Having seen this thread, I decided to give it a go, except I wans't going to permit myself to attack the CCS.
I've outlined my strategy below, followed by some comments on what I learned from it (I'm faily new to LCS, so I made some poor errors).
I started out by having the founder take mostly the intelligence options, with a couple charisma ones, so he ended up with 15 INT and 9 CHA. I then immediately recruited six liberal judges, as they have such high stats (I wanted at least 9 INT on each one, with high CHA). I had them solicit donations for money while the founder trained up tailoring with the money and provided them all with expensive suits. Then, one-by-one, I got each of the judges to recruit sleepers while the others solicted donations and the founder made and sold expensive suits. The first judge got four firemen, the second got four judges, the third got four policemen, the fourth got four radio station empoyees and the fifth got four cable station employees. I intended for the sixth to infiltrate the CCS so I could publish the backer list as soon as free speech went C. I managed to get one of the door guards at the gentlemen's club as a sleeper, and after much trying managed to get the CCS hideout location from someone (who ended the relationship before they could be recruited as a sleeper). I spent ages trying to get the hardened veteran as a sleeper, but I had no success (I can only assume that the lack of juice was holding me back).
Once all that was done, it was about 2012/2013 and I had about 55K stored up, which lasted me the rest of the game (I finished on about 30K). My only expenditure from then until the end of the game was buying upgrades for the safehouses and paying the 100/month rent on the safehouse that I started with. I had everybody train writing by writing to newspapers until they hit their cap, while the sleepers gained effectiveness. Once everybody was trained up, I would start rotating the sleepers by having them promote liberalism when they hit 80% and stop when they hit 60%. Over the next few years, I was able to get a couple laws to C instead of C+, usually gun control laws. It wasn't until 2018 that free speech hit C.
I immediately bought a printing press, and moved everybody to the safehouse with it in. Expecting a siege from the CCS at some point, I bought a few extras (fortified compound, some rations, security cameras, traps, generator) so I could slip out and avoid any danger. However, the CCS never attacked me. They were certainly very active (newspapers popping up every few days), but none of it affected me.
I turned everybody onto writing for the liberal guardian. I also got some of my sleepers to start uncovering evidence, hoping to get some special editions out. However, only the police station sleepers were able to provide me with anything. My best uess for this would be that only certain people from locations can provide evidence, and as I just recruited the first I came across, I couldn't get anything from them. I printed the liberal guardian for 6 months, until congress turned free speech back to C+, at which point I went to the same tactics I used beforehand. There didn't seem to be very uch effect form that six-month stint - the congress elections went the same way they had done before (overwhelming C+ majority), though the president did go to C. A year after it was made illegal, it was made legal again, and I resumed my printing strategy.
Once again, the elections went the same way as always for a while, until in 2021 and early 2022, the clearing out congress amendment was proposed three times, succeeding on the third attempt. Six months later, the supreme court amendment was proposed successfully. From that point on, it was just holding down w and waiting for the laws to turn to L+ one-by-one, with nothing interesting happening. Victory was finally achieved in november 2026.
In hindsight, there are quite a few ways to improve the method. I only recruited 6 people with my founder, though I could have recruited 7 (I wanted to keep a spare slot for emergencies). Similarly, each of the judges I recruited could in turn have more than four sleepers, I only stopped at four because I knew that further additions would get more difficult, though still possible. Incidentally, does anyone know the limit for sleepers recruited?
The sleepers themselves could be changed as well. I wanted to get a range of sleepers to ensure I had a range of topics to publish a special edition on, but in hindsight special editions were not as important as I expected. Instead, it would probably be more efficient to choose sleepers such that public attention is drawn to free speech as fast as possible, so you can take advantage of the liberal guardian as fast as possible.
The lack of juice is an absolute pain. It means that starting stats are what you will be stuck with. I couldn't find any way of increasing juice without a criminal record being gained, so I was stuck with no stats higher than 10 on my recruits. Even worse, I accidentally booked two dates with one of the recruited judges, netting him -5 juice. Although he was able to get his juice back to 0 with community service, the founder suffered a -1 to juice (bringing him to 49) that I had no way of fixing, reducing his stats by 2. It happened before I was able to max out his skills, so all of his writing was done at 13 skill instead of 15.
The part of the game that the most happened was the start. In the first few years, all the recruitments were made, all the money was obtained and all the skills were trained. After that, it was just passing time, with checks on the effectiveness of the sleepers. Although the CCS didn't pose any in-game problems, they were very irritating anyway, as their antics would cause the in-game newspaper announcements to appear, and w doesn't skip those. When it happens several times a month, it increases the playing time by an awful lot.
I have tried a couple times what would be the escalation of this challenge - only one active member. I can conclude that if you only have one active member, you do need sleeper agents, as without there is no way of drawing enough attention to free speech in order to get the liberal guardian out. It may be possible to do it with sleepers, but if it is possible it would only barely be possible. I tried it a few times and failed, though I was using inefficient sleeper layouts for those attempts. I don't know enough about how the sleepers promoting liberalism works to determine an optimal layout, though.
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Topic: Taking the "Crime" out of "Liberal Crime Squad"... (Read 30997 times)