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[Kodiologist]

As a challenge, and in defiance of the name Liberal Crime Squad, I tried winning the game without ever committing a crime. I did it, winning after the November 2014 election. Here are some hints and other observations.

I played without the CCS and with democrat mode on. Initially I also had nightmare mode on, but I got kind of stuck without the Liberal Guardian (nightmare mode means free-speech laws start at -2 and therefore writing for the Liberal Guardian is a crime of harmful speech), so I gave that up and started over.

For founder creation, I focused on charisma but also got a total of +5 in intelligence. I chose $1,000 for the founder's 18th birthday present, and "writing my manifesto" for the +50 juice bonus, because juice is hard to come by without committing crimes.

My overall strategy was to get a variety of sleepers to collect publishable documents by Snooping Around (sleeper_spy in sleeper_update.cpp), and have a large team (10 or so people by the end of the game) writing for the Liberal Guardian full-time. Not every issue can be affected with Liberal Guardian special editions, not all documents can be obtained from sleepers, and one kind of document that you can obtain from sleepers, Secret Documents, is always a crime to publish. You can still affect quite a lot of issues just by publishing documents leaked by sleepers. With enough sleepers, you'll soon have more documents than you can publish even if you're cranking out a special edition every month, as you ought to do to keep the masses in a liberal frenzy.

An important and well-hidden point is that writing for the Liberal Guardian is generally much more effective than having sleepers Promote Liberalism. Sleeper power (sleeper_influence) is rarely greater than 50 except for the very difficult-to-recruit CEO, politician, and eminent scientist, and it's applied once per month and only to the sleeper's issues, whereas every successful daily Liberal Guardian writing check influences a random issue with power 15. Once you've discredited AM radio and cable news by publishing their respective memos, a team of Liberal Guardian writers suffices to stack the deck of public-opinion drift in your favor. This said, all of this stuff that influences libpower, which can at best improve public opinion on an issue by 1 percentile point per month (see passmonth in monthly.cpp), is much less important than publishing documents, which, like committing newsworthy crimes, changes public opinion by several percentile points (up to 50 for certain documents and issues) immediately.

As I mentioned before, getting juice is difficult. Sleepers can gain up to 100 by Snooping Around. Active liberals' only real option is volunteering, which can get them up to 10 juice. Other forms of liberal activism that can accumulate juice have at least a chance of causing the liberal to commit a crime, unfortunately. Be sure that your founder, or sleepers who go active after getting 100 juice, don't make multiple dates for the same night. Getting caught cheating costs 5 juice, and you don't have any way to get that juice back.

[SlatersQuest]

What you say is entirely true and has been discussed before. Here's a secret, though: you do not need juice. (WHAT?!)


Seduction is a means of recruitment available to all characters regardless of juice, and your Charisma (vanilla) or composite Charisma-Health (TV mod) that limits your seduction skill is almost always high enough that any liberal can have several lovers, enough to potentially create an endless network of lovers.

I've won the game by having huge armies of seduced hippies performing music, drawing art, etc. Hippies often have high enough Heart stats even with no juice that they can still influence public opinion with their music/art once their skills get high enough. It's tedious, and it only works on the easiest of difficulty settings (i.e. no Nightmare, no CCS, as you played here), but it can be done. Although performing music/art is not criminal even on Nightmare, I've never found it effective enough to prevent the country from Reaganifying on the next election (it just isn't quick enough).


Incidentally, eminent scientists can be recruited via seduction by Actors with high enough charisma (they can have 10 charisma). Charismatic lawyers would also work, but Actors usually begin with seduction while lawyers usually don't.

[Kodiologist]

You can liberalize the country with hippies, art, music, and free love? Sounds like those 1960s counterculturists were on the right track.

[SlatersQuest]

You can liberalize the country with hippies, art, music, and free love? Sounds like those 1960s counterculturists were on the right track.

Only if the conservatives don't do anything to try to stop you! 

Like I said, we're taking easiest difficulty settings here. Generous time limit (no nightmare mode), and only very slow background conservatization (no CCS).

[ed boy]

I did a similar run, as detailed here and .

The strategy that I used involved getting news anchors and radio personalities as sleepers to negate conservative influence, then getting minor liberal influence with my founder. As soon as you can get the liberal guardian up and running, it becomes a lot easier.

In theory it should be possible to complete the game without spending any money either.