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Messages - Aquillion

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1621
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: April 22, 2004, 03:49:00 pm »
quote:
Originally posted by Pono:
[QB]Where do you find swords, axes, assault rifles, rifles, etc. i cant find any axes or swords...   :(

For swords and such, try the Oubliette.  You can buy them there.  Some guns can be bought at the pawn shop; the others can only (to my knowledge) be obtained by recruiting or killing certain characters and taking it from them.  Try visiting the intelligence HQ and inviting an Agent or two on a date.

quote:
When i rent an apartment (i havent already) do i stay in it for a shelter.... or what...
Yeah, it becomes another safehouse.

quote:
and how do i get that much money to support the apartment?
How do i make loads of money..without selling brownies and getting arrested so ppl get thrown in jail...?
There are several ways.  You can have an excessive number of people soliciting donations; it doesn't make much, but it builds up.  Alternatively, you continually recruit new (expendable) people to sell brownies, ignore the fact that they get arrested, and constantly move your leader around when not recruiting to avoid getting arrested if they spill the beans.

But IMHO the best way to make money right now is Garment Making.  You'll need some cash for an initial investment, but if you have someone repeatedly make low-quality garments their skill will eventually increase, allowing you to work your way up the ladder to making really high-quality stuff.  You can then sell the highest-quality garments for much, much more than it cost you to make them.

quote:
Do i use sleepers when i get ppl in court?
You can have a sleeper lawyer represent you, and if you have a sleeper judge there's a random chance that they will be assigned your case.  I don't know if having more than one sleeper lawyer helps, though...  It doesn't seem to let me choose which of my lawyers I want to use.

quote:
How do i boost things? like pistol, computers, and various skills?
By using them.  If you use them a lot you'll eventually see the character's skills become highlighted in white; that means one of their skills has increased through practice.

quote:
What are the difference between the white names and green names? i know the red are bad...   :mad: and will i ever see any yellow ones?
If you mean among NPC-types you see in an area, red means conservative, white means neutral, and green means liberal.

The red ones will attack you if someone raises the alarm.  They also have a chance to see through your cover when you walk by, raising the conservative alert level for the area.

The green ones can sometimes (depending on their type) be recruited easily through conversation about the issues.  Anyone can be recruited through dates, though.

The white ones are just neutral.

Note, though, that you don't want to commit crimes in front of white or green people--that will alienate everyone at the location.  Even committing a crime in front of a red person will raise the alert level to "alarmed" immediately, so you usually want to avoid that if you can.


1622
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: April 21, 2004, 04:46:00 pm »
Something I've noticed in the latest version:  If someone gets arrested and taken to court, the LCS permanently loses contact with everyone under them in the hierarchy, even if they're found innocent.  This means that if my leader is arrested, I lose the entire LCS.  It also makes defense in court virtually useless for higher-ranking liberals, since you'll lose a ton of people even if you're found innocent.  Finally, it means that there is no way to ever have your leader lose a rap sheet without losing all your other liberals in the process.  That sucks.

I think that at the very least you should only lose contact with people under a liberal if they're found guilty and sent to jail.  Although it might be a little unrealistic, it shouldn't be that easy to lose everyone...

Alternatively, you could regain contact with people once the liberal above them returns, with a chance of being unable to find them if an extended period of time has passed.

(Incidently, my strategy to deal with this system was to have the leader constantly move from rented house to rented house, never staying at the same place for more than a few days.  It seems to be working, actually.)

[ April 21, 2004: Message edited by: Aquillion ]


1623
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: April 13, 2004, 11:03:00 pm »
Ok, one last minor interface issue:  When you're selecting a liberal's actions from the 'A'ctivate menu, hitting "enter" sets the liberal to doing nothing.  It might be better if left them doing whatever they had been doing before.  Sometimes I accidently hit the letter of the wrong liberal, and then I have to remember what I'd assigned them to do...

In fact, is there ever any reason why you'd want a liberal to do nothing when they could be doing something else?  Maybe liberals who've just gotten out of jail/out of a siege/back from a mission (etc) should default to "solicit donations" or something like that instead of doing nothing.


1624
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: April 13, 2004, 08:14:00 pm »
Another minor thing I noticed:  "repair garments" doesn't seem to take into account garments worn/carried by people and squads at that location.  Logically it should fix those garments up first, rather than not at all.

[ April 13, 2004: Message edited by: Aquillion ]


1625
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: April 13, 2004, 08:04:00 pm »
Two small things...

Speaking of how badass it is for the leader to run into a corporate HQ laying waste left and right with a sword, shouldn't you recieve a juice bonus for doing so?  Creative anachronism and creative anarchism and all that rot.  Maybe wearing masks should help a little, too?

Also, when liberals are trying to disguise themselves, do they recieve a bonus for their former profession?  I think it might make sense for them to get a small bonus if they used to have a job that would commonly appear at the location they're trying to infiltrate--a former Agent in the Intelligence HQ, for instance.  Not too big of a bonus, but enough to represent the fact that they know protocols, what things to say, and all that rot.

In fact, maybe the entire team should get that small bonus if anyone on it 'belongs' in their current location?

There could also be a similar bonus to trying to fasttalk your way out of combat with conservatives.


1626
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: April 12, 2004, 03:46:00 am »
One thing worth remembering during all this is that while LCS is a pretty easy game right now once you know what to do and have gotten off the ground, it can still seem terribly difficult to people starting out for the first time.  You send a team out, you make one or two mistakes, and BOOM, they're all dead.  Or you avoid that and keep playing for a while, but don't know about raids and don't do anything to prepare for them--BOOM, your entire LCS is in court.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, mind you; given that LCS is loosely based on Oubliette, it really couldn't work any other way.  In Oubliette, though, and in the earlier versions of LCS, losing your initial characters early on wasn't that big of a deal--you'd just roll up a new team and try to build on their ashes, putting whatever you'd managed to recover and learn to use the second time around (and third, and fourth, etc).

Losing your initial character in LCS, on the other hand, is a big deal even now; it's unlikely you'll ever see anyone that good again, certinally not for a long, long time.  The proposed changes (while interesting) sound like they'll make it even easier, especially for a new player who doesn't understand how the game works.

So I think that at the very least, the LCS should get a new leader from among its ranks if the old one dies.  We could even say that the highest-ranking liberal remaining is "enflamed with liberal passion" at the martyrdom of the old leader, gaining a portion of the old leader's juice.  This would provide an excuse to allow even a formerly juiceless transient to take control of the LCS if that's all the player has left.  (If, on the other hand, the leader just ends up in jail, it could just be assumed that he can continue to lead somehow from there--unrealistic, perhaps, but simpler, and it avoids ending the game on one botched raid.)

Actually, talking about this has given me two more unrelated ideas.  First, about "leading from jail:"

It strikes me as unrealistic that liberals placed in jail just sit there and twiddle their thumbs for the duration.  Jail is, at the very least, a place with massive potentals for recruiting.  Other options for someone in jail might be to work out, study liberal rhetoric (or something else), or go on a hunger strike (costs body but builds juice, and depending on public opinion and the charges against you may get you released.

Hmm.  Bad things can happen to people in jail, too, and trying to do fancy stuff could put a liberal at increased risk.  Two other options for jail actions could be "be a model prisoner" (may get let out early, but costs you juice) and "keep a low profile" (reduces the chance of bad things happening to you in jail.)  In any case, if you've got a lot of tough friends in jail with you, the chance of anyone messing with you would probably be pretty slim.

Finally, if you have a lot of liberals in the same cell (or have recruited several), you can make an escape attempt even without outside help.  Failures could result in increased jailtime, transferral to a maximum-security jail, or even execution.

Did I just say maximum-security jail?  That's another interesting idea, come to think of it.  More serious crimes (or just being more infamous) could get one sent there; that could help with the "too easy to break out of jail" problem.  When someone's in a maximum-security jail, they wouldn't get the jail-action options listed above, either.  Plus, dividing liberals into multiple jails this way automatically makes it harder to break everyone out regardless of how much more well-defended maximum-security places are; prisoners divided between two jails are simply going to be harder to rescue then prisoners who are all in one place.

The other thing I was wondering about is how the death of a liberal affects public opinion.  Really, this is one of the more realistic ways the game could let the player advance their agenda...  If a few dozen people get killed in an illegal CIA raid, for instance, then that generally hurts the CIA's reputation.  The circumstances of a liberal's death would impact how (and whether) their death affects public opinion; their fame (or perhaps just their juice) would also be an important factor.

This could lead to players recruiting impressionable young people, building them up into reasonably well-known activists, then deliberately martyring them to advance the Liberal cause.  I like that.

Oh, and one last idea:  Suffering permanent injuries, like the loss of limbs and such, should give liberals a juice bonus if they survive.  Game-mechanics wise, this would give the player some compensation for an event that is, after all, pretty random and difficult to avoid; and theme-wise it stands to reason that the liberal who lost an arm to a Guard Dog a while back is going to be the most hardcore in the bunch (Except for the one who lost BOTH arms to a guard dog and apparently wields his gun with his teeth.  But we won't talk about him for now.)

[ April 12, 2004: Message edited by: Aquillion ]


1627
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: April 10, 2004, 05:25:00 am »
Another thing that occured to me while I was playing was that only a few kinds of sleepers seem to be useful--"big name" sleepers who can influence public opinion, lawyers, and judges.

Maybe other types of sleepers should have specific uses, too?  One way to fit in a lot of possibilites would be to give certain kinds of sleepers "one shot" abilities, abilities that may consume the sleeper in various ways if they try to use them.

For example, a Cop or CIA Agent sleeper could tip you off to an upcoming raid.  A Janitor (and just about anyone, really) might be able to bring you things from their workplace--incriminating items, generic loot, uniforms, weapons, money, you name it.  People at the police station or the intelligence HQ could let you view or even try to erase/modify criminal records.

Of course, every time they do any of these things there'd be a risk--based slightly on their intelligence--they would get discovered.  If they can't talk their way out of it, this would result in one of a number of Bad Things happening to them.  They might just lose their sleeper status (in which case they'd arrive in the shelter as a generic liberal); they might get charged with a crime (becoming a non-sleeper liberal in stuck in the conservative justice system); or, in some cases, they might just get executed with no chance of a trial.  Worst of all, they might spill the beans about the organization, resulting in criminal charges, raids, and/or unflattering news coverage; or even spill the beans about other sleepers working at the same location, blowing their cover.

In addition to the intelligence check to avoid getting caught, some Sleeper tasks could require specific skills to succeed (e.g. Computers or Security to get incriminating items.)  Each attempt would train these skills; each successful attempt would also build juice, so they could become more elite even while infiltrating Conservative society.

Perhaps there could even eventually be a way to turn generic Liberals into low-level sleepers--having them get jobs as Janitors, Guards, and the like?  This would require decent disguise and fasttalking abilities, not to mention a clean criminal record; it would also provide a way to keep key liberals out of the way of raids and other dangers.

Heh, that gave me a strange idea for an alternate endgame:  Your liberals start as a criminal organization outside of society, but as the game progresses they would increasingly infilitrate it, until at the very end they control it completely and occupy the highest positions themselves.  This would add a humorous--or perhaps kafkaesque--twist to the endgame:  In victory, your anarchist, idealistic liberal crime squad eventually becomes the corrupt society it was trying to overthrow, and a cynical observer might note that you know you've won when your infilitration has become so subtle and complete that only a highly-trained observer could tell that anything has changed at all.

Well, that last bit probably wouldn't work with the way the game is set up now, but I couldn't resist mentioning it.


1628
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: April 08, 2004, 03:30:00 am »
Well, I beat LCS a while back.  The ending is more climactic now, what with the raids and the super-liberal amendment, but it's still rough in some ways...  I'd gotten public opinion to entirely 100% on all issues ages before I finally beat the game, and from that point on I never felt there was any serious possibility that I could lose.  There were occasional random events, yeah, but my sleepers constantly fixed up any public opinion problems that occured.

The most frustrating thing about the endgame is that (as far as I can tell) there's nothing the player can do to advance the liberal agenda any faster once public opinion is already at 100%.  They're basically reduced to sitting there and enduring raids until they've won the game; and even the raids aren't that exciting, since you probably don't have any more use for your non-sleeper liberals anyway.

In fact, that's what I eventually realized.  I was fighting off tons and tons of raids at first; I probably wouldn't have gotten so many if I hadn't constantly fought off the police and refused to relocate afterwords, but with 50+ liberals in each of my hideouts, the thought of moving them around in groups of six was agonizing.  Besides, fighting off police raids was easy once I'd recruited a few dozen Agents--as long as I avoided tanks, my 50+ liberals could take down any raiding parties in one turn.

Then I suddenly realized that my liberals were of absolutely no use to me anymore--my sleepers were doing all the work, and public opinion was pinned at 100% liberal anyway.  So I ordered all my non-sleeper to surrender to the cops.  (Actually, some of them surrendered to the CIA and died.  But who cares?  I didn't need them anymore.)  When trials came around, I ordered everyone to plead guilty.

Sure enough, after that it was easy to hold down the "wait" key for a few years and win the game.  My liberals had been totally useless to me once they'd completed their tasks and stuck public opinion at 100%.

So, anyway, this sounds like a big problem with the end game--but I realized that it isn't.  Really, the game just needs one thing to fix the endgame:  A "declare victory"-type command the player can use once they think that the LCS have set the country on an irrevocable course towards Liberalism.  Once this command is entered (and confirmed!), your LCS is disbanded, your non-sleeper liberals all go their seperate ways, and the game automatically zooms forward through howevermany months and years until A. the Liberal Agenda is realized, B. the country becomes a Conservative Dystopia, or C. waaay too many years have passed and it becomes clear that the country has merely reached an effective state of Stasis.  In any case, the player is then shown the final state of the game, the year, laws, etc.

Of course, there are other things that could be done to add new and exciting endgames (more direct involvement in elections/amendment votes and such), but a 'zoom forward' option seems like the easiest solution.

[ April 08, 2004: Message edited by: Aquillion ]


1629
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: March 21, 2004, 06:04:00 pm »
Two small bugs I encountered (at least, they look like bugs):  While breaking some liberals out of confinement in the courthouse, I somehow 'rescued' one of my sleeper lawyers who normally worked there.  He had never been listed as arrested and was still considered a sleeper both before and after I rescued him; I assume the game just saw that his location was in the court and assumed that meant he was in jail.

And secondly, after one of my safehouses was raided by police and I escaped, it was still available for me to go to in the location list, and everything I'd built there was still intact.  When I cycled through my safehouses using the 'z' command, its name had changed; but it was still the exact same place as far as everything else was concerned, name and all.

[edit:] Oh, yeah, and one other small idea that came to me:  It'd be nice if there were "next/last liberal" buttons available while looking at a liberal's detailed attribute screen.  Often I just want to find the liberal with the highest score in a given stat or skill, and it's tough to do that when I have to hit each one's letter, hit enter to go back, hit the next one's letter, occasionally hit PGDN and start from A again, etc, etc, etc.  Next and last buttons would make searching through your liberals a whole lot easier.

[ March 21, 2004: Message edited by: Aquillion ]


1630
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: March 21, 2004, 01:49:00 pm »
As a matter of fact, I am.  I guess ASCII-based universe is relatively small.

1631
Curses / Re: LCS 3
« on: March 20, 2004, 11:35:00 pm »
It'd be nice if you could set individual people to move between your hideouts from the Activate menu--sometimes you want to move one person to a different hideout, and it's bothersome to form a new group just for that purpose.

[ March 20, 2004: Message edited by: Aquillion ]


1632
Curses / Re: Abandoned?
« on: January 09, 2007, 06:00:00 pm »
I'm interested in LCS!  But I think I'd prefer to see work on Dwarf Fortress.

Mainly, I don't think that LCS was really designed to be expanded on.  It was originally conceived as a sort of Oubliette-themed joke, and had things added to it from there...  Lots more could be added, but everything has to constantly be redesigned to support new additions.  Dwarf Fortress has been meticulously planned from the ground up, so I suspect time spent expanding it would be more productive.

I'd almost say I'd rather see an entirely new LCS 2 someday, planned from the ground up to support things like player involvement in elections and a more interesting endgame.  But that's something for another time.


1633
Curses / Re: BUY BISCUITS HERE
« on: October 21, 2006, 08:09:00 pm »
This is a stack of 11 hoary marmot biscuit. The ingredients are minced hoary marmot meat, minced hoary marmot meat, minced hoary marmot meat, and minced hoary marmot meat.

1634
Curses / Re: Liberal crime squad
« on: February 05, 2003, 03:20:00 pm »
One of the big problems with the endgame seems to be that having almost every issue at elite liberal forces people to discuss and vote on conservative initiatives, even though everyone involved is very liberal and the laws have no chance of passing.  It might work better (and be more realistic) if whichever group has the majority in Congress has virtual control over which issue is discussed, so a 97% liberal congress would just vote on the same liberal issues again and again until they won.  Of course, then you could end up with Congress discussing nothing but one issue endlessly, but in that kind of situation that might be the realistic thing to have happen...

Also, I'm wondering if the practice of kidnapping & brainwashing major conservative figures makes the game too easy.  Essentially all you have to do to win is kidnap several of them and wait until the nation is elite liberal...  Perhaps there should be a chance of some sort of Conservative retaliation that would force the player to go out and do something to stop them rather than just wait for the nation to go liberal?  It could be a desperate last-ditch attempt by Conservatives to block the liberal agenda, and successfully counteracting it could give the player a boost that could speed the endgame.


1635
DF General Discussion / Re: Deteriorating clothes
« on: August 17, 2006, 08:15:00 pm »
At the moment, if I recall correctly, dwarves don't care about their clothes, so you can just let them rot off their backs.  This will be fixed eventually, though.

Hmm.  Options for making clothes...  you'll have to either use pig tails, spider-silk, or leather.

Pig tails would require some farm room, but have the advantage of having other uses.  They also require a few more steps than the other methods, I think...  you have to plant, collect, process, weave to cloth, and then make into clothes.

Spider silk is actually surprisingly easy, since most of the steps can be handled directly at the weavers.  But unless you can get tame spiders (which I never managed), they're going to be slightly unpredictable, and unless you clear out absolutely huge river areas I doubt you could get silk fast enough to keep a large fortress clothed.

Leather is the toughest option, since you either have to raise and slaughter animals, or hunt.  Raising and slaughtering animals is, in theory, almost completely effortless at the moment once you have your 'seed' beasts...  it'd take forever to build a large enough population for them to reproduce at a decent rate, but once they do you could get leather easily.

Of course, the ease of raising beasts for slaughter currently comes from the fact that they don't need to eat, which will be fixed eventually, too...

Hrm, once clothing unhappiness is in, there will probably be clothing happiness, too, so you can make your dwarves happy by providing them with fine clothes.  I assume they'll like silk more...  will there be dyes to produce clothes of specific colors?  Would some dwarves prefer one color over another? It could be tied to their material preferences...  a dwarf that likes sapphire could prefer a sapphire-colored shirt.


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