Bay 12 Games Forum

I have the same problem, however I am using Ubuntu, and emulating windows via Wine. None of my saves are actually created. What do you think it may be?

The Windows version of the game saves to the same directory the executable is in. Might crimesquad.exe not have write permission to its own directory?

Ok, I new a few people may be sick of me Necroing posts, but with a new version out that may have a bug fix soon, I thought Id look through the forum a little and bring up a few ideas that look good.

I would do this by making a new thread containing links to several older posts. Pulling the threads up to the top has a couple of negative effects -- it can confuse people into thinking that the discussion is current, and it can displace active discussions from the front page. The latter isn't as big an issue in Curses since it's quiet enough that the front page contains stale threads anyway, but it's still cleaner to link older threads rather than post in them. This also lets you quote or link to the parts of the thread you want to direct attention to more precisely.

Anything's possible, but it wouldn't be easy. The input and display code would need to be rewritten at the very least.

ThreeToe is Toady One's brother, Zach Adams. I don't have a clear understanding of how big of a role he plays in Bay12Games, but my best understanding is that while he doesn't program the games, he is a major contributor to the design and vision of both early LCS and Dwarf Fortress. I don't think I've ever asked, but I imagine he does indeed deserve thanks in helping to make LCS.

The interrogation system was complicated enough with the limited options...
But I'm sorry that has happened, we would obviously like a new release version but it is your choice after all. 

The current options are a simplified version; I'd actually cut features from the game to make it as easy to understand as it is. This was pretty controversial, and a lot of people wanted the features back. The new version (the one lost to the ether) was intended to bring them back without making the system even more arcane and obscure. It might look more complicated, but it would also be more responsive, so you could learn it more easily.

Fort Zombie is the best suggestion I can make. It's the most similar game I've seen mechanically, since it has some recruitment, base management, character advancement, sending out a raiding party, assigning tasks day by day. The term "raiding party", which I appropriated in my own zombie game inspired by LCS, is a nod to Fort Zombie. I often wondered, when playing Fort Zombie, if the developers had played LCS and taken inspiration from it.

Red Faction: Guerrilla also comes to mind. It's in a completely different genre; it's a third-person open-world action game, and is very very light on its strategy and RPG elements. I'm not entirely sure why my intuition says it fits here, given how distant it looks on paper. But I know when I played it I was very impressed by the game, thought its shrewd design was underrated, and also wondered if any of the designers had taken any inspiration from LCS.

For a more real-world setting, the old Gangsters: Organized Crime is pretty similar, and I've seen a couple comparisons between it and LCS. It's set in prohibition era, you play as a mafia family, and it's more on the strategy end. Lots of emphasis on business fronts, safehouses, bribing police, rivalries between crime families.

Finally, if you're most interested in the RPG side of the game, Liberal Crime Squad is based on Oubliette, which is one of the foundational games among computer RPGs. I believe the early Wizardry games, which were also inspired greatly by Oubliette, are pretty similar to the RPG and dungeon crawling side of Liberal Crime Squad. They're both fantasy games, though.

LCS is normally compiled with GCC and GNU Make (both come preinstalled on most Linux distros), and on Windows with Visual Studio Express, which was freeware until 2 years ago. Now it's a stripped-down version of the full VC++ and you have to pay for it after the trial expires.

I think you might be conflating two different products. Visual Studio Express has always been a stripped down version, but this is the first I've heard of it being turned into a trial version rather than a forever free version. Wikipedia says Visual Studio Express is still freeware, Microsoft advertises the line as "entirely free" on their website, and all discussion on tech sites and forums seems consistent with it still being 100% free and not a trial product.

I think you may be confusing this with the fact that you can freely download other versions of Visual Studio, besides Express, which you then have to pay for after their trial elapses. Well, you have to pay for them if you want to keep using them. Obviously they can't make you pay for them.

So I heard the game got a lot easier with the addition of scavenging and recruitment. In this release, the pendulum swings the other way, and combat becomes significantly more dangerous.

Headline features are improved zombie AI and limited ammo on guns. The AI changes include making zombies slow to notice you, but able to hunt you after you slip out of sight. Most notably, however, firing guns will aggro zombies in a wide area around you, who will start to pour in on you. Let me know if it's too much.

Ammo limitations work a bit differently than in LCS. Your squad shares a common ammunition reserve and will freely share ammo with each other. Shotguns reload one shell at a time, and reloading takes an action during combat, but all weapons can be reloaded for free (in terms of time) while moving. When you have two weapons equipped, reloading during combat is prioritized only if the potential damage of the weapon being reloaded is more than four times the damage that would be done by attacking with the other weapon. Reloading is lossless, so non-empty magazines get abstracted back into the ammo pile, but your survivors won't reload guns that use magazines unless they're almost empty. Empty weapons can still be used as clubs, and are more powerful than your bare hands in combat.

Melee weapons are much more valuable this release, and the crossbow also sees its star rise significantly with these two features. The crossbow is both the only ranged weapon that is silent, and the only ranged weapon with reusable ammo. You can usually find its bolts dropped to the floor or stuck in the corpses of fallen zombies. On the minus side, it doesn't share a skill with any of the other weapons, must be reloaded after every shot, and has the least plentiful ammunition. And while its bolts are usually recoverable, they will still sometimes be lost.

These are some pretty substantial changes. Let me know they feel and how they affect the gameplay.



Download:
http://www.jonathansfox.com/ZSS/zss_python_3_3_2013.zip

Changelog:
- Added ammunition
- Added improvised melee attacks with ranged weapons
- Removed defensive benefit from having high dexterity
- Removed the ability to make unarmed attacks when weapons are equipped
- Reduced chance of attacks missing in general
- Reduced availability of scavenging supplies slightly
- Zombies start not noticing player, may take notice when in line of sight
- Zombies wander around aimlessly when not alerted to the player
- Guns are loud and attract zombies
- Zombies that lose sight of the player or hear guns will chase with pathfinding
- Zombies can no longer become incapacitated due to pain
- Armor is now considerably less effective
- Reduced length of some too-long character names
- Fixed crash bug on equipment screen when you had no equipment