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[Jonathan S. Fox]

What is the most repetitive thing you do in Liberal Crime Squad?

Is it because something is too hard? The interface is clunky? Something else?

What of this be automated?

[Capital Fish]

My most repetitive task is trying to encounter people who have no set spawning location. Soldiers, army vets, and the like. I'll spend months in the game, just wandering around the industrial apartments and the park trying to find these people.

[LordBucket]

What is the most repetitive thing you do in Liberal Crime Squad?

The recruiting/talking/dismissing/dating process.

Allow me to explain:

Step 1: I've started a new game, I'm alone with my foudner, and I immediately go to the vegan coop and start talking to people for recruits/skill gains/money. To begin with, this basically amount to holding down the wait key until somebody shows up, then mechanicaly going through a key sequence...invite them to chat if they're green, seduce them if they're red, go back to waiting, repeat. I routinely do this for five minutes at a time in the early game.

Steo 2: Once I leave the site, I then have 50-100 people to sort through. For liberals this basically amounts to pressing b-space-space 50 or so times. I can't see their stats yet, there's nothing else I can realistically do but talk to them, so I just go through the sequence. Once it swaps over to dating, it's basically holding down d to break off all the dates. Notably...during the transition from talking to liberals to talking to dates, if I'm impatient sometimes I accidentally press the wrong key when the first person to date comes up. This is kind of annoying, but it's not realy worth paying close attention during the b-space-space sequence.

Step 3: Even if I don't start over again from step 1 for more seduction gains, I inevitably have to repeat step 2 three or four (or more) times at the end of every day at least until the people I'm talking to like me enough that I can take money from them and send them on their way. This means I end up pressing b-space-space hundreds and hundreds of times.

Step 4: Start over and do this whole process 1 through 3 again several more times. Why? Because the vast majority of potential recruits have lousy stats and I don't want them. It's amazing to me how many supposedly "liberal" hippies, gang memebrs and prostitutes all have 5+ wisdom. Also, talking to people like this day afetr day is the only practical way to get those starter few points of law/business/religion, which is extremely helpful for brainwashing. When I get a good batch of people to talk to, it's not uncommon for me to keep them inthe talk-queue for weeks just to leech skill gains off them.

What of this be automated?

Might be nice, but it would have to be carefully considered to keep from trivializing the process. It would be nice to not have to press the same key sequences zilions of times, but I wouldn't want to feel like I'm mail-ordering perfect recruits. Yes...the process is annoying, but there may be other parts of the game that are more crucial right now.

If you really want to improve the interface, a complete overhaul might be more appropriate.

Something else?

On a related note, I would propose that:

1) The wisdom of liberals be looked at. It seems consistently higher than it should be. As it is, it's actually easier to get 1-wisdom recruits by brainwashing conservatives than by recruiting people who were supposedly liberal to begin with.

2) Between talking and dating, when looking at the "you have dates with (list follows)" screen, we might want a required keypress that isn't the same key used while taking to people. When pressing b-space-space 50+ times, it's sometimes difficult to stop the mindless sequence in time to keep from pressing b on the first date.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

LordBucket: I always feel bad when my first reaction to someone sharing their strategy with me is "That strategy needs to be nerfed," but my initial response to your scouring for recruits is to:

1. Dramatically reduce or remove the monetary gains through the recruit process (already something I think needs to be done),
2. Improve the quality of the basic recruits, at least by looking at the maximum wisdom of Liberals, so you don't feel as obligated to search so many recruits, and
3. Make it so you can only try to recruit one person at a time with each character, so it's less desirable to search so many recruits.

The third one means that you will pay a price in time for searching through so many recruits. One of the reasons I capped how many people you could recruit was to discourage people from recruiting a huge number of folks, but it's only slightly better if you almost recruit, but eventually reject, a huge number of folks instead.

Ultimately, I want to make the strategies that power gamers choose be the strategies that are lots of fun and not too grindy. I think LCS is more fun when you dive in and use your people rather than jumping through hoops before you get started. How can this early game be better designed to avoid that kind of start? It doesn't just have to be punishing grinding recruits like this; it could also be rewarding some alternate behavior too.

[LordBucket]

How can this early game be better designed to avoid that kind of start?

Make it easier to get the sort of recruits you want. Remove the RNG from the process. Whatever strategy I choose to play, I need recruits capable of carrying it out. If I want fighters, they need certain stats. If I want writers, they need certain stats. Whatever I want, they need certain stats. So there needs to be a way to get people with certain stats that doesn't involve depending on the RNG to give them to me. Whether I go through 50 people in one day or 50 people over 50 days makes no difference. Either way I had to go through 50 people until the RNG gave me what I knew I wanted to begin with.

The simplest solution would be to fix stats by creature type. All hippies have the same starting stats as all other hippies, all agents have the same starting stats as all other agents, etc. That instantly removes the incentive to scour through a zillion potential recruits: whatever you want, you know where to get it.

However, that solution does tremendously simplify building your team to begin with. Maybe that's a good thing. Or maybe it isn't. We'd have to think about it. It might be worthwhile to think up a system whereby spending more time gauruntees the ability to find a better recruit, without depending on the RNG. You can have bad recruits who will start working right now, or you can invest some time and be rewarded with better recruits later.

I suppose the most obvious way to do that would be to make the better recruits innaccessible for some reason. For example, desk jockeys in the high rise building would naturally have better stats than the hippies at the juice bar, but to get to the desk jockeys you have to be able to get to them, which may require fighting/stealthing/lockpicking, etc. That ties in nicely with what I've proposed before: making LCS more "progressive" by area. Things that require more effort to go to give better reward. As it is, everything is pretty much random and there's very little incentive to get very deep into anything. The bottom floor of a building is just as good as the top floor. The recruits in the safe area one step into the building are just as good as the recruits behind ten locked doors and a dozen armed guards. I think that needs to change.

Another possible solution would be to change attributes so that they can be improved by means other than juice: Eliminate the "maximum stat cap" concept. The only reason any of us go through the process of scouring recruits at all is that we know if we get a bad one, we're stuck with him for a while. I don't want a writer who will cap at writing 12 when I could have a writer who will cap at 20 instead. But there is an absolute cap to the amount of attribute gains possible from juice. Change that, and a big chunk of the incentive to scour recruits goes away.

I think LCS is more fun when you dive in and use your people rather than jumping through hoops before you get started.

I'm somewhat inclined to agree...but the current design simply doesn't encourage that. The safest, most effective and most reliable strategies mostly invove sitting back and doing very grindy things: Put clothes on, go to the bar and press S a bunch of times to train disguise. Take clothes of, go to the bar and press S a bunch of times to train stealth. Go to an apartment building and open every door to train lockpicking. There's no danger involved in any of this, there's no skill, and it's not particularly fun...it's just something you have to do. Need persuasion? Talk to people and press b-space-space a bunch of times. Need juice? Do all of the above first and then run to the jury and press u-y, leave and repeat until you're an elite liberal. Neither is there any time based incentive, and there's only a hint of increasingly stringent requirements to get increasingly better results. If I can grind to 100 juice by talking to juries, there's no reason not to continue grinding juries until I get 1000 juice. I may as well. There's no reason not to, and I didn't have to do anything particularly difficult to get the the point that I could. Jury tampering is where all my people get the vast majority of their juice because once I grind out the required persuasion and law for my foudner, it's free juice for anybody and everybody forever.

There really isn't much about the game that can be effectively "trained" through actual gameplay. In previous versions, combat was that way...I used to enjoy taking my katana teams through cutting everyone to pieces, and yes...gaining skill in the process. But in recent versions I've found that combat heavy strategies are fantastically difficult, and not terribly effective. It's safer and easier to do absolutely anything else.

[Leafsnail]

What is the most repetitive thing you do in Liberal Crime Squad?

Waiting around.  Just pressing w and watching a bit, with the occasional raid.

Is it because something is too hard? The interface is clunky? Something else?

More because all liberalisation techniques take time, and sleepers seem to be too weak at the moment to keep society liberal if you disband.

What of this be automated?

I'd be fine if it just removed all the messages that come up between days other than messages about beatings and arrests.

[Kanil]

I would support capping the number of people an individual can be meeting with at any given time, but I'd much prefer the number be higher than one, and perhaps not more than five.

Edit: Would it be possible for the wait command to instantly generate an encounter? As of now, it merely provides a chance for one.

I'm not sure if there's another use for the wait command, all I can think of is dodging the roaming parties, but you can't get regular encounters when there's roaming ones... IIRC.

I've spent the last length of time trying to recruit a dancer, it's going poorly. They're pretty much uniformly conservative in nightmare mode, and my seduction kinda sucks. So I just wait around until I find out, usually try to date it and fail (either immediately or during the actual date) and looking for a moderate one will take some time.

[funwithphobias]

I'm late to the party, but I wanted to add burglary and interrogation to that list. Stealing from the rich apartments is the best way to accumulate funds, but after you get the police uniform and a decent disguise skill it just becomes a chore. Also, the interrogation system could use some diversity.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Any ideas on stealing and interrogation?

[Necaladun]

Stealing - higher risk/higher reward perhaps?

Diamonds or large amounts of cash at places with very good guards.

OTOH, I stopped stealing once my legal sources of cash make a lot.

[themel]

I'd like to chime in and say that, yes, recruiting and stealing can be a grind, but I'm still fresh enough to the game to remember the initial fascination of walking around town trying to recruit fellow liberals to my task, and the excitement of tiptoeing through other people's apartments (this back in pre-4.01, when stealing was a lot more dangerous and gave no juice). Simply making every recruit's stats the same would make it easier to implement a preconceived strategy, but I think it would overall be detrimental to the game's charm. Yes, you spend a lot of time looking for really good recruits, but I think that's an essential part of the early game - you need to balance between immediate needs and your hope to find the perfect recruits later on.

I'd generally like the ability to choose whether to do some actions automatically vs manually, with "automatic" results determined by skill (and probably somewhat penalized), so that for example you'd have to steal a lot initially to get good at it, but when your super thieves then go to rob the downtown apartments for the twentieth time, you can just control general strategy akin to the "Steal Vehicle" process ("Steal more", "Run", "Fight"). Might work the same for siege defence, since the soldiers just don't stand a chance after a certain point, and their calling every third day really slows down the wait for that crucial election you need.

Keeping the back office troops armed for defence can also become a chore later on, a single-key "arm to the teeth with the weapon you have max skill in and pick up as much ammo as you can carry (or is your fair share of whatever is left)" would be nice. Maybe the same for interrogation.

I'd also like to complain about the Equipment Move screen, switching safe houses becomes rather impractical once you want to move a couple thousand items along (yes, I like the stacks of AR magazine, and I usually can't keep up with getting all the Army Body Armour [D] repaired as quickly as they come in). Why doesn't it work like the Equip or Buy/Sell screens and allows numerical type-in?

More: Well, the pop-ups. Please let me turn off the more useless announcements ("working to repair/repaired/cleaned clothing"). Don't make the opinion polls a pop-up every day, just give me the option of looking at them if I have them collected.

Fantasy country: Large squad management would be improved by UI features allowing me to search for people by name (typeahead!) or sorting the list by points on certain skills.

[Draco18s]

The recruit process, definately.

Just the other day I was wandering around the downtown apartments and it was taking ages upon ages between encounters, 75% of which I had no interest in (I wanted a corporate manager to kidnap).  I could literally walk every square of the building (not including the locked rooms) and encounter no one.

Beyond that, recruits needs to be simplified.  The whole "A to spend money, B to talk" is basically a meaningless choice: they do the same thing, but A uses resources.  I'd say to just reduce it down to "you meet with various people, X think you're crazy" for a few days until their full stats would be available and it would give you a chance to review and recruit some of them.  Along with that and the new limit on how many meetings you can have, it would be nice to indicate on that Liberal's page (under "N sexual interests") how many meetings they have that night and how many they can handle.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Just the other day I was wandering around the downtown apartments and it was taking ages upon ages between encounters, 75% of which I had no interest in (I wanted a corporate manager to kidnap).  I could literally walk every square of the building (not including the locked rooms) and encounter no one.

People don't really mill about in the hallways of the apartments during the day, so that's your problem in that case. There's actually a reduced encounter rate and reduced encounter size in apartments. If you want a corporate manager, you probably want to go to the Corporate HQ.

[Draco18s]

People don't really mill about in the hallways of the apartments during the day

Implies that you can get there at night?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I'd have to add an option to support it, and there'd be little benefit. The main difference is that most people would be in their apartments, which would make it extremely difficult to steal anything from them. Apartment hallways are not particularly happening places. Most people walk through them twice a day; once in the morning, once at night. In tenements, they might be hangouts for teenagers or gang members, but you won't find corporate managers taking smoke breaks in their apartment hallways or anything. There are other places to look for them though, like the Corporate HQ, the park or latte stand, or the gentleman's club.

I realize that apartments used to have a higher spawn rate, but I changed that in the most recent set of versions to make it less incredibly dangerous to rob apartments and a bit more realistic. There are only a handful of characters you can't find elsewhere (besides the park and latte stand, which should have almost everyone), and they're not critical.