Bay 12 Games Forum

I start with a charismatic and persuasive Founder and recruit an intelligent fashion designer (to make disguises and repair loot) and an intelligent and charismatic psychologist (he will serve as the homebase interrogator and doctor and will take courses in psychology and first aid when idle).

I will then have two main squads, one is my defense/assault squad and is composed of one locksmith, one taxi driver, and 4 army veterans. All members of this squad should have relatively high STR, AGI, and health. I will equip them with M4s (most accurate), armor, and just park them in my home base as protection from CCS. Once we know where the CCS base is, I go in there and shoot the place up repeatedly to train their juice and skills.

My main squad is my infiltration squad, and these are who gets their hands dirty (except no murders or assault! too much heat). It's composed of one hacker, one locksmith, one taxi driver, and 4 lawyers. All members should have very high intelligence and charisma, and maybe agility too in order to escape easier. The hacker is useful for on-site hacking, but also off-site hacking and stealing credit cards. The locksmith is great at teaching others security and cracking safes, as well as stealing as many sportcars as I want. The lawyers are amazing at disguise, bluffing, persuasion, seduction, and defending themselves in court. I train the infiltration squad by lockpicking apartments, and then putting on disguises my fashion designer made and training disguise. After a while, I basically can walk anywhere I want and can almost always successfully bluff SWAT teams during Alarm status. My taxi driver driving a sportscar serves as a nearly foolproof getaway.

During downtime, my founder teaches others persuasion and law, in case they ever get arrested. I usually have a sleeper janitor or secretary in every location so I'm warned of imminent raids. In my last run, arrest was not a concern once I kept hopping from safehouse to safehouse.

Both the assault and infiltration squads gain so much juice from their antics and are well-trained in persuasion that it's easy to further expand if I want to. I pick an abandoned factory in another city and recruit another assault squad and as many journalists as I can fit. I park them and have everyone write news for the liberal guardian. Last game I had about 30 intelligent journalists working for me. It's incredibly easy to shift public opinion this way and the longest part of the game is waiting for government to catch up. Most of my money came from either selling off expensive loot (army base and corp hq are amazing for this) or stealing CC numbers.

This approach has worked for me several times and makes the game almost too easy

This version lets you buy combat knives for $20 and sell them for $30

There's a lot of good stuff in this thread, but also some fluff (viagra, safe house upgrades, etc) that would have lower priority. Support group control would be a HUGE improvement.

Just to clarify what Darvi said, for people at the safehouse to take advantage of a class that a teacher is teaching, the student's current skill level must be below the teacher's skill -1 and and below the teacher's teaching skill +2. Low teaching skill will also give the students less skill experience per day, which means you'll spend more time and money on classes than you will with a highly skilled teacher.

In general, you should use university classes when you can't run informal classes internally. Internal training is usually much more cost efficient than sending everyone to take classes at the university.

Thanks for the clarification. Can students still be sent out on missions or are there limitations?

I'm trying to get a feel for the different ways to raise skills and how they compare to each other. We have actual practice (walking around with a disguise, picking locks, etc.), which is very situational and therefore probably the hardest to set up, not to mention potentially very risky. We also have university classes and liberals teaching each other. When are university classes better than having teachers? Is it generally more effective to train a super liberal teacher at university and then hold classes? It seems like it would, since teaching covers multiple skills at once. Lastly, is there any way to know who is a student and who isn't?

Volcanic equipment is made at the great magma forge out of slade/steel/obsidian/silver, and if you melt down volcanic equipment you obviously get volcanic bars. However, there doesn't seem to be any reactions associated with volcanic bars. Can you do anything with them?

Quote

Might I suggest Haowan's set?

Yes you might. It uses standard ascii settings in the raws I take it ? It will be really easy to add, but I thought that vherids extra ascii set would be more then sufficient.

The issue with vherid's set is that it's very pixelated. Here's a comparison, with the color scheme I use. Everything looks crystal clear to me with this set-up:

I have a couple more ideas:
1. Early Chinese blast furnaces were powered by water wheels. Instead of requiring steel bars and leather (I don't understand the point behind these), why not just require them to be powered by wind/waterwheels? It would certainly add the proper "price" to establishing blast furnaces, and it would also add to the woefully underpopulated category of machine-powered buildings. Maybe other top tier forges should also require power. It's logical from a flavor and game balancing perspective. It would also look cool. Is it possible to add a power requirement?

On a similar note, I don't understand the bronze bar requirement for metallurgists. It's tautological, unless you happen to bring some on embark or melt some bronze equipment. I find it an annoying requirement.

2. In MDF and Vanilla, one corpse will only get you one skin. You can change this behavior as follows:
in material_template_default.txt, you add the following to the SKIN definition:
[BUTCHER_SPECIAL:GLOB:NONE]
[STOCKPILE_GLOB]
[DO_NOT_CLEAN_GLOB]

and then remove [USE_BODY_COMPONENT] from the TAN_A_HIDE reaction in reaction_other.txt (credit goes to GulMadred & scamtank over at SA)

This would now get you leather hides proportionate to the corpse. The problem is that leather reactions still only require 1:1 production, so you end up with way too much leather than you know what to do with, with this modification. I personally like the idea of proportionate hides, but they'll need to be balanced against production, probable on a higher scale than bars are right now. For example, leather shirt = 9 hides or something. Do you find this an interesting option to the mod?

You might also balance out tanning production by always having it generate miasma. This is historically accurate, as tanning was traditionally always relegated to the outskirts of town because of the smell.

I think you also mentioned using leather for book pages (aka vellum)?