Bay 12 Games Forum

I think the next version should be 4.00. While distinguishing between the newer versions is a good idea, renaming older releases is a potential source of significant confusion.

Thanks for everyone's response.  I did a little testing, and it seems the difficulty in getting the "x found y's views to be insightful" raises either after a lull of not earning juice for the persuader, or because the number of recruits for the persuader is full.  My 12 persuasion founder gained a liberal rank and now all of these people he'd been meeting with are now getting the blue "insightful" text.  Before this, he'd been meeting with them for days and getting nowhere.  He's obviously still at 12 (although he may go up by the end of the recruiting session now that his charisma is higher), so the only difference is that he has an open slot for a recruit and more juice. 

The next test will be if only leadership goes up but no juice (like from leadership skillup from subordinate juice), if recruitment success changes just from the free slot.   

It's probably because your recruiter's heart was too low relative to their wisdom. Gaining rank increases your heart, and it's possible to get people willing to join even if you don't have a recruitment slot available. If your heart isn't higher than the recruit's wisdom by a certain amount, you'll hit a brick wall unless you spend money on props. If you don't have a lot of heart, recruit hippies; they always have very low wisdom.

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Good luck disarming someone with a knife

Break or sprain their hand. After which it becomes physically impossible to hold on.

A lot of disarming techniques actually rely on doing a lot of physical damage to your opponent or even downright killing them. (Boxing has quite a few "Killing blows")

I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to disarm or kill your opponent while boxing.

Quote from: irmo on April 02, 2009, 01:59:13 pm

Quote from: Oksbad on March 30, 2009, 07:23:59 am

May I suggest a few new weapons?

-PANCOR Jackhammer, automatic shotgun, hits up to three times, found rarely on CCS bosses

I get that we all played Fallout and thought this was cool, but you realize that only about five of them were ever made, right?

Yeah I know that they're rare, hence their use being limited to powerful CSS bosses. I do guess that they are too rare for even that that, so it doesn't have to be a PANCOR jackhammer, I just suggest an automatic shotgun.

An automatic shotgun would be rather pointless by the time you get it, since body armor takes all the sting out of shotguns. Also, currently shotguns do less damage per shot than an assault rifle most of the time.

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-Sawed off shotgun, less accurate than a shotgun, but can be concealed under clothes (like a pistol), is banned earlier than normal shotguns (C or M)

This should only ever be available from the Black Market. As a Liberal organization, the LCS would have trouble attracting the kind of gun nuts who can make these. I also question whether it really fills a niche--the only advantage over a shotgun is that it's easier to conceal, so why not use a pistol?

Err, can't you just saw off a bit of the barrel of a shotgun to make a (primitive) sawn off? The only advantage over a SHOTGUN it that it's easier to conceal. It packs more punch than a PISTOL though...

Again, shotguns don't do that much damage in LCS. The 44 magnum does more damage most of the time, and also has much better armor penetration when it is needed.
 

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-Bow, just for the heck of it

Useless. No reason to use a bow when there are rifles available. The only advantage it might have is that it's quiet, but it's impossible to conceal, and since you're always engaging your targets at close range, it doesn't matter if they can hear you.

(In real life)No reason to use Kung-fu/sword/axe Liberals either...

This is not a strong justification for adding an unnecessary feature.

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I also suggest re-adding a way to acquire tanks (though it should be horrifically difficult)

Why?

Because, to the extent of my knowledge, you used to be able to acquire tanks in a difficult manner. (Playing music at them in a siege I believe). The difficulty/odd procedure required to get them probably deterred many from simply abusing them to win the game. I am NOT suggesting that LCS tanks be something seen in your average game, I would prefer them to be like the Ship of the Line in Sid Meier's Pirates!, not seen in a regular game, and one has to put lots of effort to get one.

I'm pretty sure that the ability to recruit tanks was an oversight. It's also not something that can really be justified; it's implausible that the LCS could acquire a tank and skilled crewmembers, or hide the thing after using it.

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Perhaps to mounting weapons on Jeeps (for a hefty price)? (should beef up escapes! )

I wonder if site actions should be possible at all (at least outside the Industrial District) without using a vehicle. As I've said before, it's really implausible to be able to kidnap someone or escape from the police in broad daylight on foot.

But what kind of weapon do you have that needs to be mounted on a vehicle? A TOW missile or something? Please.

Stop attacking a strawman. I was thinking more like a machine gun.

It doesn't matter whether it's a machine gun or a TOW missile. The LCS likely has little use for a vehicle that will draw police attention as soon as it leaves the garage.

Why should an L+ society ban only guns? Swords, maces, crowbars, pitchforks, etc. are also very dangerous weapons too, especially in the hands of CCS terrorists. Should an L+ society force people to register any potential weapon, so the government would be able to deter crime?

Because gun control has been a wedge issue for years, whereas melee weapon control is a political non-issue. And you haven't detailed how this would affect the game, or why it's a good idea to include it.

Wouldn't they just use birth control? And abortions, if it came to that?

I don't think that applying percentage penalties would provide the exact effect that's desired; it would certainly make juice gain slower, but it wouldn't be any harder. You'd just have to kill more bouncers over a longer period of time.

What would produce the desired effect would be "tolerance"; as liberals gain rank, they have to commit more crimes on a site action before they start to earn juice. For example, a Socialist Threat might have a tolerance of 20, meaning that the first 20 points of juice earned in a site action don't count, and killing the bouncer and immediately leaving would do nothing for him. I figure that tolerance would jump up quickly for the first two ranks, then slow down since the easily exploitable farming strategies are no longer effective.

In order to keep players from having to play guessing games as to when they've broken through the tolerance, there could be a message once the highest-rank member of the squad's tolerance has been reached, similar to "The squad smells conservative panic."

Additionally, varying the amount of juice gained for murder would be a good idea. Security guards, club security, and other relatively weak combatants should probably be worth a bit less than they currently are; non-debater conservatives that don't usually have guns should only give 1-2 points.

Well, how bout this for a change. Instead of Improvised Weapons being a straight weapon skill with various weapons associated with it, make it so that when using unarmed attacks, you increase your chances of doing damage with a random background item. Remove it as a weapon skill, and simply make it so that while making your unarmed attacks, you grab a pool cue as attack 3 instead of throwing a punch and break it over the guy's back for additional damage.

There was already some work done on the unarmed weapon skill to make it represent martial arts; characters now progress from doing jabs and punches to spinning kicks. Reworking the flavor text yet again would be a waste, especially since unarmed combat frankly isn't an important feature.