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[Katokijime]

I played a bit of 3.09 and started 3.18 three hours ago.

This is all the relevant help i could find out there and i the first 18 pages of this thread.

Sell brownies, after like 5 days, stop, do community service.

"Because of the new subordinate limits, recruit a lot of (green) lawyers and prostitutes early on. A cheap but tedious way to gain some juice (xp) is to unlock all the doors in an apartment building (do NOT open them). Then when you're done, go into the one closest to the exit (crowbar it open if you have to). Make 1 pass through the room to grab any goods, if you see "Conservatives Suspicious" leave immediately. Flee any red encounters - you're not liberal enough to fight or bluff yet."

"Get trenchcoats for everybody as soon as you can - it makes a big difference for survival." Is this still true?

Also, is dumping useless hippies by having them steal cars or do stuff until they're caught still the only way to remove them?

[viskaslietuvai]

I would say that pretty much the advice you've gotten so far is spot on, but there are other ways to start off besides the sell brownies/community service route.

For further advice check the LCS wiki.
http://lcs.wikidot.com/

[Alfador]

The LCS wiki is kind of spread out and needs cleaning up--or at the least, something like the "your first fortress" tutorial, maybe a "your first revolution" tutorial. Given that I'm just starting out myself, I'm probably not the best person to make one.

[mainiac]

The LCS wiki is kind of spread out and needs cleaning up--or at the least, something like the "your first fortress" tutorial, maybe a "your first revolution" tutorial.

This is very true.  I think I know the game well enough to write a guide, but I'm not sure where to start.  I think I'll start a new thread for this a bit later.

[narskie]

If it's going to be a mega thread for questions, I have two.  Usually when I start a new game on LCS I liberally use liberal disobedience to gain the first 20 juice for new recruits.  But all of a sudden these last two I've started I noticed they keep getting arrested.  It makes sense that someone might get put in jail overnight for splashing paint on fur coats or something, but previously I've never gotten arrested on a liberal disobedience order.  Was there a rule change?

Second, is there a law of dimishing returns with the recruiting scenario?  It seems like getting people up to "ready to fight for the liberal cause" is fairly easy at first, even with a low persuasion skill.  But later on, it becomes hard to push even a liberal transient up to "determined to do something"  with persuasion of 12. 

[mainiac]

Sounds to me like you are unlucky.  In my experience, it gets easier, not harder to recruit later in the game as you get better at it.  And you could always get arrested while doing activism, but it doesn't happen too often if you have no other crimes.  The only change there I am aware of is that now you can run away.  I think you either were unusually lucky in the past or are unlucky right now.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

A cheap but tedious way to gain some juice (xp) is to unlock all the doors in an apartment building (do NOT open them). Then when you're done, go into the one closest to the exit (crowbar it open if you have to). Make 1 pass through the room to grab any goods, if you see "Conservatives Suspicious" leave immediately. Flee any red encounters - you're not liberal enough to fight or bluff yet.

Neither of these work anymore. Picking locks does not give you juice, and if you break into an apartment, the alarm will sound immediately if spotted, instead of people just looking at you suspiciously when you're stalking through their apartment. You can still use spraypaint, as Mainiac described.

"Get trenchcoats for everybody as soon as you can - it makes a big difference for survival." Is this still true?

This is not true anymore. Trenchcoats will conceal some larger weapons like shotguns and MP5s, which makes them useful for a combat team if you don't want to set off the alarm immediately upon arriving on site, but they don't add armor anymore.

Also, is dumping useless hippies by having them steal cars or do stuff until they're caught still the only way to remove them?

Unfortunately, yes, unless you don't mind getting them shot. I want to change this.

If it's going to be a mega thread for questions, I have two.  Usually when I start a new game on LCS I liberally use liberal disobedience to gain the first 20 juice for new recruits.  But all of a sudden these last two I've started I noticed they keep getting arrested.  It makes sense that someone might get put in jail overnight for splashing paint on fur coats or something, but previously I've never gotten arrested on a liberal disobedience order.  Was there a rule change?

People can get arrested for liberal disobedience, and this has been the case since 3.09, but it's pretty uncommon. If your people are getting arrested regularly, well... make sure they're wearing clothes?

Second, is there a law of dimishing returns with the recruiting scenario?  It seems like getting people up to "ready to fight for the liberal cause" is fairly easy at first, even with a low persuasion skill.  But later on, it becomes hard to push even a liberal transient up to "determined to do something"  with persuasion of 12. 

There shouldn't be. Just make sure the person you're trying to persuade doesn't have a ton of Wisdom, and the LCS isn't hated. If you have a very unpopular LCS, that can make a difference.

[beorn080]

For getting caught doing illegal activities, street sense is more important now then in 3.09, which I'm not even sure if it was there then.

I noticed, when I was playing around with super liberal founders with 25 in stats and all skills cept wisdom, that recruitment would be incredibly hard. Not many people would bail, but actually increasing their willingness would be harder. Could be that there is a wraparound in that section of the code.

[irmo]

FWIW, I think it's somewhat useful that there's no easy way to get rid of "useless" members. It makes recruitment a strategic decision. You can't just grab any random fashion designer, have him make a full set of police and security uniforms and expensive suits, and then ditch him. You can park him at the Homeless Shelter and have him sell t-shirts until you need him again, but he still counts against the recruitment cap, so it's in your interest to recruit people who have a range of strengths.

Some way to avoid recruiting people by accident would be appreciated, though. Maybe at the "Stay at X as a sleeper agent/Join the active LCS" choice, there should be a third option, "Actually, let's not recruit this person". (This also lets you see where they'd be serving as a sleeper agent, since currently there's no way to tell until you've decided to recruit. Realistically[1], this is something your recruiter should find out in the first twenty minutes.)

[1] I know realism doesn't count for much in LCS, but I'm invoking it here to justify something that also makes sense on gameplay grounds.

[mainiac]

If you don't want to recruit someone after getting them on the line, just ask for a cash donation.

[beorn080]

He means after you ask him to join, but before you decide whether he joins the LCS directly or stays hidden as a liberal sleeper agent.

[irmo]

If you don't want to recruit someone after getting them on the line, just ask for a cash donation.

I'm aware of that. I'm talking about adding a confirmation step so that you don't irreversibly recruit someone with one keystroke in the middle of flipping through a dozen recruitment/donation candidates.

If the confirmation happens at the "join the LCS/become a sleeper" step, then it also fixes the problem of not knowing what kind of sleeper you'll get.

[narskie]

Thanks for everyone's response.  I did a little testing, and it seems the difficulty in getting the "x found y's views to be insightful" raises either after a lull of not earning juice for the persuader, or because the number of recruits for the persuader is full.  My 12 persuasion founder gained a liberal rank and now all of these people he'd been meeting with are now getting the blue "insightful" text.  Before this, he'd been meeting with them for days and getting nowhere.  He's obviously still at 12 (although he may go up by the end of the recruiting session now that his charisma is higher), so the only difference is that he has an open slot for a recruit and more juice. 

The next test will be if only leadership goes up but no juice (like from leadership skillup from subordinate juice), if recruitment success changes just from the free slot.   

[Cosmonot]

Thanks for everyone's response.  I did a little testing, and it seems the difficulty in getting the "x found y's views to be insightful" raises either after a lull of not earning juice for the persuader, or because the number of recruits for the persuader is full.  My 12 persuasion founder gained a liberal rank and now all of these people he'd been meeting with are now getting the blue "insightful" text.  Before this, he'd been meeting with them for days and getting nowhere.  He's obviously still at 12 (although he may go up by the end of the recruiting session now that his charisma is higher), so the only difference is that he has an open slot for a recruit and more juice. 

The next test will be if only leadership goes up but no juice (like from leadership skillup from subordinate juice), if recruitment success changes just from the free slot.   

It's probably because your recruiter's heart was too low relative to their wisdom. Gaining rank increases your heart, and it's possible to get people willing to join even if you don't have a recruitment slot available. If your heart isn't higher than the recruit's wisdom by a certain amount, you'll hit a brick wall unless you spend money on props. If you don't have a lot of heart, recruit hippies; they always have very low wisdom.

[beorn080]

So thats how it actually works. Never realized that.