Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Kay12]

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.

Depends pretty much on how we define pacifism. For a typical stealth run, people are still quite happy to tamper with that nuclear reactor even while it's bound to cause deaths and destruction. If indirect violence is allowed but intentional combat is not, the bomb strikes I'm working on would do the trick. And as for the rest of you Gandhis, who think that bombing is too direct, I'm currently trying to make up new site actions for all sites, both for flavor and gameplay purposes. Ideas are welcome.

As for the prison, I'm a bit confused about it. When laws are extremely Conservative, it's a re-hab center. When laws are extremely Liberal, it's a... re-hab center. The Conservative one is the one that functions like Servant Corps said - they use various methods (probably medication, educational films, lobotomy and Ludovico's technique) to cure people of their extremism. But what does the Liberal re-hab center do? Will it be sweet irony if it, too, destroys Liberal minds, or just counterintuitive?

[Servant Corps]

The conservative "rehab" (which is really an 're-education camp') is established when "Death-Penalty" and "Police Behavior" is both at C+, and it rarely comes into play since you first have to be convicted of a crime and get leniency (otherwise you'd just get the death penalty and thus won't get reeducated). It's theoretically powerful, but if either Police Behavior or Death Penalty goes C, the whole conservative system goes poof.

I'm thinking the liberal "rehab" really wouldn't be about brainwashing/re-education, though functionally, it'd be the same. The liberals aren't trying to brainwash the people, but instead dig in deeply to figure out exactly why the individual lived a messed-up life to begin with, resolve those inner tensions through Liberal psychiatric training and free love, and then offer a compelling alternative (the peaceful L+ world)...so long as the individual swear off the LCS and incriminate their direct superior. I'd also have this "rehab" start as soon as a person gets arrested (rather than it occurring once a person gets sentenced), to make "rehab" more scary.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I agree, I think at L+, the prison should start curing your Liberals of whatever deeply-rooted issues caused them to join the LCS in the first place. They then leave to live happy, well-adjusted lives, having come to terms with their violent and lawless past and chosen to grow beyond it. *sniff* So beautiful. So happy. So not what your founder wants to hear.

[Kay12]

Actually the Conservative rehab isn't all that rare. If your Founder (or anyone else, but this is the typical scenario) get imprisoned for a few years early and the laws shift, the rehab kicks in.

Having the Liberal prison raise Wisdom, the running force of Conservatism, seems counterintuitive, though. Any better way to represent this?



Also, I'd like to see the following happen at some Liberal Work Therapy Camp:

While piling boulders, Vonnegut's right arm was crushed under a boulder. It had to be amputated.

The Work Therapy Camp's insurance policy pays in 32$ in compensation.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Perhaps Liberal rehabilitation directly affects Juice, lowering or raising it to 0. When Juice hits 0, there's instead a 1-in-X chance each month that the Liberal abandons the LCS.

[Kay12]

Another crazy idea borrowed from just about every other video game - how about, once the society is Elite Liberal and the game is won, there would still be ONE FINAL BATTLE against the remaining Conservatives? A boss fight of sorts. It could give more sense of EPIC VICTORY than the current system, which isn't bad but is a bit bland - the laws just slowly wade to Elite Liberal.

The country hails the beginning of the new Elite Liberal era! The last remaining Conservative forces have fled to the CEO Castle - with their destruction, your Liberal victory will be complete!


(of course, while the fight shouldn't be all a breeze, the main reason would be parading the Liberal victory!)

[mainiac]

Actually the Conservative rehab isn't all that rare. If your Founder (or anyone else, but this is the typical scenario) get imprisoned for a few years early and the laws shift, the rehab kicks in.

Having the Liberal prison raise Wisdom, the running force of Conservatism, seems counterintuitive, though. Any better way to represent this?



Also, I'd like to see the following happen at some Liberal Work Therapy Camp:

While piling boulders, Vonnegut's right arm was crushed under a boulder. It had to be amputated.

The Work Therapy Camp's insurance policy pays in 32$ in compensation.

That would be out of place.  Take a look at a Norwegian maximum security prison to see what an elite liberal prison should look like.  Also to be amazed at Norway.

[Reelyanoob]

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:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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+

A simpler system would be to store numbers for the relative proportions in each bucket, then scale those values to percentages or absolute population numbers as needed. Comparable with the POP_RATIO system DF uses.

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.

Some ideas for CCS etc:

I was thinking that as specific institutions became more liberal, conservative members of those organizations would either resign, be fired, or converted to liberalism, all leading to a higher percentage of 'liberal' entities within those institutions. A flow of  disgruntled ex-members could form the nucleus of the CCS, which would emerge once it had sufficient members (Ex-police, ex-agents etc would be cool, but only in great numbers once police / intelligence laws are liberal).

This would lead to a natural growth of the CCS, tie their appearance and strength to the success of the LCS, and it would be different every time, depending on the strategy and targets you go for. And high ranked/skilled characters could form the 'chain of command' for the CCS to give them some more characterization, story line.

LCS operations against 'liberalized' institutions should have lower, and negative effects once those targets are at about L or L+. Like was said before busting prisoners from a L+ jail should be a negative PR effect, no effect at L, etc. Also for example, publishing documents from an L+ prison should only reveal to the public how well the prison is being run. This could be (very basically) simulated by not generating secret documents when raiding highly liberalized sites (and having out-of-date documents being published only making you looked bad, i.e "get with the times bro")

Also, CCS should do more things that the LCS can do. i.e. CCS should also employ more sleepers, covert ops, training etc. Snooping LCS sleepers should have a chance to detect CCS sleepers. Just thinking about how to implement this idea ... and I got this: once an enemy CCS sleeper is identified, then they appear on raids as a special encounter, based on the CEO kidnap code, an LCS agent can then assassinate, try and convert, kidnap or date them. Realistically sleepers shouldn't lead you straight to the safehouse, but give you lead you can follow up on (i.e. they reveal a location with increased chance to encounter real CCS members)

And how about a conservative paper appear somewhere once enough laws are liberal? the "Conservative Clarion" would be a good name, to rival the Liberal Guardian. Maybe as a right-wing student paper at the Uni, like the RL Dartmouth Review.

[Svirfneblim]

I think the Radio and TV stations are meant to be the 'Conservative Clarion' in the game. Maybe as long as media laws trend conservative, they should have a random chance of silencing random events that'd shift opinion towards liberalism?

It's a great idea to have old files become obsolete. Perhaps every time a law shifts more liberal than before there's a chance of files becoming deleted? Or maybe they're all deleted once change is achieved?

Overall though, I think that the game is too easy about how much you can shift the public opinion. Especially past moderate levels, it should take much activism over a long period of time, not just few raids.

[Kay12]

Yeah, public opinion swings way too fast. But making it slower would only increase grind. Instead, I'd make small actions (random violence etc) nearly worthless, and make popular opinion more dependent on "bigger" actions. Having more special tiles on each site wouldn't hurt, if they had enough variety to have everything for everyone, Gandhi and Guevara alike.

[Soadreqm]

I think the Radio and TV stations are meant to be the 'Conservative Clarion' in the game. Maybe as long as media laws trend conservative, they should have a random chance of silencing random events that'd shift opinion towards liberalism?

EVERYTHING FINE

Absolutely nothing happened today at the Rostov nuclear power plant. Deepak Guy, A technician on the scene commented that there has been nothing out of the ordinary going on today. "We were testing the warning siren earlier, and that may have worried some people. I want to reassure everyone that nuclear power is perfectly safe, and there is absolutely zero chance that anything could ever go wrong."

Yeah, I've been thinking that it'd be cool to have the ARCH-CONSERVATIVE MEDIA silence Liberal news events. Something like the news reporting V's first bomb strike as a completely normal demolition. I think it should even be the rule rather than the exception with C+ Free Speech.

It'd make sense for the documents to expire after a while. They kind of accumulate right now, what with the best way to train computers being hacking.

And Elite Liberal prisons working as rehabilitation centers just like Arch-Conservative ones would be both deliciously ironic and entirely reasonable. The Liberal therapy sessions could suck out juice, and have a chance of converting the liberal once it hits zero. Bonus points for mentioning that the former revolutionary has been released as a productive member of society.

[Svirfneblim]

I think that slightly increasing the grind on actual raids to affect issues would be good. However, I'd prefer that it also would require surviving between the raids. I think that there should be a cap on how much a single raid can affect an issue and a cap on how much a single issue can be affected within a period of time. For example, to push a law from moderate to liberal should require 3-4 well executed raids within span of a month or two.

[Kay12]

As I said, I would focus on making the raids require more action on less raids. Currently it's very easy to shift an issue by standing near the front door, blasting a few heads, and getting out. Having interesting stuff deeper inside would invite further investigation of the site. It would also give the sites more flavor - currently, the Cable news station is a gray box with a single studio and reporters, and so on.

[MicroclineHat]

Another way to make things more difficult in the end game would be to add multiple "crime squad" entities that operate in the same way. This could be accomplished by having the CCS respawn several years after it's been destroyed, with the amount of time determined by how liberal the country has become. We're already seeing some elements of this with the gang members in the crack house. You have to kill a few of them before you can develop it as a location. Perhaps there could be a "Survivalist Shack Complex," tied to things like gun control, a "Guardians of Piety" team in a church what appears when abortion goes beyond a certain point and so on. (Another addition would be remnant groups that would pop up in the political climate just past the one they exist in, like a rogue group of firemen who still carry flamethrowers when free speech goes to C.) To make headway in that particular area, you'd need to either wipe them out or make public opinion drop to the point where the police would raid them.

The difference is that the CCS wouldn't ever be raided by the cops, since they're funded and controlled by organizations you can't destroy directly, so they'd still be the largest threat.

 

[Kay12]

It might be a bit confusing for newcomers (and maybe veterans alike) to have multiple different gangs roaming around. I'd concentrate on the CCS, but they could certainly use a facelift. I'd start with something simple, like some sort of dun dun dun! when they first appear. But they should be definitely more challenging and flavorful in game as well.