Bay 12 Games Forum

If your weapon is yellow when on site, it will be harmful to your disguise rolls. If your weapon is red, it is illegal, and will cause instant panic when people see it. Depending on your disguise, weapons might be hidden under the clothing or look more normal, which can take weapons that would otherwise be yellow or red and turn them back into green.

Hahaha, what if you had to throw your stuff away before you could fight. So you block their attack with the TV, it breaks, next turn you hit fight. But you can't aim your assault rifle, you're hauling a TV. So you hurl the TV at their head. WHAM. They slump to the ground. Death by broken TV!

The per victim twist is a good idea, it would require a lot of bookkeeping though -- each character generated would have to have some way of keeping track of who in your group has assaulted them, at least as long as you're on location. We'd thought about different ways of doing this, and the initial idea that I think was prevalent was to have assault and resisting arrest charges only given the first time it happens on a given outing. Unrelated to the game, in my home state (Oregon), "assault" not only requires contact but physical injury as well. We have no charge that correlates to what assault means in most places. I find it very strange -- can't a person be charged for something more serious than just menacing if they physically assault someone and the victim manages to escape unharmed? Perhaps they can -- I'm not a lawyer, just a layman with a seemingly unusual gift for understanding legal documents.  

Yes. Having them doesn't increase your likelihood of getting raided, but if they're arrested for any reason, the authorities will just kick them out of the country without trial.

Did you get the "Have a nice day, (name)." message that is supposed to come up when you get sentenced to over 466 years in prison?  

[ July 17, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

quote:

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In fact, I would make a more radical proposal: Eliminate direct LCS publishing entirely. It doesn't really fit in with the rest of the game. Instead, players who get their hands on sensitive information have a number of options on how to leak it...

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Yikes, considering how much work I put into building the new LCS newspaper, I'm frighteningly sympathetic to that suggestion. If it were just me coding for myself, I'd probably do it.

My personal favorite new feature that's going on is graffiti -- it's so simple and so much fun. You send them out, there's no reporting back most of the time, so it's not "bugging you" heavy, but there's a chance they're spotted by the police spraying pro-LCS tags (which increases recognition for LCS and popularity). With a likeliness depending on art skill, the character might decide to do a big mural, and then they'll start one, and it can take days to finish it. It'll tell you when they start one, and what the issue is about. It'll notify you each day following that they're working on a mural. And then when they finish it, it'll tell you they finished the mural, and remind you of what the issue it's about is on. This then affects public interest, has a short-term sleeper-like effect, and directly but slightly impacts public opinion. Working on murals improves art skill more than just tagging and minor stuff like that. It also gives you juice to complete a mural successfully (if they're spotted by the police while working on it, they'll have to abandon the project with no juice or public opinion shifts).

As for the Guardian building, yeah, I specifically designed it to be that way. Food is abstracted away except for siege stockpiles everywhere -- nobody wants a game where you have to go grocery shopping every couple weeks. (Unless you're playing The Sims --edit) People are just assumed to be able to eat. Maybe we should change the text for buying food to make it clear that you're buying emergency stockpiles for a siege, not day to day food people are going to stash in the fridge to eat a week later.

The reason you can't upgrade the Guardian building is because once you've converted it, it's actually a fairly presentable legit place that you want to keep respectable, not an abandoned warehouse to be ringed with tank traps and booby traps (presumably you got a discount price on legitimately buying the place or something... I don't know). It provides no real coverage against criminal actions at all, it's totally suspicious, because the police know all about the place and it'll be one of the first places they look for LCS fugitives. Once you have the Liberal Guardian HQ, its usefulness as a safehouse is mostly ruined.

[ July 15, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

The Supreme Court is able to be cleared out and made all Elite Liberal by a Constitutional Amendment, which should shorten the endgame. I'll have to do some testing to see how the endgame is playing out right now, and see if the balance was messed up somewhere along the line.

The United States Supreme Court has a lot more power than you give it credit for. In the decision Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court asserted its right to practice oversight of legislation to enforce the Constitution. This power has never been challenged and is now completely entrenched, so that now the Supreme Court has the power to prohibit government actions, overturn legislation, and make whatever interpretations of the Constitution it sees fit. It doesn't write laws, but it can repeal laws, partially repeal laws, and interpret the Constitution as saying things nobody thought it did originally.

For example, in Dred Scott v. Sanford, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution prohibited slaves, former slaves, and absolutely anyone descended from a slave from ever being a citizen of the United States, no matter where they lived, an action which stripped citizenship from free black citizens across much of the country. This decision was outrageous, it ignored the law, ignored history, ignored common sense, and yet it required an entire Constitutional amendment -- the Fourteenth Amendment -- for anyone to do anything about it.

Another example of the court's tremendous power is Roe v. Wade. As a result of this decision, the laws in the United States or any of the states are Constitutionally prohibited from banning abortion prior to the time the fetus is viable. Yet Abortion rights appear nowhere in the Constitution for the Supreme Court to base this decision on -- instead, it's based on the Constitutional right to privacy, which also appears nowhere in the original text or any of its Amendments, and even some of the justices on the Supreme Court today consider the right to privacy to be as fabricated as the Dred Scott decision.

As a final example of the pseudo-legislative power of the Supreme Court, the Miranda warning which police are required to give to suspects who are arrested is designed to protect against police using coercion to get suspects to incriminate themselves. This warning is universal in the United States, and defense lawyers can have even the most crippling evidence rejected outright in court if police fail to read this warning to suspects. That entire right, to have this ubiquitous paragraph read to you as you're arrested, was created entirely by the Supreme Court in the text of a decision they made in overturning the conviction of a confessed rapist and kidnapper named Ernesto Miranda who challenged his conviction on the grounds that his confession was the only evidence given against him, and that he wasn't aware of his own legal rights at the time. The source of the classic Miranda warning is in this text from the Supreme Court decision:

"...The person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he or she has the right to remain silent, and that anything the person says may be used against that person in court; the person must be clearly informed that he or she has the right to consult with an attorney and to have that attorney present during questioning, and that, if he or she is indigent, an attorney will be provided at no cost to represent him or her."

In LCS, "laws" are highly abstracted. They're broad political issues, the way that an issue is treated by the government. The Supreme Court has the power to influence these laws just as it does in the real world -- so in  LCS, Supreme Court may make a decision that appears to "legislate" on abortion or police regulation. Just as President Roosevelt tried and failed to Constitutionally alter the Supreme Court in order to clear one of the biggest impediments for his legislative agenda, the LCS can expect to face well-entrenched resistance from Supreme Court justices. Of course, we are planning to improve the endgame... grundee was talking about secret assassination missions, and as I said above, I'll try to see what's going on and find out why the Elite Liberal court stacking Amendment isn't getting passed sooner.

I'm not familiar with any efforts in the United States to prohibit students from praying in schools, only to prohibit ostensibly secular classroom teachers from holding organized prayer. Efforts to prohibit hate speech are not universal among Liberals and are rarely legislative; instead, most efforts are devoted specifically to hate crimes, which is something that even the ACLU supports, an organization that is variously lauded or notorious (depending on point of view) for its firm defense of hate speech. Note that the ACLU Congressional ratings tend to represent liberals/Democrats as those who agree most with their values, based on voting record.

A 6 wisdom and 6 intelligence Conservative will have a total disguise check skill of 24, while a character with 6 intelligence, 6 charisma, and 3 disguise skill will have a total disguise defense skill of a random number between 21-41. The player has to roll under the conservative skill in order to be spotted. Of course, if you start stealing things on site, this has the direct effect of increasing the conservative disguise check skill. This certainly may need to be balanced, and the disguise skill improvements may need to be increased, but as it stands it's currently 20 encounters to gain one skill level, which increases your base roll by 3 points. If you had a disguise skill of 10 you'd get 30 disguise skill plus your intelligence plus your charisma, which is a formidable and usually insurmountable challenge for most conservatives to overcome.

The disguiseskill algorithm actually finds the person in your party with the worst disguise skill and forces them to make the check, it doesn't total up the party's skill. Someone suggested that there should be a bonus for having someone in the group with a high skill -- I'm thinking maybe average them? But as it stands, having more people is a liability, not a benefit, in stealth. You're not the first one to question this algorithm, because it's non-obvious what it's doing, but trust me, it works.   If you want to check this again, pay attention to what happens with variable Lowest in the disguiseskill function.

All handguns are hidden by any kind of clothing, which includes trench coats. WEAPON_NIGHTSTICK and WEAPON_CARBINE_M4 are treated exactly the same for suspiciousness. Remember that there is a "feature" in C++ that case statements fall through, so this:

code:

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case WEAPON_NIGHTSTICK:
case WEAPON_SHOTGUN_PUMP:
case WEAPON_SMG_MP5:
case WEAPON_CARBINE_M4:
if(cr.armor.type==ARMOR_TRENCHCOAT)suspicious=0;
if(cr.armor.type==ARMOR_POLICEUNIFORM&&hasdisguise(cr,type))suspicious=0;
if(cr.armor.type==ARMOR_BALLISTICVEST&&cr.armor.subtype==BVEST_POLICE&&hasdisguise(cr,type))suspicious=0;
if(law[LAW_GUNCONTROL]==-2&&cr.armor.type==ARMOR_SECURITYUNIFORM&&hasdisguise(cr,type))suspicious=0;

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...means that the four weapons above are all effectively identical cases which use the same four lines of code below. Execution after locating the correct case doesn't stop at the next case statement, it stops at the first break statement encountered. The same thing applies to labcoats in the cosmetics lab; they are valid disguise, due to case fall through into the code for the genetics lab.

Hm... now that you mention it, Judges would be oddly bad at defending themselves, that's a good point. It's (persuasion+1)*((law*3)/2+1) though, so they're still better than hippies, but not by much. I've never really been happy with the persuasion * law system though, so I think the solution is to change that calculation. Also though, Judges should have persuasion. I'm sure most were trial lawyers first anyway, so it seems silly to have them be at a disadvantage to the lawyers.

Security is good for safes, but locked doors should probably be made a bit tougher, and cars should give better results to go with their future increase in difficulty/roll changing.

The handguns are another case of fall through in C++; the game just treats all the handguns as the same for the purpose of what interaction with the pistol skill.

Technically, LCSrandom(2)+1 increase to skill_ip would result in a skill increase about once every 67 days if done every day (1.5*67=100). But I take your point and tend to agree with you.   A similar change needs to happen when you're spotted stealing cars, I've been arrested for loitering in somebody's car with a broken window before, heheh.   :cool: