7.00
...
For a hard limit that would have to be changed.  Perhaps have the talk option be greyed and changed to something like " already has too many dates to juggle."
The otherwise obsolete "discovery of the other loves" text could then be an alternate explanation for the "can see this just won't work out" when a bad roll causing the date to leave.

Ah, it looks like I'm mistaken then. I agree, that should be changed too; maybe "1 Lover / 1 Max"? I like the idea of graying out the talk option. Since there are two talk options, perhaps one of them could be grayed out with the other switching to "Have a one night stand, then break it off." This would give one roll and a chance to win some extra seduction skill (or suffer wisdom), since the way you lift the cap is more seduction, and having the ability to "practice" beyond just mass pickup lines seems like a useful thing, since you can lose juice for dropping too many pickup lines at once.

Huh.  My understanding of negative juice for sleepers is that if they fail a sleeper action, they're auto-caught and booted/arrested from their position.  So doc-snooping or embezzling funds would become much more dangerous under this approach.

Oh, that's true. I was only thinking about their infiltration. The only way for sleepers to gain juice, if my memory serves, is to do the same things that risk them being captured for negative juice. So you'd need to increase their infiltration to ensure they don't screw up on their first month; successes add ten juice per month.

[SuicideJunkie]

The week vacation would be out, but I suppose the option of dropping the $100 (vs going cheap) on the one night stand is still reasonable since it does provide some wisdom protection.
Under the current rules "one roll" will generate a loveslave from a serenaded victim, which would break the cap.  If the negative juice thing is included, then that's not a problem.

You would have to wait the extra few months to get from high 80s/low 90s up to high 90s infiltration so they don't get caught, but after that you still get loot while they juice up.
On the timescale of sleepers, it seems reasonable to me.

[KA101]

Oh, that's true. I was only thinking about their infiltration. The only way for sleepers to gain juice, if my memory serves, is to do the same things that risk them being captured for negative juice. So you'd need to increase their infiltration to ensure they don't screw up on their first month; successes add ten juice per month.

You could destroy the final CCS safehouse--that's 200 Juice to absolutely everyone in the LCS.  Good way to get sleepers to the point where they can expand.  Apart from that somewhat limited & situational method, yeah, forcing lovers to start Negative means waiting, which I find needlessly punitive.

The week vacation would be out, but I suppose the option of dropping the $100 (vs going cheap) on the one night stand is still reasonable since it does provide some wisdom protection.
Under the current rules "one roll" will generate a loveslave from a serenaded victim, which would break the cap.  If the negative juice thing is included, then that's not a problem.

You would have to wait the extra few months to get from high 80s/low 90s up to high 90s infiltration so they don't get caught, but after that you still get loot while they juice up.
On the timescale of sleepers, it seems reasonable to me.

One thing I'm finding extremely obnoxious here is the (apparent?) assumption that everyone who gets targeted for seduction was first sang at.  I've never had any luck with singing at anyone--usually caught lead for my trouble.  So balancing with the idea that folks need to be drained of Juice/Infamy (because their Heart will be higher than their Wisdom) seems overbalanced.

[FinetalPies]

Yeah I've always just relied on high seduction skill alone.

[SuicideJunkie]

Here's another option:
Put a cap on the starting infiltration level if the character is a Liberal.

That way, the Agent you enslaved with the one night stand and superliminal messages will be a lot less useful than the Agent you worked over the hard way.

[KA101]

Here's another option:
Put a cap on the starting infiltration level if the character is a Liberal.

That way, the Agent you enslaved with the one night stand and superliminal messages will be a lot less useful than the Agent you worked over the hard way.

For most Liberals (Liberal Judges, in particular), this already happens and is a pretty decent restraint.  Applying it to perma-Conservative professions that have been Liberalized via music works mechanically.  Not sure how it would work thematically--the seducee is acting lovesick and therefore everyone's suspicious?

KA101 likes this one.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I believe Liberals get 1/4 infiltration when created. That effect could be added upon musical conversion.

[SuicideJunkie]

My Hangin' Judges started at 90%, so that 1/4 effect still needs to be added to the code.

I think that just leaves the problem of slaving liberals with one-night-stands.
Some sort of willpower/conviction stat to erode during the dating perhaps, but that's sorta what juice is.