On the last part:
You can now get someone to join you either by getting their heart really high relative to their wisdom, or by getting them to like your character. To get them to like your character, talk. A lot. High charisma + high heart + high interrogation skill characters will be able to spin even rough treatment in their favor by comforting the target in their darkest moment. You'll know when this is happening, there's a message for it. It's pretty hard to pull off, don't expect to get it with most characters. There's also a new indicator on the screen where you choose your tactics that shows how well the target and your lead interrogator get along. If your interrogator is the target's "only friend", you shouldn't have trouble converting them even if their heart and wisdom seem stuck at 1. Basically, you've shattered them, but they still know who their 'friends' are.
Also, this is subtle, but in the rare case that you manage to convert somewhere when they're sitting at like 9 heart and 4 wisdom, they might even be so stable that they become a permanent member who can't be deprogrammed.
OH YEAH, maybe I should provide the link: www.jonathansfox.com/LCS/lcs_win32_312_alpha5.zip
Should be compatible with old saves from alpha 4.
[ February 02, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
also, I don't know (I could be unlucky or it could just be perspective) but it seems to me that news of the kidnapping come earlier not later in this one...
also x 2: I perma-recruited my victim, yay!
[ February 02, 2008: Message edited by: a1s ]
It's probably just unlucky if you get a shorter time before it was reported. Previously the minimum time before the kidnapping was reported was 2 or 3 days, never more than 15 or so. Now it's up to 5 or 6, and can take up to 20 days or so if you're lucky.
[ February 02, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
Nice job on the improvements, though. I'm trying to figure out an effective interrogation strategy now.
Honestly, it's a pain in the ass to get gunned down by a police officer because there's one other conservative in the encounter that you have to kill before you can attack him. I know I'd be shooting for the guy with the gun over the one trying to start a fistfight.
I don't think it's weird that you don't always have your guys attacking the big target either -- I think of combat like a scene in an action movie.
In a kung-fu movie, the hero doesn't get to pick his target. Enemies come at him from all sides and he fights them off and lands blows where the opportunities present themselves. Pow, minion one down. Pow, minion two down. Whap-whap pow, tough minion three down. He couldn't attack the tough minion before he got through the small fry.
In a shooter movie, people are ducking and weaving behind cover. The hero doesn't just open fire on the boss, he has to fight off cronies that come up to the sides. Even if it's picking between the guy with the gun and the others without, the ones without get up in the hero's face, forcing him to divert his attention to fire at them. Bang bang, the guy charging at the hero with the crowbar goes down. Boom, the hero ducks behind a crate as the guy in the corner with the shotgun fires. Just as the hero levels his gun to fire back, another dude comes up behind the hero, and the hero wrestles him off and shoots him next as the guy in the corner leisurely reloads, and the hero barely gets under cover again before the next shot comes. Finally, the hero gets to focus on the guy with the shotgun, and takes him out with his next shot.
quote:
Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>Finally, the hero gets to focus on the guy with the shotgun, and takes him out with his next shot.</STRONG>
Or shoots out his teeth, either way.
quote:
Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>Hm... maybe that's when the second in command takes over? I think that happens in this version if you have others with very high juice.</STRONG>
I just lost a game where my leader died and no one took over.
My leader and the two other Elite Liberals were in the same squad that got raided and tried to escape. On the way out, my leader dies, but everyone else got out. Next turn, everyone loses contact, game over. Is it conditional or just not guarenteed?
EDIT: I also noticed that once a site went High Security, it was almost always stuck there all game. Several sites were on HS for well over a year.
[ February 03, 2008: Message edited by: Toaster ]
Edit: Did the Elite Liberals report directly to the founder? It won't try to promote deeper than that. You -should- only need 100 juice (Revolutionary) to get a promotion to founder, but they have to be reporting directly to the founder.
Edit again: You should get a message like "There are none left with the courage and conviction to lead...." just before everyone loses contact if it's triggered by the founder's death. If you get that message, it means it checked the founder's immediate subordinates and didn't find anyone qualified (they need 100 juice or 50 and a level of leadership skill).
[ February 03, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
[ February 03, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
EDIT: and an interesting crash for you to check out. Kidnapped a Conservative priest and attempted to convert. Failed miserably, and the news report went out, so I decided to just off the guy, but nobody had the balls to do it. Immediately following this, the hostage committed suicide. "Religious Nut (name given to hostage lol) has died under 's interrogation" followed immediately by the game crashing.
[ February 03, 2008: Message edited by: Skeeblix ]
Also, your description of the crash is perfect, thanks. Failed attempt to execute them + suicide + blank name in death message = precise enough that I found the bug. That's supposed be the lead interrogator's name, but because *nobody* got up the courage to execute them, that slot was emptied. Cue crash. I've set up an alternate message -- now if you try to execute them and they die on their own, nobody is directly responsible and takes the hit. It just says "Religious Nut is dead." That's the idea anyway, I haven't tested that just yet.
Edit: Okay, tested, should be working for next release.
Edit again: Found the problem with bodies... it was deleting all bodies that ARE in safehouses, when it was supposed to be deleting all bodies that AREN'T at safehouses. :( Fixed.
[ February 03, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
[ February 03, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
[ February 03, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
quote:
Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>Edit: Did the Elite Liberals report directly to the founder? It won't try to promote deeper than that. You -should- only need 100 juice (Revolutionary) to get a promotion to founder, but they have to be reporting directly to the founder.</STRONG>
That's probably why- I don't think they were.
quote:
Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>
Also, your description of the crash is perfect, thanks.</STRONG>
Not a problem. Glad I could make it easy on you.
quote:
Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>You're right, there's something weird with no bodies from dead people you interrogate.Also, your description of the crash is perfect, thanks. Failed attempt to execute them + suicide + blank name in death message = precise enough that I found the bug. That's supposed be the lead interrogator's name, but because *nobody* got up the courage to execute them, that slot was emptied. Cue crash. I've set up an alternate message -- now if you try to execute them and they die on their own, nobody is directly responsible and takes the hit. It just says "Religious Nut is dead." That's the idea anyway, I haven't tested that just yet.
</STRONG>
That's what was probably crashing my game earlier. I'm glad someone else caught it.
PS. Thanks for working on the game again. The revised torture system is much better.
Right now I'm thinking one of two things.
The first option is that you pick the category, and you still get to choose which sub-task you want the person to do, but you only get to pick from the ones they're qualified for. So if you pick Liberal Activism, you can't pick hacking if your character has no computer skill, you can't pick graffiti if your character has no art skill. But just because your character has computer skill doesn't mean you can't pick community service or create public disturbances, if you want to.
The second option is that you pick Liberal Activism, and it tells you what they'll do for that. So you pick illegal fundraising, and at the bottom it says they'll sell brownies. Where the next person you pick might have credit card fraud at the bottom. It all depends on the skills of the person.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each. The first way gives you a choice, and you never have a situation where your artist just happens to be a programmer as well, thus preventing you from doing art related choices with them. The second way has a lot of strength in simplicity, and it makes each character feel more special -- this person I've recruited will do X for that activity, awesome, I needed one of those. And by hiding the options, it gives you a sense of mystery about what they all are.
With both, the nice thing about this will be that it will make characters who start with those skills more special. Sure, in a practical sense, a character who has no artistic talent could run out and start spraying tags, but it makes sense that you won't have the LCS start doing that until you find people who are predisposed towards it anyway.
I'm leaning toward the first option (giving you a choice, if your character qualifies for more than one), but I'm open to feedback. If these both are horrible ideas, you can tell me that too.
Such as
code:
Soliciting Donations (0)
Selling T-Shirts (3)
Selling Art (0)
Selling Music (0)
The person I've chosen has no persuasion skill, no art, and no musical skill. But he does have 3 garment making.
Pretty simple to implement, Im guessing.
[ February 05, 2008: Message edited by: Torak ]
On a different note, I haven't noticed any Art skill gain (from 0) for someone assigned to graffiti for two months. Does it just raise very slowly or does it not improve your skill at all? Similarly, I've noticed people selling music/art haven't been getting skill either.
Oh, and I'm really looking forward to the teaching system. That'll greatly reduce the tedium of training fresh recruits. Suggestion: Perhaps teaching could have a smaller effect with multiple students (student defined as someone in the same safehouse with a skill level low enough to benefit from the teacher in question). An inverse linear relationship would suck horribly, so maybe a logarithmic one (base 3 maybe?) would work better.
[ February 05, 2008: Message edited by: Earthquake Damage ]
quote:
Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>On a different note, I haven't noticed any Art skill gain (from 0) for someone assigned to graffiti for two months. Does it just raise very slowly or does it not improve your skill at all? Similarly, I've noticed people selling music/art haven't been getting skill either.[ February 05, 2008: Message edited by: Earthquake Damage ]</STRONG>
checked it: they go up.
[ February 05, 2008: Message edited by: a1s ]
quote:
Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>I have to protest against the "fundraising/activism only shows skill-relevant options" change. I especially don't want the cyberterrorism options to be restricted by skill (though having no skill may yield no juice/other results). The only hassle free way I know to gain computer skill is through non-poll activism (since with polls you have to reset their activity daily, plus you get yet another screen between days you may not want).</STRONG>
I'm actually trying to actively avoid allowing you to train skills by putting someone on a task they absolutely can't do. It doesn't make sense to let someone who is computer illiterate, and expect anything to happen. But I know what you mean.
Prior to the recent interface change, the only reliable and safe(ish) way to get computer skill up was to have them check polls all the time. Boo. Checking polls is -slow- skill gain. Real slow.
What I would propose as a substitute for being able to just put anyone on the task you want and expect them to grow into it, is to get training working. So if you really want person X to be a computer hacker, you'll have to find someone with the skills and teach person X. How does that sound?
quote:
On a different note, I haven't noticed any Art skill gain (from 0) for someone assigned to graffiti for two months. Does it just raise very slowly or does it not improve your skill at all?
Hm... it raises slowly, but shouldn't be that slow. I'm not seeing a reason for it to be static though. Let me know if you see any movement?
quote:
Originally posted by beorn080:
<STRONG>Perhaps instead of disallowing the options, make it so that if they have no skill it would be practice as opposed to just straight up doing it. So say for computer hacking, instead of actively trying to hack a website or steal credit card numbers, he wanders the web studying HTML and learning about common back doors and other tricks. For art they would work with finger paints and crayons. Not sure about the others but somebody could think of something for them.</STRONG>
That's sort of what I was getting at by the "no juice gain/other effects if untrained" thing. They dick around 'til they've learned how to do something first.
Also, I think current garment making system is really irritating. If someone makes a second-rate or fifth-rate police uniform, they should be trying again until they get it right.
I have a few more design issues I'm wrestling with.
1. I'm looking for a good reason to not just get 50 random people and put them all on art duty until they bring in the big money.
I was going to make it so you just can't (well, you could, but you'd be relegated to the low skill jobs that aren't as good, not better skilled jobs), but if we do let you do it, I'd like for there to be an incentive not to. Some counterbalance, that's all. For example, the incentive not to get an army of people selling brownies is that, while you'll reign in big money, they'll all get arrested and testify against you in court.
Similarly, the idea isn't to make it so you *can't* get 50 people to put them all on sell art, or that you *won't* ever want to, but just some reason why it's a tradeoff and not always the obvious choice. Right now there's no reason to care about recruiting specialists instead of nobodies in these fields, and that's no fun.
A couple ideas off-hand:
a) Recruiting people has an upkeep associated with it. Food and such. They want money. People get grouchy when they don't get money. Low juice people eventually leave when they don't get money, and if their wisdom is high enough, they might have second thoughts and tell the police.
b) Certain tasks, even money-makers, cost upkeep to perform. You have to pay for art supplies to task someone to create art. You have to buy blank T-shirts before you can tie-dye them. You have to buy spray paints before you can hit the streets with them.
Let me know what you think. I'm not thinking all of the above or anything, those are just ideas. I think I like b) more than a). Your ideas are invited here too.
To be clear, I know the game is hard enough already, but that's mostly because it's very difficult to influence *public opinion*. Some things, like making money, are very easy -- and I just don't want it to be *too* easy. The alpha was initially just a prototype of a new activation interface, and it wasn't meant to completely rearrange the way the game handles money, or to make skills easy to get. So sure, everything's free ("everything" referring to things like causing trouble, interrogation), anyone can do anything (graffiti, art, music, prostitution), and money comes easy in it, but that's just because I haven't balanced it yet. I was focused on getting systems working, not presenting that as the way things ought to be. I'm cool with keeping the free for all on what you can activate people for if people tend to prefer it like that, but it still needs to be balanced to compensate for that.
2. Training!
So here's the problem as it stands. I want to add training, but I'm afraid with the current system that what's going to happen is you can have everyone teach everyone else their skills and get everyone looking about the same, just from holding down w. I'm thinking training should cost money somehow, whether from the teacher, or per skill level trained up, or something.
Some options:
a) A teacher can pick one skill at a time to teach, and teaches to the location they're in. Anyone at that location gains experience slowly in that skill, as long as they're at least X amount of skill under the teacher. It costs a modest amount of money each day to run a class.
b) As the activation screen implies now, the teacher picks a basket of skills and attributes to train, and trains all of them at once at their location. Really muscles up your characters, because it affects attributes, which are hugely important to how characters perform. Maybe costs a big chunk of money each day to run these "training camp" style classes, making professional teachers (fast), and experts (lots to teach) valuable for this.
c) Training is passive, and is applied by teachers to their subordinates in the command tree, without having an option to pick it or anything. They automatically pass on their skills to their subordinates by making skill gains extra effective if your boss has teaching and a higher skill level than you have. It costs nothing to train this way.
d) Training is something done by the student through an outside system. Skill to train is chosen through a submenu like making clothing, and then they go away for a week or a month or so after paying a tuition fee to the University and taking the class. They can only do this if they have a clean record or bribe the University an extra amount to keep quiet.
Other ideas? Thoughts?
in order to teach you have to have a teacher, and you have to show for class.
so... everyone who is getting thought has 'student' as their current job, and they don't do anything else (presumably they eat/sleep/entertain themselves out of the scope of this game). this also helps improve quality of education (instead of having a 100 people in your class who happen to be in the area, you only have the 10 which you need).
money could be involved, but better yet- supplies. you can steal them from evil corporations or you could buy them at a store. off course with stuff like ammo good luck with that store.
Also, I don't see why teaching should bump attributes. To my knowledge there is no way to improve your attributes other than juice, and I'm cool with that. If you do allow attribute gains, limit them. Maybe you can only gain X points above your base score that way, so recruits that start with high intelligence will always be smarter than the ones who start dumb. Of course, if you're gonna do that, you may as well let juice do all the buffing.
Teaching shouldn't be able to raise a student's skill to the teacher's level, so better teachers with higher skills are valuable, as are non-teaching operatives with high skills.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me for teaching to cost money when the skill being taught doesn't require money to use. For example, I expect firearms training to consume ammunition, which I'll have to replenish periodically, thus costing money. Sneaking, on the other hand, shouldn't need funding.
Monetary upkeep for LCS members? They're voluntary activists, not mercenaries. If you want to add another recruitment option (paid labor), that's fine, but don't add conditions to my unconditional love-slaves and such.
Now food upkeep, on the other hand, is perfectly acceptable (so long as it's handled automatically -- I hate meaningless micromanagement). Living in the homeless shelter should cost nothing, of course, since, you know, it's a homeless shelter. In fact, maybe being unable to feed your members should force relocation to the homeless shelter. The shelter can't be improved (fortifications, business fronts, Guardian HQ, etc), which is a significant drawback later in the game.
If we go with the "basket of skills" method for teaching (which I'm really starting to prefer myself, possibly with a1s's suggestion about having students specifically activate for learning), we don't have to explain why it costs money to teach sneaking -- it'll just be part of the high generic pricetag for a whole basket of generic supplies for various skills all related to "special ops". Interrogation, security, etc..
For T-shirts, I was actually thinking that high skill would affect the quality of the product (you sell more, at a higher price), while to reduce the overhead, you could steal fine cloth from the sweatshops (which already cuts garment making costs in half, but here we can apply it to fundraising as well). Hacking could have a low overhead but require computers to even attempt it, stuff like that.
I love Earthquake Damage's ideas on upkeep. No upkeep for people in general, but food costs -- and then only when you're not at the homeless shelter. There's already buying food reserves, but I'd leave that as it is now, for stockpiling for a siege. Like you say, pointless micromanagement sucks -- just make it have a background cost, and a line on your end-of-month budget. This would give the cooking skill a real purpose, as it would allow you to spend less on daily upkeep for that location.
[ February 06, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
Also, hacking currently seems to be split up into low-risk activism, high-risk activism, and money making variants. I see no compelling reason to change that.
[ February 07, 2008: Message edited by: Earthquake Damage ]
Edit: As a side note, "hanging out" is currently used for people treating injuries as well. I'll probably eventually allow you to specifically select to just do nothing on the activation screen, and have a description for that saying they'll cook, study, guard hostages, tend to the injured, and any other random tasks around the base.
[ February 07, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
Blank string for heal injured is bad though.
Perhaps for the legal fundraising the person could be "discovered" and you would have to give an incentive for them to stay. This could work both ways because if they have a high enough heart they could give a VERY minor sleeper effect for 1 or 2 issues. Maybe a hundredth of the normal amount or even less. However the opposite of that is that you lose the person and you have no choice in who gets discovered. Maybe random events where the item being hocked is so popular that the stand gets rushed by people and property is damaged and people are hurt.
An effective way to rebalance (or nerf, depending on your point of view) much of the game would be to limit the number of members you can recruit in some way. Too much restriction would suck horribly, but you could gradually decrease the limit in some way over time if you feel the game is still too easy. A simple way to do this might be to base the number of people you can recruit on your juice, heart, charisma, leadership (how do you improve this other than mass recruitment?), etc. Perhaps you can make the recruitment limit affect only the members recruited through persuasion, leaving seduction (typically slow due to the risk involved with dating multiple people at once) and kidnapping (also slow for obvious reasons) unrestricted.
Alternately, you could have a character's leadership skill affect how well their (direct?) underlings operate. Hell, you could go as far as to make members goof off (ever play the Dragon Warrior series?) rather than follow orders depending on some combination of their juice versus your leadership.
quote:
Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>An effective way to rebalance (or nerf, depending on your point of view) much of the game would be to limit the number of members you can recruit in some way. Too much restriction would suck horribly, but you could gradually decrease the limit in some way over time if you feel the game is still too easy. A simple way to do this might be to base the number of people you can recruit on your juice, heart, charisma, leadership (how do you improve this other than mass recruitment?), etc. Perhaps you can make the recruitment limit affect only the members recruited through persuasion, leaving seduction (typically slow due to the risk involved with dating multiple people at once) and kidnapping (also slow for obvious reasons) unrestricted.Alternately, you could have a character's leadership skill affect how well their (direct?) underlings operate. Hell, you could go as far as to make members goof off (ever play the Dragon Warrior series?) rather than follow orders depending on some combination of their juice versus your leadership.</STRONG>
Limiting recruitment is an idea that I like a lot, and I've floated the idea in the past, but the response from the community has been pretty cold, so I haven't moved to implement any restrictions.
My idea is to make leadership and juice the key factors, such that new recruits -can't- recruit themselves. As they advance, they gain the ability to recruit new people, but the maximum number of people they can manage is capped based on a combination of their juice and leadership. Leadership skill currently increases as your subordinates gain juice -- and only for juice gains over 20 (activist level). It also increases with recruitment, but I think I'll remove this. At the moment having Leadership has a fairly powerful effect on suppressing confessions when subordinates are arrested, and encouraging former subordinates to come back to the LCS if the leader is released from prison.
I would propose that juice be damaged when the leader or their subordinates are arrested, convicted, executed, or killed in action -- to a point. It wouldn't cruel, so it wouldn't reduce you below, say, 50 juice. This would also be offset by taking action to correct the issue: breaking someone out of the lock-up would be enough of a juice boost for the leader to completely wipe out the loss of having their subordinate arrested and then some, but it wouldn't fully erase a conviction (it still sucks that they let their guy get sent to prison in the first place). Plus, convicts count toward their recruit cap. Overall this means that to increase their cap, they need to have recruits under them who gain experience, rise in juice, and don't get flattened by the machine.
As it stands, leadership is capped not by charisma but by juice; if you have high juice, may still have low leadership, but you can't have high leadership without high juice.
My instinct would be to start out with a fairly tight cap on recruitment, and then loosen it as testing shows is needed. Example:
- Under 50 juice: 0 subordinates.
- Socialist Threat (50 Juice): 1 subordinate. (an assistant or specialist contact)
- Revolutionary (100 juice): 5 subordinates. (enough to run their own squad)
- Urban Commando (200 juice): 8 subordinates.
- Elite Liberal (500 juice): 11 subordinates. (enough to run two full squads)
Each level of leadership grants +2 subordinates. You can't even start to get leadership until you have at least 50 juice.
The LCS Leader automatically gets +11 subordinates (enough to fill two squads, if you include the leader) by virtue of their rank.
I would count kidnapped and seduced people toward the cap, unless they become sleepers. The lead interrogator is the person who gets the recruit in kidnappings.
Because the LCS is a -hierarchy-, this is not as restrictive as it might sound. There's no true cap on recruitment. Recruiting your first five people as gang members and starting with a wave of heavily-armed violence would quickly get you a bunch of early leaders and enable you to run half a dozen squads. Recruiting hippies and selling brownies would get you money, but achieve little in the way of broadening the LCS, and if they all land in jail, you'd be on your own unless you spring them out. Your people aren't throwaways anymore, but valuable resources, and you can only get more when you prove you can use the ones you already have. There's incentive to recruit strong characters, turn away weak ones, and put your people to good work. I think that's good game design.
Of course, certain things would have to be balanced... brownies and prostitution would have to be less risky, for example. But all in all, I hope that people are open to at least trying this. I know it would change gameplay strategies, but I think it would be good for the game in the long run.
quote:
You can't even start to get leadership until you have at least 50 juice.I would count kidnapped and seduced people toward the cap, unless they become sleepers. The lead interrogator is the person who gets the recruit in kidnappings.
Two things:
1. So how exactly do you gain leadership? Only from recruitment (currently, anyway) and subordinates gaining juice? Does it only increase when they reach certain juice thresholds or does any juice gain improve leadership (regardless of how high their juice already is)? Do you gain leadership from your subordinates' subordinates?
2. Seduction and kidnapping are slow processes compared to chatting someone up on the street. They should have benefits. Either you have to gimp liberals/moderates (who you can recruit through persuasion), which is retarded, or you need to provide some other benefit.
As it stands, seduction provides very little benefit as a recruitment option (you can get conservatives, who aren't any better than their liberal counterparts) for the risk (recruiter can gain wisdom, etc). If seduction counts toward the limit, which is understandable since you can date multiple people at once (but only if you're lucky), then it should at least provide some other benefit. Maybe lovers are nigh-guaranteed to return when you're released from prison, never testify against you, or something like that.
Kidnapping is even riskier. If you succeed in time, you get a sleeper. If you don't, you get something worse than an ordinary recruit (rehabilitated upon capture). Having that recruit, which is still difficult to get at all with the new interrogation system, count against your subordinate limit adds insult to injury (or injury to insult, or whatever).
Edit: All juice gained by subordinates past the first 20 gives an amount of leadership experience to the boss proportional to the juice gained. So as long as they have at least 20 juice, every time they get juice, it gives the boss leadership. Leadership goes up fairly slow though, and is capped low. It's subtle but very powerful.
[ February 09, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
[ February 09, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
quote:
Leadership goes up fairly slow though, and is capped low.
Eh? Capped? I thought skills were uncapped.
Also, what all does it affect anyway?
At the moment Leadership just suppresses confessions in subordinates (keeping them on your side instead of breaking and testifying against you), and encourages subordinates to not permanently lose contact if you're sent to prison. It's not used frequently, as these rarely come up, but it's a pretty substantial effect where it is applied, and those are pretty serious situations where you can lose characters permanently. I'm happy to hear ideas on other areas where leadership can play a role.
(Actually, that's a pretty good idea for later... I might end up compiling a list of where you can run into what units for purposes of kidnapping/seduction/etc.)
[ February 09, 2008: Message edited by: Mercutio Valentine ]
I also like the fact that your ideas would make it harder to become a giant force of Liberalism right away. You have to build up before you can go big. You'd need a good number of high-juice, skilled specialists, who sort of become the next ranking group of soldiers. Not everyone is going to want to join a bunch of low-skill hacks with guns and a cause to fight for; but a well tuned fighting force? That's a whole 'nother ballgame.
I also really like the idea of making individuals count, it's more of a Liberal way of thinking. See, the Conservatives just paste a serial number and job description on your forehead, AND THAT'S NOT THE WAY WE DO IT, MAN.
We gotta rise up and overcome! It should matter when a fellow Liberal is lost in battle, or taken to jail in a raid! True Liberalism is about the WILL OF THE INDIVIDUAL! FUCK THE MAN, WE ARE NOT DISPOSABLE, WE ARE PRICELESS AND UNIQUE!
But yeah, in-character rant aside, I'm loving your ideas, Jon. I think it's important for it to matter when someone on your side dies. You should stop for a moment and go "Aw, I liked so-and-so, they could do blablabla the best" Keep up the good thinking!
[ February 09, 2008: Message edited by: Skeeblix ]
- New Intro Options
- Activate Screen Revisions
- Finally, Training
- Hacking and Money Making Revisions
- Bugfixes and many minor changes.
Please criticize everything, Liberally.
Your saves will not be compatible. If you run the game with an old save file, the game will crash horrendously (I forgot to increment the version so that the game knows not to try to load the old save).
Edit: By the way, the next big to-do is to get the recruitment cap in. I'm glad you guys like the idea. :D And thank you, it's rewarding to me to know that the hours of work I put into the game are appreciated.
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
https://lcsgame.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lcsgame/branches/31104branch/
You'll need some curses implementation, but I don't think that's a problem if you're in linux. Don't expect the graphics to be pretty though, the linux graphics are something weird.
This is the bleeding edge of the code as I last touched it, post-alpha 6, so you'll get a little of what I've worked on since then, including the now-usable mass activation screen, the return of being able to have your people write for the Liberal Guardian, and finally figuring out what the heck is wrong with public opinion shifts that cause the LCS to always be insanely popular.
I can't guarantee that the game will build properly if you run the linux makefile. If you run into problems and can't figure out how to fix them, let me know what they are, and I might be able to help.
If you can't get it off SVN, I can zip the code up too and throw it on my website if you want me to.
EDIT: Updated the zip file to contain the changes above too. If you got alpha 6 before, you might want to re-download it, as it's a little shinier now. I guess that should be a new version, but I'm feeling even lazier now than I was when I forgot to increment the internal version number last night.
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
Mover#005 -- could you give a list of the errors you're running into when you compile? The code on there is exactly what was used to build the current executable I have up for download, so it should work. Should. Hopefully. If you give me the errors you're getting, I can take a look at them. I'm used to working with errors from GNU, Borland, and Microsoft, so no worries.
I am trying some of the new features, so it may be related to incomplete messages about activities my guys are up to, but I'm not sure, I can't remember if it's been doing this since I started.
quote:
Originally posted by Skeeblix:
<STRONG>Okay, small bug with beta6. I'm not sure if you did this to avoid accidental wastes of time, but it now takes two keypresses to advance the day. It's behaving as though a message is being displayed every time you advance the day and you can hit any key and it will advance the day after you hit w.I am trying some of the new features, so it may be related to incomplete messages about activities my guys are up to, but I'm not sure, I can't remember if it's been doing this since I started.</STRONG>
THANK YOU. I was wondering WHY the game lagged so bad, I tried recompiling with optimizations, I tried closing other programs, I tried looking for excessively laggy code, I tried everything, there was just no explanation, and I never fixed it. But this makes PERFECT sense. I don't know where the problem is, but I'll find it.
EDIT: Alright, it's happening after every Go Forth action. I'm going to try disabling everything else my men are doing and going on a site alone to see if it continues.
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Skeeblix ]
quote:
Originally posted by BishopX:
<STRONG>one other thing, I just lost one of my recruiters in a gun fight, and ended up leaving her body in one of my safe houses. During that time people kept coming back to see her about joining LCS. I recruited some of them, and then when I disposed of her body they lost touch with the squad.</STRONG>
That is extremely odd o_O; I am going to have to try to duplicate this to figure out why it's doing that. I'll look into it.
quote:
Originally posted by Skeeblix:
<STRONG>Another bug. went to the pawn shop and bought a gun, left the pawn shop. The screen went entirely black until a key was pressed.</STRONG>
I wonder if it's the new hacking code...? I'm betting it is... do you have hackers?
Edit: Sure enough, I just found a bug in the hacking code that would cause extra clearscreens/keypresses each day if you have people doing any of the computer-related activities. :)
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
code:
error:Typumwandlung von »interrogation*« nach »int« verliert Genauigkeitmeans roughly:
Typecasting from »interrogation*« to »int« looses precisionchanged from:
pool[pl]->activity.arg = reinterpret_cast<int>(new interrogation);
pool[pl]->activity.arg = reinterpret_cast<long>(new interrogation);
thencrimesquad-saveload.o: In function `load()':
/usr/local/src/31104branch/src/title/saveload.cpp:548: undefined reference to `recruitst::recruitst()'
crimesquad-talk.o: In function `talk(creaturest&, int)':
/usr/local/src/31104branch/src/sitemode/talk.cpp:592: undefined reference to `recruitst::recruitst()'
crimesquad-daily.o: In function `advanceday(char&, char)':
/usr/local/src/31104branch/src/daily/daily.cpp:510: undefined reference to `tendhostage(creaturest*, char&)'
/usr/local/src/31104branch/src/daily/daily.cpp:966: undefined reference to `completerecruitmeeting(recruitst&, int, char&)'
/usr/local/src/31104branch/src/daily/daily.cpp:947: undefined reference to `completerecruittask(recruitst&, int, char&)'
here I completely lost it
quote:
Originally posted by Mover#005:
<STRONG>Problem is, I'm not really familliar with them :Dcode:
[snip]here I completely lost it</STRONG>
Go ahead and commit the first change to SVN if you haven't already, eventually we're going to get the type sizes standardized in the code, for now it's chaos. The rest are link errors, and I kind of expected them... there are two files it's not compiling:
/src/daily/interrogation.cpp
/src/daily/recruit.cpp
Unfortunately, I'm not really sure how to add them for you. How do you compile for linux?
Edit: If you know what file to change to make them compile, and can do that, you can commit that change too. I would have done it myself but I don't know what to do... I'll keep poking at it.
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
quote:
Originally posted by Skeeblix:
<STRONG>Another bug. went to the pawn shop and bought a gun, left the pawn shop. The screen went entirely black until a key was pressed.EDIT: Alright, it's happening after every Go Forth action. I'm going to try disabling everything else my men are doing and going on a site alone to see if it continues.
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Skeeblix ]</STRONG>
This is now fixed. :D It was asking "Is there a location in memory set aside for messages to display about hacking?" when I wanted it to ask "Is there a message to display about hacking?" Subtle, but important difference. :roll: Of course, when it goes to display this non-existant message, you just get a blank screen (or if you didn't go forth, a nonresponse).
quote:
Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>Torak -- I think the teacher needs at least 2 levels of skill above the student... but it doesn't say that anywhere, does it? :o</STRONG>
My people arent actually learning anything, they just get the teaching skill extremely fast (maybe +1 or +2 a day) and then nothing else from a trainer. On any setting.
quote:
Originally posted by Torak:
<STRONG>My people arent actually learning anything, they just get the teaching skill extremely fast (maybe +1 or +2 a day) and then nothing else from a trainer. On any setting.</STRONG>
Ergh, that is not what is supposed to be happening, on so many different levels... can you send me your save at floppysocks@hevanet.com?
Edit: I'm testing and I'm still not getting this. How exactly do you have the training set up? Like how many people are there, how much money do you have, what are the skill levels of the participants? Or you can just send me your save and I'll look at it.
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
EDIT: I got a 2nd crash, apparently related to taking two buying and selling at pawnshop
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: BishopX ]
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: BishopX ]
quote:
Originally posted by BishopX:
<STRONG>I just got a crash, went to the apartments, picked a door lock, then rented a room. I also have hackers out, murals and recruits being eased in. I got the blank hacker screen, the mural screen, and then a crash. I reloaded, and didn't pick the door and got no crash.EDIT: I got a 2nd crash, apparently related to taking two buying and selling at pawnshop
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: BishopX ]
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: BishopX ]</STRONG>
I can't think of any obvious explanation that would allow me to fix these, and I can't reproduce these myself. :(
Edit: Could you add a hang out option to the assign tasks in bulk. I end up using check web polls to quickly get everyone to stop selling stuff to learn. Also teaching goes up way to fast. When I taught my 600 non garment makers politics my main char got to like 26 teaching in under a week. Also the recruit limit looks like a very good idea. This was a very rambling edit wasn't it.
Edit2: Alright teaching combined with no recruit caps is UNGODLY powerful. Right now I have about 700+ libs with 50+ total skill 10 persuasion, 10 garment making, 6 driving, 5 pistol, 3 writing, 2 law. This past month I spent 500k and was still in the green. So yeah. Only reason my fighting skills aren't higher is the Intel HQ is high security and I am having trouble recruiting agents.
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: beorn080 ]
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: beorn080 ]
quote:
Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>Edit: I'm testing and I'm still not getting this. How exactly do you have the training set up? Like how many people are there, how much money do you have, what are the skill levels of the participants? Or you can just send me your save and I'll look at it.[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]</STRONG>
I no longer have the save, but it went something like this: A Skill 6 Teacher was set onto teaching Covert Ops, every day my people would gain about 1 or 2 teaching skill, and cap out at 6, with no further increase in anything, no matter how long I waited.
There's also an issue that if you run out of money with a Teaching job on, it never gets canceled , and you cant seem to re-start it, as far as I can tell (even if you change the job and wait a while), because whenever I tried to start it again, nothing happened , even with enough money.
quote:
Originally posted by beorn080:
<STRONG>Just a small suggestion while I'm busy beta-testing. With the new poll page maybe you could add in random things like 82% of dwarf fortress players prefer ascii.</STRONG>
Sounds like a good idea.
quote:
Originally posted by beorn080:
<STRONG>Edit: Could you add a hang out option to the assign tasks in bulk. I end up using check web polls to quickly get everyone to stop selling stuff to learn. Also teaching goes up way to fast. When I taught my 600 non garment makers politics my main char got to like 26 teaching in under a week. Also the recruit limit looks like a very good idea. This was a very rambling edit wasn't it.</STRONG>
Adding a hang out is a good idea. For training, I actually don't force you to not be doing anything -- in fact, I think you can even send a squad out, and they'll take the class when they get back.
Teachers get 1exp per person per skill they train, and it takes about 100exp to gain a level, so yeah, it'll be craaazy with those numbers of people. I actually changed this on my computer already to be a maximum of 10exp a day.
quote:
Originally posted by beorn080:
<STRONG>Edit2: Alright teaching combined with no recruit caps is UNGODLY powerful. Right now I have about 700+ libs with 50+ total skill 10 persuasion, 10 garment making, 6 driving, 5 pistol, 3 writing, 2 law. This past month I spent 500k and was still in the green. So yeah. Only reason my fighting skills aren't higher is the Intel HQ is high security and I am having trouble recruiting agents.</STRONG>
Two possible solutions jump to mind:
1) Wait for recruitment caps.
2) Revise the $500 cap on daily expenses.
At the moment it costs $50 per person per skill trained, up to a maximum of $500. So if you run a small class with a limited number of skills to teach, it comes at a discount. I could change it to just a per person expense -- $50-100 per person, if they train at least one skill -- and then remove the cap of $500. So if you want to train 60 people, you can, if you have $30,000 a day to pass out. Or $300,000 a day for 600 people, if it comes to that.
quote:
Originally posted by Torak:
<STRONG>I no longer have the save, but it went something like this: A Skill 6 Teacher was set onto teaching Covert Ops, every day my people would gain about 1 or 2 teaching skill, and cap out at 6, with no further increase in anything, no matter how long I waited.</STRONG>
That's really strange. I haven't seen anything in the code that jumps out as being something that could cause this sort of anomaly. I'll keep an eye out for it, and let me know if this happens again.
quote:
Originally posted by Torak:
<STRONG>There's also an issue that if you run out of money with a Teaching job on, it never gets canceled , and you cant seem to re-start it, as far as I can tell (even if you change the job and wait a while), because whenever I tried to start it again, nothing happened , even with enough money.</STRONG>
Teaching job is actually very casual and well-behaved with the way it handles your money. Every day, if you have the money, it spends it. If you have partial money, it spends partial money and does a partial job. If you have no money, it doesn't do anything that day.
Additionally, if it has nothing to do on a given day, eg, nobody to train, it is smart enough not to waste you money. You don't have to micromanage it. If it has very little to do/a small class, it will make a partial charge (less than $500 for that day).
It is completely ignorant of whether you had money yesterday or whether it trained anyone yesterday. It doesn't have any "on/off" switch that it flips when you run out of money -- when it runs its code to give people experience in skills, it checks if it can charge for that skill, sees it can't, and silently declines to give the experience. The next day it'll check again.
So, this is probably working as intended. You ran out of money, and it quietly stopped training. Once you had money back, it discovered that there wasn't anyone present who needed training, so it didn't spend the money you had available. You tried changing the job and waiting awhile, then switching back to training, and again, it said "Nope, still no experience to award, so I'm still not going to charge money."
Try recruiting somebody fresh and sending them there, and you should see it "turn on" again.
Note that if you get skills that seem to stop early (agility 2 person only gets 4 pistols when teacher has 12 pistols), they may have hit their skill cap. Alternatively, you may have hit the limit of the teacher's ability -- if the teacher only has teaching 1, they won't be able to train people past pistols 3, for example. Or if they have pistols 5, you won't be able to train past pistols 4.
If there aren't any, it should say that teaching has been cancelled.
Also, a teacher should have its skill decreased by the number of students he has. (full with 1, -1 with 2 to 5, -2 with 6 to 15... and so on).
I don't know if squad should be able to receive teaching...
quote:
Originally posted by flap:
<STRONG>I haven't tried that version. However : "So, this is probably working as intended. You ran out of money, and it quietly stopped training."If there aren't any, it should say that teaching has been cancelled.
Also, a teacher should have its skill decreased by the number of students he has. (full with 1, -1 with 2 to 5, -2 with 6 to 15... and so on).I don't know if squad should be able to receive teaching...</STRONG>
Reducing the effective skill of the teacher (at least as far as speed of teaching goes) would be more practical if you could select certain students to learn and certain ones not to. I decided against this to remove levels of micromanagement, and to keep the complexity of the code down. If you start assigning students, it gets complicated -- do you have to be specifically a student, or can you be just hanging around idly? What if you want idlers who aren't loading down the class or generating expenses? What if you have two teachers in one building? Can a person attend both? What if you want them to attend one, but not the other?
Right now, it just assumes that the classes are held in the evening, after everyone gets back from their assigned daily tasks. The guys who shot up the police station at about noon come back, drop off their gear, and still have time for an evening class on law from the Liberal Judge the LCS happens to have seduced. Even people who might not otherwise need it will be curious and pop in for some lessons, if they're being run there. After all, it wouldn't be very Liberal of the LCS to limit access to education and shut people out of classes if they're right there in the same building. ;)
One side effect of all this is that a lot of the heat of criminals in the building rubs off on the person giving classes -- if the guys who knew exactly what to do to shut down the nuclear power plant last week are getting their science lessons from a girl at the homeless shelter, the police are going to be pretty anxious to find her, too. (She'll get the same racketeering charge for teaching criminals that you get for recruiting criminals -- it wouldn't be worth even that, but her association with the LCS gives them an argument that she's enabling them as part of the criminal machine. It's only one count, no matter how much she does though, so it's not -too- hard to beat.)
Also, teachers should only acquire heat from their students if those students commit crimes while they're attending classes, if at all. It's ridiculous for the teacher to get implicated for something their students did half a year before they ever attended classes. The type of crime and lesson should also factor into it, since there's no real or imagined crime in teaching law and business courses to someone who stole a TV from the local 711.
Also, reducing the effective skill of the teacher is a ridiculous idea for the reason you said: It'd require excessive micromanagement. While some people may not mind making fine adjustments to 50+ characters every day, most of us find it tedious.
Ah. Overlooked that "with respect to speed of teaching" remark. I don't mind reducing teaching speed so long as the reduction scales reasonably. Spending five years to teach pistols 3 to 20 fresh recruits is retarded. I do mind skill reduction w.r.t. how high a skill level the students can learn.
[ February 11, 2008: Message edited by: Earthquake Damage ]
quote:
Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>While I dislike any teaching fee, I'll live with a per-person teaching fee (capped or otherwise). A per-person per-skill fee, however, becomes far too expensive for teaching to be worthwhile. If training one squad were to cost $10,000 each day, why the hell are you even training them? If a game feature is prohibitively expensive, don't have that feature.</STRONG>
It's currently per-person per-skill for the sole purpose of giving you a discount for small classes or cases when you're only teaching one skill to a group of people. So training a squad of six pistols 3 would cost $300 a day, if they are only picking up pistols, while without the per-person per-skill, it would be set at a flat $500 a day. I wouldn't want to do per-person per-skill without the cap.
quote:
Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>Also, teachers should only acquire heat from their students if those students commit crimes while they're attending classes, if at all. It's ridiculous for the teacher to get implicated for something their students did half a year before they ever attended classes. The type of crime and lesson should also factor into it, since there's no real or imagined crime in teaching law and business courses to someone who stole a TV from the local 711.</STRONG>
About half the crimes in the game don't have any heat signature at all; so technically, you wouldn't get heat for teaching the guy who stole a TV from the 711, because stealing TVs doesn't trigger raids. You would get heat for teaching the guy who killed three people at the 711, because murder does have a heat rating. On the other hand, you're probably right about it taking into account what course you're teaching.
I do feel that it's right that there be some consequences for an LCS assault rifle instructor who trains the guy who was shooting up the Police Station with an M16 last week. There's no inherent crime in teaching him the skills, but the guy is a wanted criminal and the instructor is not some neutral university professor, it's a fellow member of the organized crime ring that made that attack.
"Oh, there's no crime in teaching these guys to sneak around, pick locks, and use guns." Perhaps not inherently, but the cops aren't stupid. They have a job to clean up the LCS, and they'll find some excuse to arrest the person who is training people to commit crimes.
Like I said though, I hear you, if they're just teaching law and business, it doesn't really make sense. Will probably make Fighting and Killing and Covert Ops the only heat building ones -- Political Leadership, General Education, and even Street Survival are fairly innocent.
quote:
Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>Also, reducing the effective skill of the teacher is a ridiculous idea for the reason you said: It'd require excessive micromanagement. While some people may not mind making fine adjustments to 50+ characters every day, most of us find it tedious.Ah. Overlooked that "with respect to speed of teaching" remark. I don't mind reducing teaching speed so long as the reduction scales reasonably. Spending five years to teach pistols 3 to 20 fresh recruits is retarded. I do mind skill reduction w.r.t. how high a skill level the students can learn.
[ February 11, 2008: Message edited by: Earthquake Damage ]</STRONG>
I would strongly mind a reduction in skill that the students would learn, I think it would be a huge mistake. Slowing it down for lots of students is not so troublesome, but even so, there may be a time when you want your infiltrator to learn ASAP so you can get them into the prison with enough skill to break out your person on death row, and it may be unpleasant to have to micromanage the number of people in class by giving them a private safehouse (which, granted, you might want to do anyway if you want to run the class on the cheap), or worse, not realize it's a factor. I'm not strongly against it, but I'm not convinced.
quote:
Originally posted by Little:
<STRONG>Dying after being seen attempting to steal a car, and if you die in the resulting chase. your game CTD....</STRONG>
I'll look into it when I get the chance (too busy to code right now). Man, I am so tired of stolen car crashes... it used to be much worse. :D
Now, I hadn't done anything major against corporations, though several corporate issues were liberal (not elite). I also had a CEO (converting the sons of bitches approaches Nintendo hard) and a few manager sleepers.
I had angered the feds, though, by fat-fingering a "secret document" special edition when I meant to print a "police record" one. Within the month, the cops arrested my writers for treason. Most of them got off, so no big deal, right? But then this mystery raid comes nearly a year later and slaughters everyone that matters, making the rest of the LCS disband. Was it the feds? I was careful, for the entire game, not to make them mad, with the exception of selecting the wrong special edition to print. I was afraid they'd raid for that, but then all I got was a treason trial, so I thought I was in the clear. Do they never give up once you've crossed them, and does it really take them that long to raid? Or was it the corporations who attacked because the laws became too liberal (which is retarded in the same way as turn-based strategy games where everyone goes suicidally berserk when you're winning, even when such behavior is wholly unrealistic)?
quote:
Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>Was it the feds? I was careful, for the entire game, not to make them mad, with the exception of selecting the wrong special edition to print. I was afraid they'd raid for that, but then all I got was a treason trial, so I thought I was in the clear. Do they never give up once you've crossed them, and does it really take them that long to raid? Or was it the corporations who attacked because the laws became too liberal (which is retarded in the same way as turn-based strategy games where everyone goes suicidally berserk when you're winning, even when such behavior is wholly unrealistic)?</STRONG>
It was probably a CIA raid, like you suggest. They don't ever give up -- once the LCS angers the CIA, they will continue to attack until everyone is dead. They don't care about justice -- so your person is just an art seller, they're not concerned about that. If they have knowledge that person is a member of the LCS, and they surround the compound and (try to) kill them.
Alternately, I believe there is a small possibility that you can get a raid for kidnapping Radio Personalities or Cable News Anchors. Once you anger the media, it's possible that you basically get a lynch mob of hicks show up and raid you. They're not very tough, but they're killers too. I've never seen this, and it's possible that somewhere it's disabled, but I know there's code to support it.
But overall, I have to say, I've done the same thing -- giving up before I realized that it wasn't the cops after all, and suddenly game over because my founder just got executed. I wonder if it should disable giving up when you get raided by other groups, always give you a fighting chance.
As a side note, is it just me, or does the game feel much more winnable in this latest version? It's not like you're walking against the treadmill, you can actually make progress. It's still tough, but yeah. Maybe it's just the poll screen, for awhile I had it disabled. The Guardian helps too, because it works like a short-term sleeper factory.
Also, do you like the new elections?
[ February 12, 2008: Message edited by: Trorbes ]
quote:
Originally posted by Trorbes:
<STRONG>I noticed in the latest Alpha build that, in the Activate screen, when a liberal is writing to newspapers, the activity column is blank.
Edit: Healing too, I think.[ February 12, 2008: Message edited by: Trorbes ]</STRONG>
Yeah. What does writing to newspapers do anyways
quote:
Originally posted by Little:
<STRONG>Yeah. What does writing to newspapers do anyways</STRONG>
Writing to newspapers is like a very weak version of writing for the guardian. You don't get any news articles, but you do have a subtle short-term sleeper effect on the "Background Liberal Influence". This takes the form of consuming public interest (public interest drops) in an issue, and converting it into a higher chance of winning the end of month natural moves rolls. Participants in the end of month rolls include sleepers, graffiti artists, troublemakers, and writers on the LCS side, and AM Radio and Cable TV on the Conservative side. All of these have very subtle, slow effects, but they're powerful -- it's almost entirely the power of the AM Radio and Cable TV to influence public opinion shifts over long periods of time that enables the country to turn Conservative. Crippling those two groups and implementing your own machine to influence public opinion steadily will help to secure your more dramatic gains achieved through direct action.
Edit: With that being said, I wouldn't bother writing to newspapers. It's pretty useless.
[ February 12, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]