High security is actually getting a shrink from infinite to about two months; the closed down is going from a few days to a couple weeks, but it's less common. It will mean you can't walk in and blast the life out of a place twice a week every week, but I don't think that's unreasonable.
The biggest restraints on the pace of the game aren't public opinion, but the pace of government changes. Justices are well-known, but since the election overhaul I did, the Presidency shifts very slowly too. As it stands, you'd need at least 17 years to get an Elite Liberal President; that's just way too long, honestly.
My goal is to make the game be an ongoing struggle for dominance in public opinion and in other ways. At the moment one of the problems with the game is that as you grow in power, the threats to you only increase. There's no plateau, no achievement, no breath of fresh air or time to relax before the next challenge. I would like to see conflicts with gangs and other groups that can eventually be marginalized and defeated as the LCS expands its influence. I want you to be able to have measures of the power of the LCS; this is part of why I make LCS popularity capped now, so you can't become more popular than the general Liberal sentiment in the population. As you push the issues back across the board, the LCS can grow more popular.
One subtle change that I suspect most people haven't noticed is that average people on the street now appear in alignment distribution that is based on the public mood. If you go to prison for 17 years and come out in the heart of an Arch Conservative Hell, you'll see reds crawling everywhere, with only a few Liberal strongholds in the shelter, co-op, and crack dens. As public opinion moves in your favor, you'll see fewer and fewer enemies against you, and soon it'll mainly just be the cops and security guards and special enemies.
I want the game to be responsive to your actions, giving you rewards as you play, and for accomplishments less than total victory. As you choose different strategies, it should affect how the game plays -- a very "good alignment" strategy will result in a popular LCS, but it'll lack punch. A very "evil alignment" strategy will be devastating where you strike, but it can soon backfire if you end up making the public hate you. I do want to let you pick good and drag it out for decades if that's what you want, but the goal isn't to make you do that -- rather, it's to make the more aggressive actions you do take meaningful in the short term, and also more exciting because they cost you something to perform, namely your popularity, which in turn reduces the effectiveness of your actions. The idea is that there would be a good reason to do this specifically, though -- because if you don't hit them like this, you'll never do as much damage as you could to that target. Running in with six people with assault rifles and shooting the place up should be crippling to them.
Ultimately, I'm trying to finesse the situation into a place where there's less grinding, and more meaning behind your actions. You don't run out and kill janitors for days to get your juice up, because then the LCS becomes loathed and they kick down your door. Instead, you get your combat team's juice doing meaningful, interesting things, like fighting gangs for influence, or skirmishing with some corporation. If, in the end, the game is longer for these changes, it will hopefully not be from being more monotonous.
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Edit: To be clear, this extension in the too hot timer isn't out of any intentional effort to make the game slower paced, it's mainly a preparatory change for when your actions have a more direct effect on the groups you attack. Having the building out of action for a couple weeks should, theoretically, be an advantage. Once this is in place, we can do things like having the AM Radio and Cable News not affect anything while they're closed down, and have the Police not be able to raid you if you slam them with a giant hit. You'll then have a meaningful way to lift a siege -- you can't attack the sieging units directly from the outside, but you can attack the police station, and if you do enough damage, you'll close it down and force them to break off the siege.
[ February 16, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
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Topic: The Mythical Almost Invincible Battle Founder (Read 13255 times)