Bay 12 Games Forum

I am mostly only doing updates when someone suggests something or has a bug issue - I don't really have any active plans to add new features but I'm still keeping an eye on things and tackling any problems people might report.

Hmm, it looks like there's a few issues going on there and honestly I probably need to dissect the handling of siege escapes a bit more overall to debug it. It's something I put together a while ago and was very hacky so likely some of those hacks are leading to issues in the turn processing order.

I've found the problem and should be able to get a fix out later today that should recover your save - the issue is that it's having a problem trying to load the portrait information for a guard dog you've recruited, because I forgot when setting up that logic that guard dogs don't have generated portraits, so it's trying to process a bunch of null values into numbers.

Nightmare mode isn't currently available (but it's fairly easy to modify the save file to set all laws to -2 if you really want it). The CCS is already active - they will start taking action once the country has partially liberalized. The White House is not in since it didn't really work in the version I was basing mine off of and I was trying to stick with things that were 100% complete to port over to this one (this is also why I didn't include the Stalinist Crime Squad option).

They will, but only in the situation where you had liberals at the base and surrendered (or tried to fight and lost). If they raid an empty safehouse they'll confiscate all the items there and recover corpses/hostages but not touch any investments you had. This is consistent with the version I was basing my code on, but looking at the original code it looks like there were stubs in place to make police also dismantle your base when raiding empty safehouses that weren't active in that specific version, so they may have been finished after I'd started working on mine. It would make sense for cops to dismantle all the (illegal) investments in an empty safehouse.

CCS won't capture safehouses in my version, but this was kind of broken in the original as well so that was a conscious decision not to implement it since there's a lot of hackery around CCS bases and how they get captured which wouldn't play well with safehouses that weren't originally owned by them (long story short they need to be a custom map, with a "CCS Boss" tile, or else you can never take them back because killing the boss is what triggers the capture).

Hmm, that was an issue a while ago during development but I'm not sure why it would only be hitting you - it's kind of an all or nothing thing. Are you running the most recent version? It should say "version: b12" in the bottom left corner of the title screen if you are.

It's possible there might be some weirdness with how input is handled in win10 or by your laptop but again if it's a win10 thing I would expect more people would be having that issue. Does the output log have any exceptions in it? You can find it in C:\Users\(your windows username)\AppData\LocalLow\Lazy Dog Software\LCS. It will only have data from your most recent play session so you'd need to boot it up and reproduce the issue and then quit.

So.

I have been pretty quiet on this for a while, mainly because I haven't really had anything else to add - I'd gotten it to the point where I felt happy with the state it was in and aside from some small tweaks here and there I haven't really needed to update anything. However, lately I've been feeling like coming back to it and trying to clean up a few more of the tiny little issues that bugged me over the months and have a very minor update that I am working on, nothing super noticeable, just some behind the scenes adjustments to how certain things are calculated.

So since I'm already working on it, I'm curious if there are any features that people might find interesting that I could potentially add to make this update a bit more substantial. The game is already almost at feature parity with the original - if there are any minor things that I'm missing that I've just forgotten about, feel free to point those out, but I'm also curious about broader suggestions that might just make the game better regardless of whether or not the original had it.

I still have no idea how I'm going to handle the inevitable ammo clusterfuck from adding so many different guns, all with varying calibers and mag capacities. This is because of how ammo is implemented in LCS. Ammo is tracked by magazines, and each magazine can only hold a certain number of rounds. The Luger and TEC-9 might both be 9mm, for example, but they both have different capacities. Needing both a special "8-round" mag that only the Luger can use, and a special "32-round" mag that only the TEC-9 can use?

Last time I played LCS (which was a year or two ago), LCS did NOT let you unload magazines and transfer the ammo to others, so you can't unload a 30-round 9mm SMG mag and use it to refill your 15-round pistol mags.

Yeah, this was always an annoyance of mine, especially when you loot a lot of stuff from enemies so you end up with a ton of clips that are like 14/15 because they managed to get a shot or two off before you killed them. I feel like you could potentially rework it so that ammo stored in bases is counted in "bullets" rather than "clips", though. It would be a bit of an overhaul but the way I imagine it working is like this:

-Clip items would still exist, but only for the purpose of carrying it around during squad actions.
-When a clip is dumped into a base inventory, instead of tracking the item directly it would just dump its remaining capacity into a counter for the ammo type in the base
-When Liberals add a clip to their inventory, it subtracts from the ammo counter in the base and gives them one clip appropriate to the weapon they have equipped, provided the base still has enough left to give them a full clip. If it's short, it just gives them a partially filled clip and then won't let them take any more.
-Clips looted during squad activity or purchased from a store wouldn't have to change functionality. The conversion would only happen when moving things to/from base inventory.

The main thing that would be needed here is to modify the base handler to track ammo counts of different ammo types as a property of the base, rather than just storing references to inventory object. The second thing would be some way of tagging ammo types on clips so that the game knows that a 30 round 9mm SMG magazine and a 15 round 9mm pistol magazine are both actually the same kind of bullets and to sort them into the same pool when stored at a base. There would also need to be some kind of change to transferring items between bases, since ammo would no longer be stored as items but you'd still probably want to be able to move it from one place to another.