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[Jonathan S. Fox]

Hmm... well, when I enabled choosing what sub-task you wanted to do, I wasn't trying to make it possible to pick to focus on a skill and get that skill automatically raised from 0 if you held down w. But, it wouldn't be hard to just make it so you don't get anything until you skill up. Since a lot of people seem to prefer that, I'll probably do that then.

I have a few more design issues I'm wrestling with.

1. I'm looking for a good reason to not just get 50 random people and put them all on art duty until they bring in the big money.

I was going to make it so you just can't (well, you could, but you'd be relegated to the low skill jobs that aren't as good, not better skilled jobs), but if we do let you do it, I'd like for there to be an incentive not to. Some counterbalance, that's all. For example, the incentive not to get an army of people selling brownies is that, while you'll reign in big money, they'll all get arrested and testify against you in court.

Similarly, the idea isn't to make it so you *can't* get 50 people to put them all on sell art, or that you *won't* ever want to, but just some reason why it's a tradeoff and not always the obvious choice. Right now there's no reason to care about recruiting specialists instead of nobodies in these fields, and that's no fun.

A couple ideas off-hand:

a) Recruiting people has an upkeep associated with it. Food and such. They want money. People get grouchy when they don't get money. Low juice people eventually leave when they don't get money, and if their wisdom is high enough, they might have second thoughts and tell the police.

b) Certain tasks, even money-makers, cost upkeep to perform. You have to pay for art supplies to task someone to create art. You have to buy blank T-shirts before you can tie-dye them. You have to buy spray paints before you can hit the streets with them.

Let me know what you think. I'm not thinking all of the above or anything, those are just ideas. I think I like b) more than a). Your ideas are invited here too.

To be clear, I know the game is hard enough already, but that's mostly because it's very difficult to influence *public opinion*. Some things, like making money, are very easy -- and I just don't want it to be *too* easy. The alpha was initially just a prototype of a new activation interface, and it wasn't meant to completely rearrange the way the game handles money, or to make skills easy to get. So sure, everything's free ("everything" referring to things like causing trouble, interrogation), anyone can do anything (graffiti, art, music, prostitution), and money comes easy in it, but that's just because I haven't balanced it yet. I was focused on getting systems working, not presenting that as the way things ought to be. I'm cool with keeping the free for all on what you can activate people for if people tend to prefer it like that, but it still needs to be balanced to compensate for that.

2. Training!

So here's the problem as it stands. I want to add training, but I'm afraid with the current system that what's going to happen is you can have everyone teach everyone else their skills and get everyone looking about the same, just from holding down w. I'm thinking training should cost money somehow, whether from the teacher, or per skill level trained up, or something.

Some options:

a) A teacher can pick one skill at a time to teach, and teaches to the location they're in. Anyone at that location gains experience slowly in that skill, as long as they're at least X amount of skill under the teacher. It costs a modest amount of money each day to run a class.

b) As the activation screen implies now, the teacher picks a basket of skills and attributes to train, and trains all of them at once at their location. Really muscles up your characters, because it affects attributes, which are hugely important to how characters perform. Maybe costs a big chunk of money each day to run these "training camp" style classes, making professional teachers (fast), and experts (lots to teach) valuable for this.

c) Training is passive, and is applied by teachers to their subordinates in the command tree, without having an option to pick it or anything. They automatically pass on their skills to their subordinates by making skill gains extra effective if your boss has teaching and a higher skill level than you have. It costs nothing to train this way.

d) Training is something done by the student through an outside system. Skill to train is chosen through a submenu like making clothing, and then they go away for a week or a month or so after paying a tuition fee to the University and taking the class. They can only do this if they have a clean record or bribe the University an extra amount to keep quiet.

Other ideas? Thoughts?

[a1s]

A mix of B and D.

in order to teach you have to have a teacher, and you have to show for class.
so... everyone who is getting thought has 'student' as their current job, and they don't do anything else (presumably they eat/sleep/entertain themselves out of the scope of this game). this also helps improve quality of education (instead of having a 100 people in your class who happen to be in the area, you only have the 10 which you need).

money could be involved, but better yet- supplies. you can steal them from evil corporations or you could buy them at a store. off course with stuff like ammo good luck with that store.

[Earthquake Damage]

If you go the "spend money to make money" route, I suggest that selling shirts requires either mo' money or a successful garment making check.  Personally, the only people I put on shirt duty are rescued sweatshop workers since their skills seem appropriate for it.

Also, I don't see why teaching should bump attributes.  To my knowledge there is no way to improve your attributes other than juice, and I'm cool with that.  If you do allow attribute gains, limit them.  Maybe you can only gain X points above your base score that way, so recruits that start with high intelligence will always be smarter than the ones who start dumb.  Of course, if you're gonna do that, you may as well let juice do all the buffing.

Teaching shouldn't be able to raise a student's skill to the teacher's level, so better teachers with higher skills are valuable, as are non-teaching operatives with high skills.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me for teaching to cost money when the skill being taught doesn't require money to use.  For example, I expect firearms training to consume ammunition, which I'll have to replenish periodically, thus costing money.  Sneaking, on the other hand, shouldn't need funding.

Monetary upkeep for LCS members?  They're voluntary activists, not mercenaries.  If you want to add another recruitment option (paid labor), that's fine, but don't add conditions to my unconditional love-slaves and such.

Now food upkeep, on the other hand, is perfectly acceptable (so long as it's handled automatically -- I hate meaningless micromanagement).  Living in the homeless shelter should cost nothing, of course, since, you know, it's a homeless shelter.  In fact, maybe being unable to feed your members should force relocation to the homeless shelter.  The shelter can't be improved (fortifications, business fronts, Guardian HQ, etc), which is a significant drawback later in the game.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

For attributes, I was thinking you could have your skill improved, if your base (non-juice-affected) skill was several points lower than the teacher's. So if you're an athlete (very high starting physical stats, which is extremely good for combat), you can help get other LCS members "in shape". They still won't be athletes when they're done, but they could be more well-rounded. Still, even though I included what attributes the training programs would exercise on the activation screen (you can see them in any of the alphas), we can just remove those with no problem.

If we go with the "basket of skills" method for teaching (which I'm really starting to prefer myself, possibly with a1s's suggestion about having students specifically activate for learning), we don't have to explain why it costs money to teach sneaking -- it'll just be part of the high generic pricetag for a whole basket of generic supplies for various skills all related to "special ops". Interrogation, security, etc..

For T-shirts, I was actually thinking that high skill would affect the quality of the product (you sell more, at a higher price), while to reduce the overhead, you could steal fine cloth from the sweatshops (which already cuts garment making costs in half, but here we can apply it to fundraising as well). Hacking could have a low overhead but require computers to even attempt it, stuff like that.

I love Earthquake Damage's ideas on upkeep. No upkeep for people in general, but food costs -- and then only when you're not at the homeless shelter. There's already buying food reserves, but I'd leave that as it is now, for stockpiling for a siege. Like you say, pointless micromanagement sucks -- just make it have a background cost, and a line on your end-of-month budget. This would give the cooking skill a real purpose, as it would allow you to spend less on daily upkeep for that location.

[ February 06, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Toaster]

Hacking right now seems to be extremely effective at no cost and very low risk.  In University district apartments, 7 hackers got raided once in two years, while I was sitting on some 600k cash.  This is with them alternating between all the options (CC fraud, DoS racket, cyberterrorism, secure systems).  Seems low to me, though the midlevel apartment may have been enough heat dispersal to keep The Man at bay.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Hacking is definitely overpowered, I agree. I've had adjusting it on the low priority, but since we're talking about balancing money, it's probably best to go ahead and look at it. Most of the hacking options just do the same thing right now, and while I might split it up again later, I'm combining them back into one hacking option for now. Or maybe I'll split it into activism and money making. Not sure yet.

[Earthquake Damage]

I suggest not forcing us to set someone's activity to "Learn" to benefit from teaching.  It'd suffice to use "Hanging Out" instead.

Also, hacking currently seems to be split up into low-risk activism, high-risk activism, and money making variants.  I see no compelling reason to change that.

[ February 07, 2008: Message edited by: Earthquake Damage ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Main reason to change it is that it's deceptive -- it's not actually split up at all.   It's a superficial categorization -- there's still only one style of hacking and it does all of the above. I could go ahead and cut it up, it's just more work to do that.

Edit: As a side note, "hanging out" is currently used for people treating injuries as well. I'll probably eventually allow you to specifically select to just do nothing on the activation screen, and have a description for that saying they'll cook, study, guard hostages, tend to the injured, and any other random tasks around the base.

[ February 07, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Earthquake Damage]

Eh?  Last I checked people set to heal the injured were set to a blank activity string, not "Hanging Out."

[Jonathan S. Fox]

It checks both heal injured lists and no activity lists when searching for doctors.

Blank string for heal injured is bad though.

[beorn080]

I don't like the idea of using money to balance the money making.  All that would do is slow down the start and force you to use throwaway characters  to do illegal fundraising to fund the legal fundraising which once you figure it out would pay for itself just slower then normal.  Truthfully most of the game seems like that.    

Perhaps for the legal fundraising the person could be "discovered" and you would have to give an incentive for them to stay. This could work both ways because if they have a high enough heart they could give a VERY minor sleeper effect for 1 or 2 issues. Maybe a hundredth of the normal amount or even less. However the opposite of that is that you lose the person and you have no choice in who gets discovered.  Maybe random events where the item being hocked is so popular that the stand gets rushed by people and property is damaged and people are hurt.

[Earthquake Damage]

As I've already said, I disagree with the "spend money to make money" concept (for pretty much the same reason as beorn, actually).  Most things in LCS can be done by simply having a large enough organization (of course, having hundreds of members vastly increases the tedium).

An effective way to rebalance (or nerf, depending on your point of view) much of the game would be to limit the number of members you can recruit in some way.  Too much restriction would suck horribly, but you could gradually decrease the limit in some way over time if you feel the game is still too easy.  A simple way to do this might be to base the number of people you can recruit on your juice, heart, charisma, leadership (how do you improve this other than mass recruitment?), etc.  Perhaps you can make the recruitment limit affect only the members recruited through persuasion, leaving seduction (typically slow due to the risk involved with dating multiple people at once) and kidnapping (also slow for obvious reasons) unrestricted.

Alternately, you could have a character's leadership skill affect how well their (direct?) underlings operate.  Hell, you could go as far as to make members goof off (ever play the Dragon Warrior series?) rather than follow orders depending on some combination of their juice versus your leadership.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>An effective way to rebalance (or nerf, depending on your point of view) much of the game would be to limit the number of members you can recruit in some way.  Too much restriction would suck horribly, but you could gradually decrease the limit in some way over time if you feel the game is still too easy.  A simple way to do this might be to base the number of people you can recruit on your juice, heart, charisma, leadership (how do you improve this other than mass recruitment?), etc.  Perhaps you can make the recruitment limit affect only the members recruited through persuasion, leaving seduction (typically slow due to the risk involved with dating multiple people at once) and kidnapping (also slow for obvious reasons) unrestricted.

Alternately, you could have a character's leadership skill affect how well their (direct?) underlings operate.  Hell, you could go as far as to make members goof off (ever play the Dragon Warrior series?) rather than follow orders depending on some combination of their juice versus your leadership.</STRONG>

Limiting recruitment is an idea that I like a lot, and I've floated the idea in the past, but the response from the community has been pretty cold, so I haven't moved to implement any restrictions.

My idea is to make leadership and juice the key factors, such that new recruits -can't- recruit themselves. As they advance, they gain the ability to recruit new people, but the maximum number of people they can manage is capped based on a combination of their juice and leadership. Leadership skill currently increases as your subordinates gain juice -- and only for juice gains over 20 (activist level). It also increases with recruitment, but I think I'll remove this. At the moment having Leadership has a fairly powerful effect on suppressing confessions when subordinates are arrested, and encouraging former subordinates to come back to the LCS if the leader is released from prison.

I would propose that juice be damaged when the leader or their subordinates are arrested, convicted, executed, or killed in action -- to a point. It wouldn't cruel, so it wouldn't reduce you below, say, 50 juice. This would also be offset by taking action to correct the issue: breaking someone out of the lock-up would be enough of a juice boost for the leader to completely wipe out the loss of having their subordinate arrested and then some, but it wouldn't fully erase a conviction (it still sucks that they let their guy get sent to prison in the first place). Plus, convicts count toward their recruit cap. Overall this means that to increase their cap, they need to have recruits under them who gain experience, rise in juice, and don't get flattened by the machine.

As it stands, leadership is capped not by charisma but by juice; if you have high juice, may still have low leadership, but you can't have high leadership without high juice.

My instinct would be to start out with a fairly tight cap on recruitment, and then loosen it as testing shows is needed. Example:

- Under 50 juice: 0 subordinates.
- Socialist Threat (50 Juice): 1 subordinate. (an assistant or specialist contact)
- Revolutionary (100 juice): 5 subordinates. (enough to run their own squad)
- Urban Commando (200 juice): 8 subordinates.
- Elite Liberal (500 juice): 11 subordinates. (enough to run two full squads)

Each level of leadership grants +2 subordinates. You can't even start to get leadership until you have at least 50 juice.

The LCS Leader automatically gets +11 subordinates (enough to fill two squads, if you include the leader) by virtue of their rank.

I would count kidnapped and seduced people toward the cap, unless they become sleepers. The lead interrogator is the person who gets the recruit in kidnappings.

Because the LCS is a -hierarchy-, this is not as restrictive as it might sound. There's no true cap on recruitment. Recruiting your first five people as gang members and starting with a wave of heavily-armed violence would quickly get you a bunch of early leaders and enable you to run half a dozen squads. Recruiting hippies and selling brownies would get you money, but achieve little in the way of broadening the LCS, and if they all land in jail, you'd be on your own unless you spring them out. Your people aren't throwaways anymore, but valuable resources, and you can only get more when you prove you can use the ones you already have. There's incentive to recruit strong characters, turn away weak ones, and put your people to good work. I think that's good game design.

Of course, certain things would have to be balanced... brownies and prostitution would have to be less risky, for example. But all in all, I hope that people are open to at least trying this. I know it would change gameplay strategies, but I think it would be good for the game in the long run.

[beorn080]

BRILLIANT! I love the idea of limiting recruits to your juice.  Would certainly make recruiting something that would need to be focused instead of just doing it in bulk.  The only thing i see is that it both limits and emphasizes the recruiter build.  It would limit its long term effect but would make it extremely useful early in getting the higher end liberals who would then have the ability to recruit other good liberals.  I must say you are a genius ranking among the ranks of the ranked geniuses.

[Earthquake Damage]

quote:You can't even start to get leadership until you have at least 50 juice.

I would count kidnapped and seduced people toward the cap, unless they become sleepers. The lead interrogator is the person who gets the recruit in kidnappings.

Two things:

1.  So how exactly do you gain leadership?  Only from recruitment (currently, anyway) and subordinates gaining juice?  Does it only increase when they reach certain juice thresholds or does any juice gain improve leadership (regardless of how high their juice already is)?  Do you gain leadership from your subordinates' subordinates?

2.  Seduction and kidnapping are slow processes compared to chatting someone up on the street.  They should have benefits.  Either you have to gimp liberals/moderates (who you can recruit through persuasion), which is retarded, or you need to provide some other benefit.

As it stands, seduction provides very little benefit as a recruitment option (you can get conservatives, who aren't any better than their liberal counterparts) for the risk (recruiter can gain wisdom, etc).  If seduction counts toward the limit, which is understandable since you can date multiple people at once (but only if you're lucky), then it should at least provide some other benefit.  Maybe lovers are nigh-guaranteed to return when you're released from prison, never testify against you, or something like that.

Kidnapping is even riskier.  If you succeed in time, you get a sleeper.  If you don't, you get something worse than an ordinary recruit (rehabilitated upon capture).  Having that recruit, which is still difficult to get at all with the new interrogation system, count against your subordinate limit adds insult to injury (or injury to insult, or whatever).