How would backtracking work
Some issues-changing methods will be intelligent. For example, if you're writing article and placing television ads, you'll always place ads that will attempt to sway public opinion in the direction you need. No need to be prompted every time.
The most direct methods will come from site actions and squad behavior.
For example, let's say you've gone too far on energy policy, and every home now has a portable nuclear reactor in its basement. So you break into some apartments and
set one off. This would shift public opinion back away from nuclear energy. Or let's say you still have "liberal" media functioning in your society. You could to break into their offices and replace their scripts so for a short while they'll be praising your cause instead of theirs. It will generally be possible to be very specific about what you want to accomplish during a site action. But this works both ways: making people hate corporations is no longer a matter of shooting people in corporate offices. You have to actually
do something that makes people hate corporations.
As to squad behavior, there are two major changes:
First, the primary methods of opinion and public interest change is receiving a slight conceptual change from LCS. The basic idea is to more closely tie the squads
behavior to how public opinion is changed, instead of tying it primarily to sites. For example, let's take gun control. If the squad goes into the local mall and guns down a dozen people, public opinion will shift in favor of gun control. But, if the squad goes to the same mall with katanas and cuts people down instead, public opinion will shift
against gun control. Reason being, "if we had guns we could have defended ourselves." This does cause the game to does lose most of its potential for comical irony, but as someone pointed out a few pages ago, this isn't LCS. We can take it in new directions.
Second, it will also be possible to sway some issues intelligently by using disguises to lead the public to believe the raid was performed by someone else. If you want public opinion to sway away from religion, disguise yourself as a bunch of priests and go on a killing spree. If you want people to hate the police, dress up as police when you do your bad deeds. Changing opinion in either direction will be possible in this way whether or not you've "passed" your target goal for an issue. Of course, as with LCS, a failed attempt can result in a backfire: if people realize it was really an
antipolice group trying to frame the police, they'll rally in favor of police even more strongly than before.