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[Kay12]

A perennial topic, endgame challenge deserves a thread of its own. Most of the difficulty modifiers in LCS happen in the early game if they increase difficulty, and late game if they decrease it. Examples (not comprehensive):

- Liberal Guardian may be torched by firemen only if Free Speech is C+
- Death squads, a nasty and common NPC only appears if Police and Death penalty laws are C+
- Many common NPCs have stronger weapons when gun control is more Conservative (counterpoint to this one below)
- Liberals get death sentences easier if Death penalty laws are Conservative

On the other hand, Conservatism has some relatively minor advantages:

- Most forms of fundraising lose effectiveness if society is Liberal enough
- Most guns are harder to get in the late game (although you'll probably have more than enough guns in any case)


So, this is a thread for addressing the issue of difficulty balancing. Two suggestions from me:

* CCS should spring out later. I'm actually working on this, so no need to care about this unless you want to complain. The LCS appears only once an Arch Conservative Prez is elected and the Congress is Conservative, and the term before that is implied to have been Conservative as well. CCS appears way earlier - when the public opinion flips over 60% Liberal, that is.

* Public opinion needs to be tweaked. Currently, the system has two kinds of people - "ALWAYS MORE LIBERAL" and "ALWAYS MORE CONSERVATIVE". It makes sense to support LCS when the people think that the country is too conservative, but popularity should be harder to gain after the country is Moderate-Liberal already: "Wait, what, they still think this is bad? Wow..."

[Jonathan S. Fox]

A more complex public opinion scale would be pretty straightforward to simulate. You could do it by storing an array of 4 floats or integers for each issue. Each number represents the percentage of people who think the current law is "liberal enough" at a certain tier of the issue. For example:

Free Speech
| C+ | C  | M  | L  |
| 10 | 24 | 53 | 80 |

This means that:
10% want C+
14% want C
29% want M
27% want L
20% want L+

This scheme is superior to storing the number of people in each bucket directly, because it doesn't suffer the risk that you'll have greater than or less than 100% of the population. You do need to guarantee that the numbers are higher than the previous number and lower than the next number, but that's an easier check. There's also an intuitive way to solve it -- just split the difference between the invalid numbers and set both numbers to that value. Or just swap them. You can also shift public opinion across the board just by nudging all the numbers up or down, rather than having to add to some and subtract from others.

It's also extremely easy to assess relative opinions people have on the current state of the issue. If you want to see how many people support the idea, take the entry for that one (L+ is 100) and subtract the entry one level more conservative (C+ subtracts 0). If you want to see how many people want to make the issue more conservative, just look at the score for one level more conservative. If you want to see how many people want to make the issue more liberal, subtract that issue's score from 100.

Using the example above:

If Free Speech is C+, 90% of the population votes to move to C.
If Free Speech is C, 10% votes to move to C+, 76% votes to move to M.
If Free Speech is M, 24% votes to move to C, 47% votes to move to L.
If Free Speech is L, 53% votes to move to M, 20% votes to move to L+.
If Free Speech is L+, 80% votes to move to L.

Storing these four numbers gives you the entire breakdown of the population, and exactly what laws how many people prefer.


Edit: If the CCS springs out later, they should also spring out stronger. Maybe they don't need the big ramp up of varying strength levels, where they're relatively impotent early on and scarier later. I had them coming out earlier and weaker. But that just seems to make them easier to kill and less threatening for more experienced players. Perhaps making them really quite scary but an endgame feature would be better.

[Kay12]

Jon, you're awesome.

About the CCS, they are a bit of a ragtag bunch, yes. Prostitutes and rubes with a mercenary here and there, not really more challenging most site raids. Perhaps they don't need to be powered up at their safehouses too much though, if they get some real Crime Squad power to otherwise hurt the player with.

[mainiac]

The popular opinion thing is cool. 

As for the CCS, I don't think the problem is so much that they slowly ramp up strength as it is that they can be killed off entirely before they are at full strength.  If you made it so that if you drive them to the second safehouse they automatically go to half strength and if you drive them to the third they automatically go to full strength it might help.

I think there need to be more direct consequences of liberalizing society however, as in attacks on the LCS itself.  For instance by weakening the police, the LCS might leave society vulnerable to all sort of troublemakers, conservative and otherwise.  So even if the CCS is no longer influencing public opinion cause they've been driven to the hills, there might be other groups that attack the LCS directly.

[Kay12]

Oh yeah, there's just the problem that LCS is creating an utopia that works, so weakening the police shouldn't have such consequences...

About the CCS, I like the feeling of damaging them when you attack them (yes, I can imagine their boss shouting in frustration). While CCS gaining strength would be good gameplay-wise, it should be explained in-game because it's not intuitive otherwise. Also, perhaps the entire CCS ordeal can be expanded from three measly safehouse raids to a larger operation. Stuff like bashing their armories to make them arm themselves with weaker weapons and so forth. In fact, perhaps the main Conservative Crime Stronghold should be almost divinely powerful (they do get Government and corporate funding you know) unless you weaken them yourself first.

[mainiac]

Well instead of making them strengthen every time you hit them, you could just make the later locations untracable until they have reached full strength.  These locations are supposed to be secret so it would make sense that they wouldn't be known even to their members until they were actually up and running effectively.  I also do like the idea of more extended warfare against the CCS.

[Kay12]

I don't think CCS remaining under cloaking until they're at full strength would work very well. The CCS does attack the LCS rather violently, including car bombs that can't be defended against except by attacking the CCS and disabling them. Or did you mean that they'd just lay low until they're fit again? In that case, their "healing" could be accelerated. Anyhoo, since CCS is the most fun thing in LCS (in the DF sense for beginners and thrill-wise for veterans), I think it deserves more than a few prostitutes and a mercenary =)

EDIT: Did I already mention that I really liked the "Oh God what am I going to do" feeling when I actually met CCS for the first time and couldn't destroy them for months? Sweet!

[mainiac]

I was more saying they should lay low until they strength up.

[Kay12]

Ah yes, that'd make sense. I had this happen, actually. It was probably a bug, I had to wait a few years between the Fallout shelter and Robert E. Lee raids...

By the way, I always envisioned the Bunker to be a rather ornamental building. Sort of the CEO's luxury hangout if things get unbearable...

[Svirfneblim]

There definitely should be a system like Jonathan describes, with people tending towards moderation.
Also, I think that it'd be interesting to have some variable that tracks how many people are nigh-permanently, grudgingly alienated and will stay hardcore conservatives no matter. This should depend on particularly violent acts performed by LCS and should be low but decrease very slowly.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

One of the Presidential election games I used to play simulated public opinion by starting a percentage of the population of each state supporting one candidate or the other, and a percentage undecided. Your advertising could only convert the undecided population. The fewer undecideds there were, the less ground you or your opponent could gain by advertising.

If you need to eat into your opponent's gains, you couldn't just persuade people you were awesome, you had to go on the warpath and start attacking your opponent, which would convert your opponent's supporters into undecideds, making it possible to turn them to your side. By making your opponent look bad, you couldn't gain support for yourself (and risked backfiring), but you could undermine support for the other side.

If we have a public opinion system that tracks various alignments, we could do something like that. Actions could have differing effects on different parts of the scale. For example, dramatic violence might only affect Conservatives and Arch-Conservatives, nudging them toward moderate, while releasing lab animals and publishing the Liberal Guardian might only be effective on people already somewhat sympathetic to your cause. If this system were very clearly communicated, and the actual effects of your actions were made obvious, this could add some additional strategic depth.

[mainiac]

What does that do to the philosophy of many different paths to victory?  Would a pacifist run still be possible?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

What does that do to the philosophy of many different paths to victory?  Would a pacifist run still be possible?

That would depend on how you distribute the effects. Maybe a pacifist run requires sleepers and special editions to undermine Conservative support, and can't just rely on graffiti/writing/activism. Maybe a violent run requires things like freeing bunnies and smashing machines in order to finish the job.

[Servant Corps]

Oh yeah, there's just the problem that LCS is creating an utopia that works, so weakening the police shouldn't have such consequences...

Browsing from the past:
Military Base

Under an Elite Liberal society, most prisoners would be quite happy in jail/rehab/whatever, and shutting down the building would probably cause a huge public backlash on the LCS, along with the prisoners sieging the LCS in retailiation for preventing them from getting the help they want and need.

I think replacing a prison with a rehab center that will deal with the Liberal's inner problems and rehabilitate them into proper society is the best option to making life difficult for the LCS.

[Montague]

I've always been a fan of the "Moderate Crime Squad" or rather, a moderate/conservative military coup or martial law put into place, it would freeze all legislation and generate piles of patrolling soldiers on certain raid sites, it could also start campaigns against the LCS or CCS, depending on how violent they were.

It would be a temporary thing, where the current president (if not C+ or L+) or the controlling general/junta would force a new election, which would put a non-C+ or L+ leader in charge and it would reshuffle the senate and court justices, after a year or so.

Alternatively, they might act as a powerful CCS-type entity that launches raids and tries to swing public opinion toward moderate, but will only ever be active for a year, when they force elections, then its anybody's game depending on how public opinion swings and if the Moderates/military was successful or not. The LCS or CCS might fight hard against the military and the elections win the game one way or another.

It would trigger if change one way or another became too sudden. Maybe to keep the game from being won or lost too easily.

Not sure how realistic it might be, since in the USA, military coups/ martial law/ juntas and whatnot are unheard of, since they simply don't have the authority to do that sort of thing. It would be resisted by so many levels of society anyways.

There might be different ways of implementing this, though.