Setting aside the tone of the argument, but addressing the central concerns motivating its start in the first place, I've never played a version of LCS where sleepers weren't the primary way to win. I wrote a
post not unlike this one five years ago, back when Toady was coding the game himself, and I was a teenage fanboy.
The synopsis of my post was criticizing the ability to play like this:
1. Recruit one squad of sweatshop workers.
2. Have them make and sell expensive suits at the pawn shop. This was the way to grind money back then, garnering around $8000/day for a single squad of sweatshop workers.
3. Seduce three full squads of agents with a random sweatshop worker. They were the best fighters, and seducing anyone was much easier back then. This made your safehouse effectively invincible.
4. Buy a printing press, then crack the intelligence HQ supercomputer using a single programmer grabbed off the street in a black suit and publish records in the guardian. This was the easiest way to grind juice back then, as each publication gave 50 juice to the entire LCS, including your three squads of agents and your founder, without having to use those characters.
5. Kidnap and convert four news anchors into sleepers.
6. Attack the Cable News and AM Radio stations to bring those issues to 100%.
7. Disband.
In fact this strategy was an expanded one designed to show multiple overpowered mechanics. A smaller but just as effective strategy would go like this:
1. Recruit sweatshop workers and sell expensive suits.
2. Kidnap and convert four news anchors, using the suit money to finance conversions.
3. Suicide a few squads of sweatshop workers into the AM Radio and Cable News stations.
4. Disband.
I nerfed the expensive suit strategy to death in my first release, recruiting agents and other powerful characters is now significantly more challenging, and publishing special editions no longer gives massive juice bonuses to the entire LCS. I also overhauled interrogation, and success in both that and seduction now depends more on the skills of your character, not the amount of money you spend.
I've been working on the sleeper issue for years. The formula is completely different now, and they're much weaker, but they now have more abilities and depth, and their own screen. Yet sleepers are still "The" way to win -- you just need more of them, more varied targets, and more skilled characters to convert them.
Now that sleepers have other abilities, it occurs to me that we could actually remove their passive ability to alter the issues, with the exception of the News Anchor and Radio Personality sleepers, who could have a unique ability to steadily liberalize those issues at a rate of one point a month per sleeper, killing the Conservative media over time by destroying their message from the inside. To compensate, strengthening the currently "secondary" abilities of most sleepers is perhaps called for -- and maybe removing the ability of non-sleeperizing dates and interrogations to provide a map of the person's workplace, in order to make this a sleeper-only ability?
Edit: Note that we would need to reduce the instability of issues (random movement, events) during disband if sleepers won't be there to constantly counteract any movement during this time. That's not too hard, however.
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Topic: Flawless, perfectly safe winning strategy (Read 11619 times)