EDIT:
I've released LCS 3.10 alpha 3 for download. Please give it a shot and let me know what you think. The differences between the actual release and the feature list below are:
3.10a1
- I re-doubled the selling price on armor, so that it's now twice the manufacturing price, rather than merely the manufacturing price. So now you can still make a profit from making expensive suits, it's just much less attractive than it used to be -- $300 per suit profit is less useful than $1200 per suit.
- No agility check to give cover fire in sieges
- / and \ support in init file removed; AZERTY support added
3.10a3
- General balance changes.
- Police now search for safe houses differently.
- Added a prototype system for writing articles for the Liberal Guardian.
- Added various new weapons.
3.10a5
- A pause before you get into encounters
- Stuff appears in restricted squares
- New law: Gun control
- Pawn shop now sells more guns, but only if they're legal
- You can now cause alarm by the weapon you're carrying
- You can now cause instant alarm as soon as anybody sees you if your weapon is totally illegal, like walking into the police station with an AK-47 and a clown suit
- You can get thrown in jail for openly carrying an illegal weapon in public
- You can disguise yourself and get away with holding an illegal weapon
- "Massive Conservative Response Imminent"
Download link for Windows:
3.10a1:
http://www.jonathansfox.com/LCS/lcs_win32_310a1.zip
3.10a3:
http://www.jonathansfox.com/LCS/lcs_win32_310a3.zip
3.10a5: [CURRENT VERSION]
http://www.jonathansfox.com/LCS/lcs_win32_310a5.zip
Source update:
3.10a3:
http://www.jonathansfox.com/LCS/game10a3.zip
3.10a5:
http://www.jonathansfox.com/LCS/game10a5.zip
(unzip and copy this over the game.cpp in the full source code downloadable off the bay12games website)
The original post follows:
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If there was going to be an update to Liberal Crime Squad, what would you like to see?
--- COMBAT & FIGHTING:
- Ballistic vests that provide the strongest armor yet, and can't be made or bought, but are carried by military and some police forces
- Raids conducted by special Police SWAT units with machine guns and body armor (Trivia from the SWAT entry on Wikipedia: In the SLA siege, the police eventually assaulted the building with teargas and SWAT units armed only with semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and no body armor. The building burned down, all of the SLA members inside were shot multiple times, and despite over three thousand rounds fired and the police not using body armor, not a single police officer was injured.)
- Back ranks during a siege are less effective (must pass an agility check to attack)
- Assault rifles can hit more than once per round
- Just a little less likely to hit Liberal bystanders on accident... it's not really fun to have to always be holding your fire when fighting
- Shotguns are easier to hit with, but do reduced damage on a "barely hit"
- Mere pistols no longer blow people's limbs apart with a single bullet (I lost one too many main characters to security guards BLOWING MY BODY IN HALF with the first shot from their .22 revolver), but may still get other critical hits ("heart is blasted!" and dead at the end of the round, broken neck and paralyzed, all those other uncool other things that don't involve decapitation, exploding bodies, or outright dismemberment that is vastly out of proportion to the power of the weapon used)
--- SLEEPERS:
- Sleeper system overhaul -- eliminating the early News Anchor/Radio Personality win without making them useless, by having them all influence the normal background moves of public opinion, rather than have their own independent effect
- Make almost all sleepers good for something, except like, police dogs and mutants
- Police department sleepers can give advance warning of police raids and leak police records
- CEO sleepers may warn of imminent corporate attacks and leak corporate documents (corporate managers can also leak documents)
- Agent sleepers may warn of imminent CIA raids and leak intelligence documents
--- LEGAL SYSTEM:
- Hiring a good attorney costs $5000 instead of $1000
- Getting away with murder (literally and metaphorically) in court is generally harder; prosecution is stronger, and how many (and how bad) the charges are influences the difficulty
- Sleeper judges always reduce the sentence, and never order executions
- There's always a chance of conviction, even if you're really good; you're guilty, it should never be a sure thing to get away with it. Instead, emphasis should be on avoiding that position in the first place.
--- HACKING:
- Harder to get a "major event" in hacking
- Can cause a scare by hacking into CIA networks (don't get data disks, but you do influence the intelligence issue)
- Can deface conservative websites
- Credit card fraud is less lucrative for lower level hackers
--- DATING:
- Law enforcement officers and agents sometimes identify wanted Liberals on dates, and try to arrest them
- Kidnapping soldiers and other dangerous targets can sometimes backfire
--- COMMAND STRUCTURE:
- Liberals stay in contact when their boss is only arrested, and only disappear when their boss gets sent to jail or dies
- High juice, high heart liberals might come back after their boss is released from jail (so maybe you're sent to jail for twenty years, and awhile after you're released, one day your old top general just shows up at the homeless shelter, weapon in hand... everyone else has abandoned you, but she's a veteran with too much put into this... even after twenty years, the man can't keep her down)
- Color coding on the promotion screen to show which liberals are arrested, in jail, or in hiding due to their superiors being in jail
--- OTHER STUFF:
- Armor can only be sold at the cost of manufacture (can't sell expensive suits to raise money)
- The keys '/' and '\' can be used to page forward and back instead of brackets or pageup/pagedown, by typing "slashes" into the init file
There are other things I'd like to see too, but that's not my wish-list. That's a list of features that are in the current build of LCS sitting on my hard drive. Some features will need more testing eventually, particularly for balance, while others are a little crude; Liberals "slink back" after you're released from prison, just like if they escaped a siege a couple days previous, for example, and that doesn't feel quite right. And with the SWAT units and body armor, it may be okay to remove the agility check I added early on to back rank support in a siege -- if you want three ranks of agents, go ahead and get them, but beware the fact that agents can arrest you if you try to date them with a criminal record, and they don't come with body armor, while the assaulting units will.
A couple of thoughts on things I'd like to do beyond this:
- Add weapons: M4 Carbine (lighter, less powerful version of the M16 preferred by urban assault teams, using the same ammunition), MP5 submachine gun (rapid fire like an assault rifle, lighter bullets like a pistol), and a combat shotgun (generic pump-action shotgun equivalent to the existing one, but chambered for 4-8 rounds -- I may even replace the current shotgun completely). Once this is done, I can alter damage calculations a bit so that some weapons can nullify armor more than others, thus justifying heavier weapons without them doing more raw damage, or penalize agility rolls in combat due to the weight of the weapon, thus encouraging lighter weapons (SMG or Carbine instead of the M16 and AK47).
- When fighting evil, after you're in an area for a certain amount of time with the alarm on, or after you've killed a certain number of Conservatives, the building is evacuated and red "ENEMY" SWAT teams start appearing from the entrance, trapping you in and forcing you to fight your way out or surrender (which will have to be added). The thing at the top of the screen says "CONSERVATIVES ALARMED" will have to change to something like "POLICE RESPONSE", with a special case for the police station itself.
And of course I could think of other things, but there's no reason to get carried away. I'm posting now because I'm interested in what you'd like to see. Give me some ideas!
P.S. Not to complain too much about the source code, as I've actually enjoyed learning it, but the one thing above anything else that really drove me crazy was having 40 separate places where I had to manually add support for the / and \ keys. Sure, the actual key reads were parameterized, but the "press [] to see other pages" stuff was hardcoded as separate constant strings in like 40 different interface pages.
[ June 10, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
[ June 10, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
[ June 10, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]