Bay 12 Games Forum

Actually, low penetration weapons tend to be MORE lethal to the target. The bullets are designed to mushroom on impact, which transfers more force into the body. That means they'll lose speed more quickly (and thus not penetrate) and also shred internal organs. And it's true that in real life cops are trained to shoot to kill. In real life however, cops don't shoot NEARLY as often as they do in LCS

The point isn't to undermine the whole "forces of EVIL" thing. It's to get more use out of the justice system. Right now the only way to get arrested is to give up - sometimes if you're really slow running away you get tackled and arrested, but most of the time it's MP5 bullets to the chest, you die. That seems like kind of a harsh penalty for the player because somebody got caught selling pot brownies. I think it would be much more interesting to have the character get shot in the leg, arrested, and then you have the ability to rescue them from the police station/court house rather than just losing that person right away. I realize it's pretty easy to replace people, but why even have the option of breaking people out of jail if it barely comes up?

To add some spin to it, if someone is booked after resisting arrest, maybe they could be interrogated more harshly than someone who gives themselves up - meaning that they'll be more likely to give up their leader or depending on police oversight laws, even dying in custody. So while resisting arrest wouldn't be risking death most of the time (MOST of the time. Even shooting to wound can kill someone), it would be a bigger risk to both the individual and your organization than simply giving themselves up.

Something I think would be nice is the ability to influence combat a bit more. Nothing too complicated, but here's a few ideas of what I mean:

A) If you're being pursued, you'd have the option of "Covering Fire" - essentially, you would select some squad members and they would do the "fight" action while the rest of the squad tries to escape. This would give the escaping people a much higher chance of getting away than normal - if they do get away they'd just be removed from the squad and placed back at the safe-house. If they fail to escape, it just treats it like a "fight" round with the escaping people not getting to make an attack. Obviously, this would only work if your squad is on foot or in separate cars.

B) Being able to select your squads rules of engagement: "shoot to wound" or "shoot to kill". The former would make your squad more likely to hit extremities, while the latter would be how it works now. The purpose would be that shooting to wound would be useful when you want to take hostages; you would damage them enough that they can't resist, and would be less likely to accidentally kill them in the process.

C) Related to B, I think that police behaviour should also use the same rules of engagement - they would default to shooting to wound and trying to arrest unless the LCS member fires a gun at them or kills a cop on the site, at which point they'll shoot to kill. I think even if the LCS engages the cops with fists, the cops should still try to arrest rather than to kill, since attacking with fists isn't really a lethal threat. Naturally, Death squads will ALWAYS shoot to kill.

D) Another combat related thing that might make for an interesting playstyle: martial arts skill should give a character a chance to disarm an opponent when they attack, though it would only really occur at higher skill levels. If someone gets disarmed, they'd have to either waste a turn retrieving their weapon, or attack unarmed. Maybe with REALLY high martial arts skill, the unarmed attacker would actually take the weapon and equip it THEMSELVES.

I'm getting a bug where Elven merchants don't seem to want to leave. They've already given the "X has departed" message and they won't trade with me, but all their stuff is still in the depot and they're just hanging out there as if they're still trading with me. I've had other merchants come by and they left just fine, it seems like it's just the elves that are stuck.

I hope that if goblins do learn advanced siege tactics, we'll have some way to resist it (Like reinforced walls to prevent tunneling and such).

One thing that always annoyed me in Dugeon Keeper 2, whenever the heroes had a dwarf on their side, they'd just tunnel directly to your dungeon heart, thereby circumventing all your traps. What made it annoying was that in that game, once a wall is dug out, it's GONE. You couldn't rebuild it, all you could do is build a barricade which could be destroyed by normal melee attacks. It really messed up a lot of interesting designs.

In Dwarf Fortress you can always rebuild walls, but it would be nice if goblins didn't always use tunneling as a first resort, otherwise they'll just keep digging past all your traps, rendering them useless... Although you could always surround your fortress with an underground magma layer. Then if the goblins try to tunnel through, they open up a wall and get a bunch of lava dumped on them. Water would work too but it wouldn't be as cool.

Somewhat related, one of the demands my dungeon master made was to have a bed in her tomb.

I didn't ask why.