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[LordBucket]

The following strategy will allow you to win 100% of the time, with no save-scumming and no possibility of danger, even on nightmare mode.

 * No recruits - use the founder only
 * No fighting - ever
 * Never be wanted for any crime

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Starting out

Choose a high heart/charisma/persuasion/psychology build. For example:

Nobel peace prize:  +2 heart
Father lectured me: +1 heart +1 psychology
Class clown:        +1 charisma +1 persuasion
Mom slept with lawyer: +1 seduction
Draw a better world: +2 heart
Religious counseling: +1 pyschology
Control people: +1 charisma, +2 persuasion
People pay for sex: +1 charisma, +2 seduction
Meet a law student: free sleeper
Write your manfiesto: +4 charisma

Using V4.x, this will start you with:

15 Heart
13 Charisma
7 Intelligence
3 Persuaion
3 Seduction
2 Psychology

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Skilling and gearing up

Your targets are:

10 persusaion
6 seduction
6 security
8 disguise

A black dress
Any handgun
Approximately $5000

Right away, go to the vegan co-op. Talk to everyone who is green, and seduce everyone who isn't. Once seduction light ups because of the full point of skill gain you'll be limited in the amount of further gain you can get. It appears that skill gains past that point are capped at .45, but I have occassionally seen it cap at .46 and .47 as well. In any case, 15 additional seduction attempts will usually be enough to reach cap, so there's no need to continue seducing people after that point. Having about 30-50 liberals waiting to meet you is about right. Break off all dates.

These liberals will continue to give you skillgains on a dimishing return every day that you talk to them, so chat with them every day for 4-5 days before soliciting donations from them. You will notice that in addition to persusaion skill, this will also give you business/law/religion/etc skills as well, though not nearly as much.

During those 4-5 days you'll want to be training other skills. Go to the apartments every day and pick every lock and seduce every red you see. Once again, skillgains per site visit are capped, so you may not need to finish every floor. Stay until you think you've reached cap, and then leave.

After the 4-5 days are up, squeeze all the liberals you've been talking to for donations. This will typically net you about $2000, depending on how many liberals you were talking to. Now that you have funds, go to the department store and buy a $500 black dress. Start over again at the vegan co-op and talk to another 30-50 liberals and repeat the above process. However, this time instead of focusing on seduction and security, go to the ministry of love, or any secure location for which the black dress is a disguise, and stand just inside the entrance, only one or two steps inside the building. Wait for conservatives to show up. If anyone especially dangerous like agents shows up, seduce them and find some nice, harmless secretaries and office clerks. This isn't strictly neccesary, but you may as well take every precaution you can. Also avoid dogs, as they appear not to give disguise skillgains. If the arrivals are inappropriate for any reason, simply walk away and step back near the exit. Once you've found an appropriate target, press s repeatedly to wait. This will train disguise skill. Continue doing this until the first sign of trouble. The second you see that conervatives are suspicious, leave immediately.

Repeat this process until you have all the gear and skill levels listed above. If you want to be especially cautious, there is a slight advantage to continuing this process to get enough money to buy a $5000 expensive dress as a swapout, but it's not neccesary. Feel free to also continue the process to get your persuasion and disguise skills higher, though I have not found it to be neccesary to do so.

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Juicing up and psychology

Now that you're able to go anywhere with impunity, it's time to go the courthouse. Somewhere inside there will be a jury you can influence. With 15 heart, 10 persuasion and a point or two of law, I've never seen a jury fail to be convinced. Doing so will net you 20 juice and some amount of persuasion and law skill gains. Do this for a week or two, until you have 200 juice. You probably don't need quite that much before you start looking for conservatives to date-nap, or you can keep going to 500 if you'd prefer, but I find 200 to be a good, safe amount. Be absolutely certain to have your handgun equipped when you start date-napping, as even the occassional secretary will knock you unconscious if you don't have it.

While you're making your runs through the courthouse, start looking for high-heart conservatives. Your best targets will be musicians and psychologists. If you want to play it especially safe, you might want to wait until you've reached your juice target of 200 or 500, and then if you're really paranoid you can continue the above processes until your persuasion skill is capped. But it's not really neccesary. By now you probably have 16-17 heart, and 10-14 persuasion. Combined with your starter 2 points of psychology that's probably enough to brainwash any high-heart target before they're missed.

Note that you don't have to try to brainwash everyone you seduce. You'll be able to see a targets stats during the date-napping screen. If your target has 3 heart and 10 wisdom, for example, break it off and find another target. The first few times you'll want a target with 6-8 heart and no more than that much wisdom.

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Brainwashing, because conservative minds are dirty

Time to start brainwashing. Your first few targets are mostly just to train psychology, but if you've done everything I've described above you should be able to succefully brainwash even your first target before he's discovered missing. Note that if you bought a $5000 expensive dress, now is the time to put it on, as it will make brainwashing easier, though again, I haven't found this to be neccesary. The regular $500 black dress is almost as good. Regarding the brainwashing, there is some room for flexibility here, but in general the formula for success is to leave the defaults, except take away food and water for 2-3 days, then give them food and water. Repeat. Don't worry about hurting them. Once their heart rises above their wisdom, it's usally safe to feed and water them every day until they convert. If the conversaion process seems to be taking a long time, add in $100 expensive props, or optionally, $50 drugs. However, I find that these can sometimes be counter-productive at low levels of psychology. Your objective is to win by grinding skills and find an easy target, rather than winning by clever brainwashing techniques. Be sure to tell every sleeper you get to promote liberalism, as they do nothing by default.

Repeat this process several more times to grind up your psychology skill. More is better. Once you have 5-8 or so skill, feel free to start branching out to more interesting targets. Or be as paranoid and careful as you'd like. In general, once your psychology skill is equal to, or greater than the wisdom of your target, simply accepting the defaults without bothering to starve them will work flawlessly. Eventually you will even see succesfull brainwashes on the very first day using the default settings.

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60 sleepers, because naps are nice

To win, you will need approximately 60 sleepers. That's three pages full on the review-sleepers page. You'll want a broad mix of people able to affect as many issues as possible.

Never kidnap any police, gang unit, or DethSquad officers. With no combat skills, these targets will occassionally knock you out during the date-napping attempt, even if you are armed.

Be careful about priests, lab techs, eminent scientists, and corporate mangers and CEO's. Yes, you do want these targets, but high business/religion/etc skills can be used to resist brainwashing if you lack a correspondingly high skill. Even with 15 psychology, a corporate CEO with 8 business can resist brainwashing. To overcome these targets, in addition to very skill skill, you will also need to make a point of starving and dehydrating them for a few days. Yes, you can still get 100% gaurunteed conversaion, but these targets can be more difficult and it is best to be especially cautious with them. Simply avoid them until you are at psychology skillcap, and make sure to starve them and use drugs and props. The $5000 you saved up earlier will be used to pay for props for these targets. After a few days of this, their barriers will be down. Note that hangin' judges are probably in this category as well, but if you've done the training and juicing described previously, you probably have 6-10 law, which is plenty to overcome most anything a judge can put up.

From my experience, 60 sleepers is a relatively safe minimum. If you want to be cautious, an extra 20 would be perfectly reasonable. Again, be sure to have at least a couple of every type. A page or so worth of highly conservative targets such as judges, CEO's etc. would also be good, but in general, so long as you're not getting lots of janitors and teenagers,  quantity seems to be more important than quality. Simply grab everyone you can. It may take a couple hours, but with the average conversion taking 1-4, it is very possible to have all the sleepers you need by October of your first game year.

--------------

L for Victory!

Once you have your 60-80 sleepers, view the issues and disband LCS. Hold down spacebar for a minute or two. Congratulations. The country is now liberal.

[Megaman]

some things can go wrong even if you have mad phycology. Also this won't work in hte 'hardest setting', because CCS might find you, kill you, rape you.

[E. Albright]

Even with 15 psychology, a corporate CEO with 8 business can resist brainwashing.

That's what drugs are for. In addition to defending against table-turning, they punch through anti-brainwashing defenses.

Once you're good enough, you can completely forgo nuance in brainwashing. My current game has my mutant smooth talker doing absolutely nothing but tying them up and talking to them, and can usually turn anyone in 4 days or less. High Heart and low Wisdom are just as important as Psych; since she had 20 and 2, respectively, she never bothered to explicitly grind Psych and started her brainwashing on Arch Conservatives. Well, she did grab a few bouncers out of frustration at not being let into the club, but her first C+ was her 5th victim. After 33 conversions (21 C+), she still only has 12 Psych.

[Megaman]

and if you get it wrong early on the cops start making angry facs and impriosioning people

[Neonivek]

This is kinda one of those things I want fixed so that it cannot be done.

Like a chance a sleeper will be found out and people will realise someone is brainwashing people activating the CCS who are more efficiant then you are if you just creating sleepers.

[Servant Corps]

some things can go wrong even if you have mad phycology. Also this won't work in hte 'hardest setting', because CCS might find you, kill you, rape you.

That's why you disband, so you let your Sleeper Army (presumably) drown the CCS' message out.

[Neonivek]

Yes but an Active CCS should be much more effective then an army of sleepers and disbanded LCS

[LordBucket]

This is kinda one of those things I want fixed so that it cannot be done.

I don't know that I'd call it broken. I lean towards calling it a valid, alternate playstyle. In fact, in some ways it's a lot more difficult than it used to be. The build up is easier...skill gains are a lot faster, and knowing for certain that you have no heat saves a lot of heartache, but it takes a lot more sleepers to win now than it used to.

Like a chance a sleeper will be found out

As it is, sleepers occassionallly disband and show up at the homeless shelter, and sometimes die of old age.

[Neonivek]

I don't know that I'd call it broken. I lean towards calling it a valid, alternate playstyle.

It bypasses the themes and in some ways the point of LCS turning what should be an advantage into a game winning strategy.

As well it also destroys the Nemesis of the game (CCS) and turns them into sort of a joke since they can apperantly be defeated by 80 people speaking bad things about conservatism.

At least the game should call you out on it: "Congradulations, America is now Liberal thanks to no one" or something. Maybe calling it the "Shadow President" ending or something.

[LordBucket]

As well it also destroys the Nemesis of the game (CCS) and turns them into sort of a joke

I've only played a couple games since the CCS was introduced, but I haven't found them to be much of an influence either way. They only seem to show up if you start shooting up sites with SMGs. Most actions, sleepers, grafitti, writing, juries, prison breaks, hijacking radio stations...none of this kind of thing triggers them. It seems to be really hard to activate the CCS without going out of your way to blow places up.

It bypasses the themes and in some ways the point of LCS

Maybe, but I think that has more to do with the consequences of fighting than brainwashing. In my experience, heavy-combat strategies are unreliable and problematic. Training difficulties, deaths, high heat requiring you to constantly move people around, arrested characters being out of commission for months until trial or needing rescue which requires a second team to be able to do it, occassionally abandoning you and ratting on others, the CCS...there's an awful lot of overhead involved with lots of fighting and there isn't really much benefit from it. It's so much safer and easier to have a team of writers, or a guitar squad, or stealth into sites, or focus on sleepers...pretty much anything else you can do in the game is simpler and easier and less trouble than fighting.

I kind of miss the days of running around with my swords and trenchcoats squad. But it's been a while since it made much sense to do that.

[Neruz]

Maybe, but I think that has more to do with the consequences of fighting than brainwashing. In my experience, heavy-combat strategies are unreliable and problematic. Training difficulties, deaths, high heat requiring you to constantly move people around, arrested characters being out of commission for months until trial or needing rescue which requires a second team to be able to do it, occassionally abandoning you and ratting on others, the CCS...there's an awful lot of overhead involved with lots of fighting and there isn't really much benefit from it. It's so much safer and easier to have a team of writers, or a guitar squad, or stealth into sites, or focus on sleepers...pretty much anything else you can do in the game is simpler and easier and less trouble than fighting.

I kind of miss the days of running around with my swords and trenchcoats squad. But it's been a while since it made much sense to do that.

The ironic thing is that the brainwashing approach is a substantially more realistic way of winning than running around with an armed squad blowing shit up.

[E. Albright]

And that is a problem. I am not saying that LCS should go pure combat but I am saying that combat has effectively been written out.

But it hasn't. If we take the assertion that the violent play style is effectively removed from the game by the viability of sleepers, then we may as well concede that it never existed. Sleepers have always been the safest and surest (albeit not fastest) road to victory, harkening back to the days well before the CCS had even been contemplated. If anything, they're toned down from what they used to be - there was a time that 2-3 News Anchors would win you the game with no other actions or sleepers required.

[Leafsnail]

Um, I have a problem.  For some reason none of the doors in the apartments are locked.  This means I can't train security.  How come?

[Alexhans]

I think that this kind of alternatives are always fun to try...

If you like the violent approach... go for it.  You'll have fun too.

Something that maybe should be added is some sort of limit to the number of pick up attempts (I mean what raises your stats) because after a while people will start seeing you as a player and wont want to give you the hour if you flirt with them...

Or not? 

Anyway, the idea behind this is that you wont be able to increase too much seduction in one visit.

It's

[Leafsnail]

Oh, by the way, this message comes up at the start:

"Attempting to open filename: sitemaps.txt Failed to load sitemaps.txt!  Reverting to old map mode".  Could this have something to do with the sudden dissapearance of locks on apartment doors?