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[Kay12]

Now that documentation is a hot topic, another little mystery that has been troubling me is safehouses and heat. Especially heat. The game presents a color-coded number with no explanation on what heat does, and after 2 years of playing, I must admit I'm not too sure myself! (although the heat system has changed more than once during that time)

So, what is heat? It's a way the game uses to measure the Conservative attention towards a Liberal or a safehouse, similar to wanted levels of other popular games. However, nothing in the game explains what that color coded number means. Especially because of the "secrecy"-number, also formatted as percents, there is plenty of room for confusion. Does 25% heat mean that the safehouse has a 25% chance to get raided? Does 95% secrecy mean that any heat lower than that may be ignored? These aren't explained at all. Decreasing heat by safehouse shuffle and community service aren't exactly obvious, and neither is the effect of shutting down the Police Station (although I think that's being worked on along with the other site documentations) or the effects of heat on non-police raids. Is heat just police attention, or does it also attract other enemies like the CCS and the Corporations?

So, how does the heat system work? How could it be improved to be more intuitive? I'll dive the source today to search for these heat springs, but here's what I know already...
* Only severe actions generate heat. These include prison breaks, murder, terrorism and treason. Kidnapped people and dead bodies also generate heat, I think.
* Heat won't start glowing on a safehouse until some threshold is passed (a few count of terrorism is needed to start heat accumulation)
* You can and will get raided by cops even if your heat is below the secrecy level.
* I'm fairly sure that firemen will raid even heat-free safehouses that publish the Guardian.
* Same applies to the extrajudicial raids from CIA, Corps and Media outlets.
* I think CCS used to only attack locations with heat on them, but I'm not sure since the recent versions have changed CCS raid behaviour.
* Community service and safehouse salsa lower heat. The pace of community service is about enough to clear one murder heat each week, and about a single terrorism/treason heat each month, if I remember correctly.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

All those changes have been futzing about trying to make it feel right for a player, and it's finally somewhere close to reasonable. Despite this small victory, I agree fully that it's nowhere near transparent. Having some display is better than nothing, but your description of the problems with the current display is dead on.

Heat is a target number that the police have to roll under to find your safehouse. They roll every day. Heat is displayed as a percent not because it's actually a percent, but because that gives you at least some sense of scale. Is 10 a big number for heat? 100? 1000? How much is too much? The percent gives context: We have a more intuitive sense that 10% is small, 100% is big, and 1000% is huge. We should definitely find a more intuitive way of communicating this (or, if you have any good ideas, a better way of handling heat in general).

I believe secrecy is actually a percent, and is pretty straightforward in the most recent iteration. Secrecy ranges from 0% to 95% in increments of 5%. It acts as a mask on heat, both slowing accumulation and reducing the cap. If your squad accumulates 20 heat in a 95% secrecy safehouse, that's because 95% of the squad's potential 400 heat is being masked. If it were possible to get 100% secrecy, you would never get heat.

[Kay12]

I must agree, it's a lot better than it used to be.

If I've understood correctly, the cops have to plan a raid before actually doing it, right? So it's not just random rolls, but random rolls and a delay?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I must agree, it's a lot better than it used to be.

If I've understood correctly, the cops have to plan a raid before actually doing it, right? So it's not just random rolls, but random rolls and a delay?

Yeah, they roll to find you, then start a countdown. They stop rolling during the countdown and then raid when the countdown expires.

This one time at band camp, there was a bug where the police would continue to roll during the countdown and reset the raid timer if they found you again. Very high heat safehouses would never get raided for that reason.

[Kay12]

Presenting heat in a better fashion would be hard because of the limited size of the screen. Everything should stay compact. One alternative system would be to retain the calculations similar but round the results to a fixed scale, like the 6-star rating in GTA. It would have the advantage of presenting things in a way that is familiar to many new players and it puts the heat in scale - 1/6 stars feels like a minimal risk, while a meter full of stars would accurately present the risk involved with camping here. Obvious disadvantage would be that it would make any long-term changes (like volunteering) even more obscure, unless the scale is fairly large. And at a fairly large scale we'd run out of screen space and wrap back into numbers. Must think...

[Dwarven WMD]

Presenting heat in a better fashion would be hard because of the limited size of the screen. Everything should stay compact. One alternative system would be to retain the calculations similar but round the results to a fixed scale, like the 6-star rating in GTA. It would have the advantage of presenting things in a way that is familiar to many new players and it puts the heat in scale - 1/6 stars feels like a minimal risk, while a meter full of stars would accurately present the risk involved with camping here. Obvious disadvantage would be that it would make any long-term changes (like volunteering) even more obscure, unless the scale is fairly large. And at a fairly large scale we'd run out of screen space and wrap back into numbers. Must think...

Considering what we do half the time, we'd need a ten star scale.
A better question is how we know what our heat levels are. Does some Conservative just show up saying "Hey, we suspect you _____much."? Maybe heat should be a bit more obscure; instead of numbers, you just get messages such as "One of your liberals notices an increased number of police cruisers near Generic Liberal Safehouse"? Only getting certain sleepers would give an approximate idea of how much you're being noticed and it still wouldn't be reliable if you're seen as too dangerous and the sleeper is some kind of peon; A simple cop will hear less about a raid than an agent given certain circumstances.

[Kay12]

More obscure heat has problems - even the current system is in no way obvious enough about the positive effects of volunteering, for example. The percents don't just start falling off fast enough to be noticeable. Maybe adding a text (cooling) or (warming) to the safehouse if it's undergoing significant heat change?

[Elodie Hiras]

A better question is how we know what our heat levels are. Does some Conservative just show up saying "Hey, we suspect you _____much."?

My guess is that members of the LCS are smart enough to know they are being wanted by every policeman in the city. They have an idea of the relative safety of their little outpost. They don't know how close the police is from finding them, but they know how wanted they are, and how well they are hidden. This is represented by heat.

[Kay12]

LCS is a game, and knowing the amount of heat is one of those little comforts that can be afforded to these binary brothers (and sisters, thank you Loretta) in arms, in my opinion.

On the other hand, there could be an activity similar to opinion polls, let's call it "Intelligence", that makes a Liberal stalk the streets and report anything out of ordinary. Having multiple Liberals do it could reveal raids and general safety of different safehouses beforehand, in addition to some other benefits I haven't got time to think about yet. Perhaps they'd notice CCS safehouses after collecting enough data?

[Dwarven WMD]

LCS is a game, and knowing the amount of heat is one of those little comforts that can be afforded to these binary brothers (and sisters, thank you Loretta) in arms, in my opinion.

On the other hand, there could be an activity similar to opinion polls, let's call it "Intelligence", that makes a Liberal stalk the streets and report anything out of ordinary. Having multiple Liberals do it could reveal raids and general safety of different safehouses beforehand, in addition to some other benefits I haven't got time to think about yet. Perhaps they'd notice CCS safehouses after collecting enough data?

Maybe you choose the intelligence activity, and you get a list of information to look for or a list of places to spy at?
Something like:
Intelligence>Location>Method>Type

So maybe you get something like:

Code: [Select]

The Woz will do Social Engineering at Cyber Unicorn Cafe and record Any Intel.
This will cost 0$. Proceed?
Also, if I remember correctly, community service has little effect on heat, and just makes the public have a higher opinion of you and possibly affects sentencing. I've never seen heat go down from community service.

[Kay12]

Community service has been buffed recently. If I've understood the source correctly, it has 1/3 chance each day to remove one "point" of heat. If these are the same points of heat in the crime list I saw somewhere in the source, community service is fairly effective: a murder is worth two points, so one will stop causing heat after about a week. Terrorism and treason are the highest heat single crimes, at 10 points each, taking about one month to clear up.