Bay 12 Games Forum

This is just my personal preference, but I'd rather that the use of improvised weapons not have any special benefits.

In fact, I would be quite happy with the removal of the improvised weapons skill, and not giving any skill bonuses when using improvised weapons.

The idea of allowing liberals to upgrade both attacks and defense with improvised weapons has the potential to be quite overpowered, as well as somewhat nonsensical.

But if the CCS gets destroyed, which they will likely do, then the LCS is almost guarranted to win, as long as they keep their guns silent and avoid the cops. The CCS is actually quite weak compared to the LCS.

I think the idea of there being many terrorist groups trying to change society to fit their own whims, while there only being two main parties, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, duking it out, seems to create rather interesting dynamics, and would be pretty funny. Should you raid the CCS and avoid the Radical Moderates, for instance? Or target both equally? Also, the idea of getting raided by the NRA in Safehouse #1 and the Libertarians in Safehouse #2 is funny as well.

If the CCS is weak, then the CCS should be made stronger. Simply adding additional factions wouldn't necessarily make the game harder, just longer, and adding people with different political views would detract from the heavily exaggerated polarity between the two major factions.

I played LCS waaaay back in the day. Back when you had unlimited recruits and seductions, where in a week or two you could easily build up an army of converts.

Now with these "new fangled" recruit limits, I find the game much more enjoyable, and much more frustrating

I can never decide if I want to recruit a person or pass on them in hopes that a better one comes along. What do you look for in a recruit (in general). Obviously if you're recruiting for a specific skill you'll specify, but let's say you've got two characters with the same skill level, what do you look for in their stats? High Heart? High Int? Low Wis? All of the above? What tips you over the edge of whether to spend a limited slot to recruit them or not?

Generally if I want a fighter, I look for high agility & health along with low wisdom; skills aren't very important, because most of the time a point or two in a weapon skill is not going to make a difference even if it's a decent weapon skill. This also makes it easier to track ammunition and deal with shortages on the fly.

If I'm looking for a specific skillset, like a good doctor, then I try to find someone with a high skill cap and high starting skill. Other stats don't really matter if the character is just going to do his thing in the safehouse.

In general, high skill caps are better than high starting skills unless the skill is difficult to train. Currently, a character will often be generated with skills much higher than their skill caps, which means that he'll need to earn a lot of juice before his stats are high enough to allow the skill to increase. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell which skills are hard to train without experience or code-diving, and you can't determine the skill cap at the recruitment screen unless you know the underlying formula.

Next up, seduction: What determines the limit? I had a guy with 2 or 3 seduction and every time he tried to seduce someone (beyond the first) he drove them off with his liberal polygamous attitude. Next I recruit a prostitute who easily seduces 2+ people at the same time.

Is it based solely off of seduction? Is there a quick and dirty rule, like 1/2 seduction is about how many love-slaves they can have?

Finally, I read that being a love slave produces juice, but I haven't found anything that explains that any farther...

You get 1+1/2 seduction skill slaves (rounded down). Note that a new slave saves one of his slots for his recruiter, so unless the slave has 2+ seduction he can't seduce more. Prostitutes are guaranteed to have at least 2 seduction, so recruit them if you find that important.

Would there be any problem with assigning vehicles to squads rather than individuals? This would make it impossible to assign two vehicles to a squad, or two squads to a vehicle, but I don't think that's a valuable feature. If it were changed, it would be much easier to handle vehicle assignments; there could just be a list of vehicles and their squad assignments, and the player would just press the key corresponding to a vehicle to assign it to a different squad.

The current system for mutants gives them totally unreliable stats. IIRC, they should be able to get inhumanly high stats unless there's a bug and the normal stat cap is being applied to them; but even if they have 14 strength, for example, they might have 2 health.

The last time I looked at it, the mutant stat generation is a bit more reliable than you say. Most often a mutant will have generally high or low stats because their randomly-generated stat total is either really high or really low, and then distributed in the same random manner as other people. It's unlikely that a mutant will beat the odds and end up with his stat pool distributed extremely unevenly, although the lack of a stat cap means that it is remotely possible.

Heh, lets play a game of 'spot the college student', cookie to whoever finds it first!

In my opinion, we shouldnt limit how many people you can seduce per infiltration, rather, I think that the severity of a date ambush should increase with the more people you go out with. In this example I could see a situation where the liberal is either arrested (if they had any outstanding crimes) or are beaten up/interrogated or something like that.

My main reason for wanting a limit isn't to balance seduction or issues-based recruitment; it's just that the lack of a limit produces an incentive to mass-recruit/seduce people like in the OP's image, which is really boring. Introducing a limit would make this tactic impossible, and also make recruiting slower if you ever are in a time-sensitive situation for whatever reason.

Implementing a limit would be as simple as setting a max number of dates/interviews per day (such as 1+Liberal Rank+3 if he's the founder), and having the game display a notification (similarly to the current "Police Officer won't talk to you" message when you fail a roll) along the lines of "Liberal Ted doesn't have time for another meeting/date" if you've hit that limit.

This game should be more mod-friendly.

If you can code, then you can mod the game all you want, since it's open source.