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[Jonathan S. Fox]

So this post is about some of the underlying mechanics of the game that are otherwise hidden from the player, and some of the things I'm doing, so I can get people's opinions and feedback. Right now, I don't have anything uploaded with these changes, but I wanted to get it written down because I might be too lazy to describe it in detail later.  

Yesterday, I managed to get it so your people would carry around information about how many times they've committed a certain crime, rather than just whether they've committed a crime or not. That's nice.

Then I got carried away and made the different crimes carry different "heat" ratings, so that committing murder would attract more police attention than committing theft. I overhauled the way police do investigations and raids, making it so that everyone in a safehouse who is wanted by the police has their "heat" ratings rub off on the safehouse each round, so that the safehouse gets more and more hot the longer they're there. Once the heat for the location reaches a certain threshold, the police countdown for a siege starts.

So now each safehouse has a certain protection value (higher for a place with a business front than the homeless shelter, for example), and that protection value absorbs a certain proportion of the heat that having wanted people in the safehouse inflicts on it. Before you have a business front, you might absorb 0% of the heat, while after you set one up, you might then absorb 75% of the heat, for example, meaning it's 4 times as effective at hiding people. Once the heat level gets past the threshold, the amount of time before the raid actually happens is also influenced by the protection value of the safehouse.

If nobody there is wanted, the heat level of the safehouse goes down. If you start violently repelling police raids, the heat decay of all safehouses starts to degrade, because the police are focusing more and more resources on tracking all of your past movements as well as your current movements. This means that as you escalate your ability to fight off the police, they escalate their pressure against you and make it harder for you to rely on the old hiding strategy.

So that all sounds fine. The problem is that what I've essentially done is fixed a system that wasn't broken. The way police raids worked before was that if someone was wanted, then a countdown would begin before that place was raided. If you spent even one day at a safehouse with someone wanted for theft, they'd raid that safehouse eventually. More secure safehouses took longer to find. My system has this as well, but it's a less powerful effect (shorter wait times, even for good safehouses) that doesn't kick in until after the safehouse has generated enough heat from housing multiple Liberals or highly wanted Liberals there.

This SHOULD play differently in these ways:

1. If hiding a lot of highly wanted liberals in a very secure safehouse, you will find that the police raid sooner than before, but still take awhile to find the place.

2. If you slip from place to place on occasion and are only wanted for a few minor crimes, you'll manage to go completely undetected. Why not? They don't care that much! They're not spending all the resources in their department to track down a very slippery petty thief who doesn't stay in one place.

My hope is that the result is a somewhat steeper curve that gives a more realistic feeling about when the police attack. A couple of hackers in the basement won't attract much attention at first, but if you get a bunch of them or build up a significant record over time, they'll start considering you more and more important to hunt down. If you go to the police station with a gang of six Liberals and steal a bunch of TVs and Computers, gun down four police officers, and break a bunch of people out of the police lock-up, then they'll be angry enough that it won't take them two years (as it might before) to find that squad's hiding place downtown. It might still take them six months, but that's just because that was the last place they look.

I don't have a complete version with this change yet, but once I do, I'd like to hear feedback on how this new design for police investigations works. I'm concerned that for all the work it took me to do all of this, I may have fallen into the fixing what isn't broken syndrome. It's more important that this maintains *balance*, and I'm concerned that will my number juggling and making the system more complicated than it was, I might have broken that.

If you have any ideas about this or any related issues, I'll be happy to hear them.

Edit:

Incidentally, as this is a very "under the hood" change, it's entirely possible that nobody will notice any of this in actual gameplay. Which is fine. But that wouldn't be very exciting.

[ June 02, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[flap]

Unless we've got some people who would give us some info from the police.

[slMagnvox]

yeah, sounds like you've laid the groundwork for some good gameplay.

I start out alot of my games with the "half-dozen hackers in the basement" strategy and I usually get raided pretty early before I can invest in my safehouse.  So you might be on the right track, complicating the system to more appropriately ramp up the difficulty.

[ June 03, 2007: Message edited by: slMagnvox ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

That's a good idea, flap -- with this, I can add support for police sleepers to leak more detailed information regarding the state of their investigation.

slMagnvox, yes, my thought is that it might make the early game easier, and so boost some strategies like hacking first, but then I thought that this may not be a bad thing. It would change some of the strategy, but it would also encourage thinking about what techniques can be used to "build up" before you get a lot of police attention.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I almost posted this in the other thread, but I figured it might be a bit spoiler-y if I ended up implementing it, so here's a run down of my thoughts on the details of a gun control issue (assuming I ever make one):

At its Arch-Conservative, there are guns everywhere. You can buy AK-47s in the pawn shop, your convicted felons have a free pass at the gun stores, a lot of "everyday Joes" carry guns, and average police and security guards can be seen toting machine guns.

At a Conservative level, felons can't buy them (of course you just need to send a lackey with a clean record down to buy for you... but hey, there are privileges to being organized), and machine guns are no longer bought and sold. Police and security guards carry their normal weapons.

When the issue is moderate, the Pawn Shop doesn't sell AR15 rifles (which I'd have to add), a weapon that works like an M16 without the burst fire. As it uses assault rifle ammo, as long as it's legal, you can buy assault rifle clips to refill your weapons... additionally, carrying machine guns in public will now quickly draw suspicion (or even cause alarm outright), plus fewer people carry guns.

When the issue is Liberal, the Pawn Shop no longer sells powerful handguns, and few people carry guns besides law enforcement and government.

At its Elite Liberal level, the Pawn Shop doesn't buy or sell guns at all, any shooting range activities are prohibited, and only government employees and maybe some criminals have them. If you aren't in a police/military uniform, carrying any large weapons causes alarm instantly. Security guards carry batons.

[Tommy2U]

I think unless there were stringent security checks at entrances to public buildings and apartment blocks it would make the game easier as the society goes Liberal. I mean the LCS would find the ways to get guns while facing largely unarmed opposition.

[flap]

About the cops system, well, I don't know if it has been implemented already... But we have sleepers. Do the conservative have mole in our group ?

You know the little bastards who would inform the cops of everything you are doing. In some case you would meet the police when going fight evil (they would have been warned of your arrival), or get all the information you explained above earlier.

Our way to detect the mole(s) ? Because they have been in contact of the squads whose expedition has been stopped by the police. Or through the sleepers you have. You could also ask one of your guys to follow some other of your guys (but if you asked a mole to follow one of yours, he might give you a wrong report).
During a fight, if the mole is in the squad, it can decide to start fighting against you (if you are likely to loose...). Or if you are caught the police might tell him something which would enable you to understand that HE sold you.
You would get the info when your guys leave the prison  (or they would tell it the lawyer)(there needs to be someone to report what he has seen).
You might then decide you hunt him down to show an exemple and reduce the likehood of moles. To do so, you would need to collect some info by sending guyes around to find him. One day, one of yours might come back and tell you "he is in that appartment". And then lets go "fight EVIL" to bring him back and show the exemple. Of course, police might be around to help him.

The biggest proportion of mole survive, the more you are likely to get. (A mole which has been found but manages to survive would have a worse effect on you than one which is working but don't do anything). The biggest proportion you find, and punish, the less you might have.

Any comment ?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

On the topic of gun control making the game easier as it stands without checkpoints, let me run through a few thoughts on the features I'd like to add:

1) Security checkpoints during high security, including metal detectors that allow Conservatives to be automatically alerted if you try to proceed with weapons they don't want in the building. (Maybe allow sleeper security guards to wave you through anyway...)

2) A "major police response" phase when fighting evil that takes place somewhat after the first time you kill someone, and happens when you've taken way too long to finish your business and have allowed everyone to evacuate the building and the police to surround it and start clearing it with SWAT units. Or, it could simply be two phased: in the first after the alert phase, evacuation, you seem to have free reign, as everyone has fled the building and only a few stragglers remain. The second phase, they've been largely replaced by heavily police units.

3) Relocate most of the special awesome things to the back of the building. I think there is something distinctly odd about being able to nonchalantly walk into the police station and bust open the police lock-up four times in as many days, and not get caught or even noticed until you're long gone. I'd also like a few such things to cause automatic alerts. It causes automatic alert to use the movie studio, or to shut down the nuclear reactor, but not to break people out of the police lock-up. I really think you should need to have a set of police uniforms and someone who is really slick with the bluff to break anyone out of the police lock-up without a shootout taking place right then and there.

If all of those are in place, I don't think it'll be quite so nice to have unarmed security guards. I'd probably prefer to be able to buy ammo somewhere...

On the topic of conservative moles in the LCS, I did briefly think about what it would take to have something like that. My conclusion at the time was that, as you described, it would require quite a few aspects to it in order to be satisfying.

We'd need to think about a) How did they get there? How can you be more careful next time? b) What information, exactly, are they leaking? What are the gameplay consequences? c) How do you detect one? and d) How do you deal with one once they're detected?

You've thought through quite a few of these. The problem is that this sounds like a lot of work to implement one feature.   Since your people can already break under the pressure of police interrogations, causing all kinds of problems with your chain of command (lost contact with everyone under, and superior is hit with a racketeering charge), I don't think it's completely needed.

I do think that the lack of any "special persons" you're specifically targeting does seem odd, however. I really think it would add a lot to gameplay to have at least something like your idea of hunting down former moles. Maybe as an intermediate step, police sleepers could reveal the safehouses of people who have previously ratted you out, and this would enable you to gain major juice for recapturing them or killing them. If a political system was implemented, such a targeted system could be used for political assassinations and kidnappings, which is very much in the theme of the game. LCS is loosely based on the ill-fated and short-lived Symbionese Liberation Army, which made its initial notoriety with a rather poorly thought-out ("rampage"-style) assassination of a popular liberal school superintendent, the first black man to hold his position, using hollow-point bullets modified to carry cyanide.

[flap]

Well, as I haven't played much LCS yet (But am trying the change that right now), my suggestions can't be very technical, and might look out of place (such as already implemented, or just not consistent with the game).

So, the things I can put together regarding your questions about the mole :

1: How would we get one ?
Hmm. How would they infest such an organisation in real life ?
They could be fake liberal right from the beginning. Once things start to heat a bit too much for them they would go to the police.
Or once they are caught by the police, the police prefers to let them go in exchange of some info. They could have ways to put pressure on them. (We know enough about you to send you to jail you know. But we might make an arrangement...)
The moles would have relations out of the LCS (met before or after you recruited them). These relations could be used to put pressure on them. Or simply by being confident, they could give to their relatives too many informations.

So there would be many different ways. In terms of gameplay, do we really need to model that ? I don't think so. There could just be a random check on some of you character agains juice, heart, wisdom or intelligence (I don't know which characteristic would be best) to see if he becomes a mole.

Eventually the result of that check coul be stored, a given somewhere when we discover who is that mole (we would then know if he was caught by police, if he betrayed you unpurposelly by telling too many things to relatives...)

2: What kind of info would a mole leak ?
Well, you described a new police and crime rating system. Maybe by sending info to the police they could add a modifyer to someone which would increase its rating. Or worse, simply give info on the safehouse, which would reduce its 75% "heat absorption" to 0. (He simply tells that there is an hideout somewhere in that building).
How do we decide which info he gives : It could maybe be any info on any of its direct contact (higher or lower) (so as you told, that would be close the guyes caught by the police who speaks ?). But instead of losing all contacts at a time, they might be caught one after the other in their every day activity.
They could maybe give info on all the people they seen performing a criminal act (thus increasing the heating he would bet from that specific act).
They might steal things from your stock, or money. (you'd then be warned by a message.)
Eventually, they could just disappear one day.
They could give info of one of the squads moves (the one it is part of, or the one under its level...). When the squad arrives at the place, the police would be waiting for them.
Oh, a last thing, maybe funny : they could submit wrong orders to all their lower contact. Instead of doing what you told them, they might do something really foolish.

3: How do we know that we have got a mole ?
Hmm. Good question.
If the police is already on site when you arrive, that's easy, you know that you have been sold.
If the guy disappears or give wrong orders, the result is quite obvious too.
(In these both cases, in terms of gameplay a message can be printed "Rats ! we've been sold. There is a mole !")
For the guy who gives some info, it is really less obvious for the player. that maybe where police sleepers would usefull ("well that man has been arrested. We got some info to lead us"). Or in front of the justice, you could receive a message such as "The evidence were too accurate. Someone must have leaked them !"

4: How do you find who is that mole once you know that there is one ?
If the mole is in the group which has been arrested, the police could free it in front of everybody, or reward him. (Dirty conservatives ! They know, that will be beaten by all remaining liberals !)
If you have suspicions, you can Activate an agent to follow someone. You would gather some info on who he meets, and what he does during the day (this would require to define a kind of schedule with random events, and coordinate it with the different activities. Hmm. Maybe not, we just need to follow him when he is not working with you. So make out random events, such as he meets his sister...). That person would meet a number of other people, or drop a letter somewhere or give a call, drop a packet. You could try to follow that new person, try to see the number, take the packet, wait for someone to come... Then that contact could appear to be some normal contact, not to worry about, or go directly to the police (or give a call to the police). We could imagine, 1, 2 or 3 intermediates to make a real investigation.
Of course, there would be a check of intelligence, desguise... Any liberal would like to be followed (and thus might loose heart, juice...). Or the mole would stop which has seen you would stop giving the info (instead of seing his contact, he would do something else).

5: How to avoid to get one ?
Hmm. I don't think that you can avoid the check against getting a mole or not. But, if some moles have been caught and suppressed in an examplary way, that check would be more difficult. If your liberals know that they are being surveyed in the organisation (They know that you "A"ctivate some people to watch what is happening), they check would be more difficult too. So you exchange the juice reduction of those who have seen that they have been followed, with a bit more security. (Hey, a terrorist organisation which does not get paranoïd is not a real terrorist organisation !)
By the way, when you activate someone to follow someone else, you have to actively specify who he has to survey. I wonder whether the tracking described above should be automatic, or wether you should be given different choice. But, an interesting option could be "show yourself" : the liberal (whether a mole or not) would know that he is being followed, get the juice reduction but also increase in the felling of being surveyed (and if the guy is a mole, he would stop its action. You never know that he was one, but at least the info he gave has been stopped).

Oh, if there is a high feeling of being surveyed, each mole would be less active.

6: Okay. You have found one. How do you design it ?
In fact, you could designate anyone as a mole, and thus be wrong. Designate someone wrongly would have a very bad impact on your team or liberal agenda. (and probably good if you find a real one). Maybe the way to do it would be when following someone, you also have the option of "F"ight ! and "K"idnap, like any conservative. Then the bastard could be torturred. They idea is not to convert him, but let him suffer as much as possible (yuk !) and make an example, eventually get some info on what he told exactly (you might get an insight on who has high heat on him, whether one of you safe house is not safe anymore, or where he hid the stuff he stole. He might even give an other mole. Or his contact that you might follow. Maybe that man is in contact with other moles...)

Well. That's probably about it... What do you think of it ? Of course, any tiny bits here would need more work to be defined.

Hmm, yep, if we decide that it would be fun, it would probably take a bit of work to implement that ! Maybe I should help a bit... (but might development environment is broken right now)

Lets go play a bit now !

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Yes, that sounds cool, but I think more than I want to take on right now! If you want to take a look at the source code, you're welcome to; I have a download for the latest version in the LCS 3.10 thread. I might warn you it's a bit intimidating though. Sorry for my unresponsiveness, I've had a crazy week.

[flap]

Yep. I will have a look at it once my personal computer is repaired. But, yeah I know that it is probably big, and I have already enough project running.

"Unresponsiveness". Well, no it is alright ! My usual development cycle is a few month or years. So we are not in such a rush.

And cutting ideas in small bits is always usefull : even if it is not implemented it might fuel some other, easier to implement things.

[Xavior]

The map code is rather confusing to me, but I see that around line 3700 it generates all the special squares, and it only puts them on Free Blank tiles. Is there a reason loot and special squares can't go in the Restricted area for the locations that have them? It seems like it would make far more sense, and I'm kind of annoyed that those areas are so fruitless to explore, since everything is either right next to the entrance or just on the other side of the building.

(Note: The greater area would completely eliminate the ability to go in and break people out of jail continuously with no risk)

And right now it looks like I have a police station with so much secure space there's NO lock-up o_O Poor Aiko  

[ June 10, 2007: Message edited by: Xavior ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Done, uploaded, and in the latest downloadable release.   Amusingly, when I tested the first attempt I made at allowing stuff to appear in restricted areas, I had the court lock-up appearing in a wall and the jury in a door. Works fine now though.

[Xavior]

Wahaha. Wonderful.

There is one thing I feel compelled to point out, as much as I love it, I think the disguise skill might be a little broken. It would appear the problem is in the disguiseskill function around line 15,000.

Namely, it would seem as long as you're wearing the right uniform and have ANY disguise skill whatsoever, you automatically become invulnerable to suspicion, as you immediately get set to 10,000 skill.

For some reason at some point I thought that was based on the encounter tables(having gone through them like the dirty cheater I am to find out what the probability to find people was) but now it seems rather obviously not that. (It seems from disguisecheck() to just be based on the int and wis of your enemies, talk about overkill.) The only thing I can figure is that the lowest=10,000 line was added just to test that diguise worked at all, rather than add a new #define like the one for lotsa moneys.

EDIT:
Speaking of overkill, does it ever become possible to beat that 100 media power check for keeping the security guards in their seats while performing on the radio or TV? Taking the straight average of everyone on your squad seems a little harsh for making that possible. The highest I've come to so far is about half, with my main character who became an Urban Commando through elite theft. I mean, forced taxation.

-- Also, before you have a point in disguise skill, what you're wearing seems to have no effect, I imagine even if you have good disguise stats, so you have to get into alot of close situations before you get a point and are actually allowed to try to not arouse suspicion. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, it's actually a pretty good motivator(uwaa, they're shooting at me!), and I could be wrong.

[ June 11, 2007: Message edited by: Xavior ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I just looked at disguiseskill, and it looks okay, actually. If it was broken, the conservatives would never notice if you walked in naked.   I just changed the way this works to try to fix this -- in fact, now you get a bonus for having a lot of people in your group. Radio shows with more than one person are always more interesting.   I don't have time to test it right now, but it's straightforward enough that it shouldn't be much trouble.