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[Mercutio Valentine]

Seduction I see as mainly a tool to assist kidnappings of dangerous sorts-- Agents, f'rex, who are extremely useful skillwise from the get-go. However, I'm inclined to agree with giving them a loyalty boost. Seems like that'd be the best compromise to make it still useful without overpowering it.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

As Mercutio Valentine says, the main advantage to seduction is the ability to get powerful characters that don't come in the Liberal variety, like Death Squads, Police Gang Units, and Agents. Awhile back I nerfed seduction by making it riskier, because it was so powerful that it was the technique of choice for farming armies of troops. I think it was too much though, so I've done a little bit of tweaking of the balance for seduced characters, and prepared the game to support recognizing who was seduced vs. brainwashed vs. recruited, so that special advantages and/or disadvantages can be applied later on based on the way they were recruited. Still a lot of work to be done here.

Edit: All juice gained by subordinates past the first 20 gives an amount of leadership experience to the boss proportional to the juice gained. So as long as they have at least 20 juice, every time they get juice, it gives the boss leadership. Leadership goes up fairly slow though, and is capped low. It's subtle but very powerful.

[ February 09, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[ February 09, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Earthquake Damage]

quote:Leadership goes up fairly slow though, and is capped low.

Eh?  Capped?  I thought skills were uncapped.

Also, what all does it affect anyway?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I capped skills awhile back, actually. The caps are very generous in most cases, leadership being the big exception; each skill is tied to one of your attributes, and you can't get your skill level above 2x your stat in that attribute. The nice thing about this is that it takes into account stat gains from juice, so if your cap is too low, all you have to do is increase your juice, and your stats will increase, thus giving your skills more room to increase. The exception here is wisdom, which is tied to a few skills... notably business and religion, don't remember off-hand about any others. You can *have* skills higher than the cap if you got them before your cap was lowered (eg, a rifle master who is paralyzed doesn't lose her skill, but she can't gain any more), and you can continue to accumulate experience. If you are currently capped, gather experience, and then later your skill cap is increased, your skill level will "spring up" to the level it should be, based on your experience. The idea is that regardless of how much experience you have, you're limited by your natural abilities -- if you're dumb as a rock, you'll never wrap your head around enough science to figure out that nuclear reactor, while high intelligence will allow you to learn what you need to learn. If you later get your head knocked and are really mentally slow, you'll by hurt by your lower stats (many many things check your stats as well as your skills), but you'll still be better than some up and coming whiz kid who doesn't have the same experience to fall back on.

At the moment Leadership just suppresses confessions in subordinates (keeping them on your side instead of breaking and testifying against you), and encourages subordinates to not permanently lose contact if you're sent to prison. It's not used frequently, as these rarely come up, but it's a pretty substantial effect where it is applied, and those are pretty serious situations where you can lose characters permanently. I'm happy to hear ideas on other areas where leadership can play a role.

[Mercutio Valentine]

Whoa, whoa. Death Squad units can be gotten via Seduction? How? I've never run into them when the Alarm wasn't raised. Same for SWAT teams and a few others.

(Actually, that's a pretty good idea for later... I might end up compiling a list of where you can run into what units for purposes of kidnapping/seduction/etc.)

[ February 09, 2008: Message edited by: Mercutio Valentine ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Get law enforement regulations down to Arch Conservative, and you can hang out with the Death Squads down at the police station.  

[a1s]

we have death squads?  :eek:
never saw them in game.
I used to seduce a few swats back in the 3.11, but they were actually worse then agents and had a good chance of dragging the seducer to prison.

[Skeeblix]

I'm loving the idea of capping the amount of recruiting you can do. It doesn't make sense that you can just go out and grab an army of disposable troops off the streets anyhow. You'd think after hearing about Liberals being killed by the dozens others would think twice about joining right away.

I also like the fact that your ideas would make it harder to become a giant force of Liberalism right away. You have to build up before you can go big. You'd need a good number of high-juice, skilled specialists, who sort of become the next ranking group of soldiers. Not everyone is going to want to join a bunch of low-skill hacks with guns and a cause to fight for; but a well tuned fighting force? That's a whole 'nother ballgame.

I also really like the idea of making individuals count, it's more of a Liberal way of thinking. See, the Conservatives just paste a serial number and job description on your forehead, AND THAT'S NOT THE WAY WE DO IT, MAN.

We gotta rise up and overcome! It should matter when a fellow Liberal is lost in battle, or taken to jail in a raid! True Liberalism is about the WILL OF THE INDIVIDUAL! FUCK THE MAN, WE ARE NOT DISPOSABLE, WE ARE PRICELESS AND UNIQUE!

But yeah, in-character rant aside, I'm loving your ideas, Jon. I think it's important for it to matter when someone on your side dies. You should stop for a moment and go "Aw, I liked so-and-so, they could do blablabla the best" Keep up the good thinking!

[ February 09, 2008: Message edited by: Skeeblix ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

http://www.jonathansfox.com/LCS/lcs_win32_312_alpha6.zip

- New Intro Options
- Activate Screen Revisions
- Finally, Training
- Hacking and Money Making Revisions

- Bugfixes and many minor changes.

Please criticize everything, Liberally.

Your saves will not be compatible. If you run the game with an old save file, the game will crash horrendously (I forgot to increment the version so that the game knows not to try to load the old save).

Edit: By the way, the next big to-do is to get the recruitment cap in. I'm glad you guys like the idea.   And thank you, it's rewarding to me to know that the hours of work I put into the game are appreciated.

[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Mercutio Valentine]

Jesus, son. Do you sleep? *goes to download*

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Testing this version was the most fun since... well, at least last version. For awhile there it kind of sucked. Not sure if there was an overall net gain or just recovered ground. Either way, it all balanced out in the end to me really wanting to get the release out.

[Mover#005]

Could you please upload the source somewhere so we can compile for ourselves? This thing doesn't work under linux in wine for some reason. Thanks

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Sure, absolutely. If you can use SVN, do a checkout here to get the latest code:

https://lcsgame.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lcsgame/branches/31104branch/

You'll need some curses implementation, but I don't think that's a problem if you're in linux. Don't expect the graphics to be pretty though, the linux graphics are something weird.

This is the bleeding edge of the code as I last touched it, post-alpha 6, so you'll get a little of what I've worked on since then, including the now-usable mass activation screen, the return of being able to have your people write for the Liberal Guardian, and finally figuring out what the heck is wrong with public opinion shifts that cause the LCS to always be insanely popular.

I can't guarantee that the game will build properly if you run the linux makefile. If you run into problems and can't figure out how to fix them, let me know what they are, and I might be able to help.

If you can't get it off SVN, I can zip the code up too and throw it on my website if you want me to.

EDIT: Updated the zip file to contain the changes above too. If you got alpha 6 before, you might want to re-download it, as it's a little shinier now. I guess that should be a new version, but I'm feeling even lazier now than I was when I forgot to increment the internal version number last night.

[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Mover#005]

whoops, thought the code on sourceforge was old... got it, thanks

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Heheh... it was old, actually. I DID tell SVN to commit when I posted alpha 6, but there was an error that I missed, so it didn't actually go through with it.