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[xriso]

Win the interesting way:

Pick a mainly A character, except grab the $1000 at the second to last part.

Go to Homeless Shelter and "make (T)rouble". Pick up a bunch of gang members. From this point on your head man can sit tight, doing nothing for the rest of the game.

Form squads from your gang members, consolidating pistols to the pistol experts. Get the rest of them to buy crowbars at the Pawn Shop. Crowbars are very painful.

You have a bunch of very nasty guys. Now for the fun part:

Go forth and stop EVIL at primarily the two media stations. Run around the lobby and grab loot, then run back to the entrance and kill some poor weaponless conservative. Try to not fight security guards, especially if there are more than 1. Once the conservatives are alarmed, get out.

If your guys get damaged, send them to the clinic right away. They can't get caught by the police there, and they also don't lose contact with any subordinates.

After 10 days or so, sell your loot and relocate. Whenever a safe house gets raided,  that means the house is now safe, so you can send your guys there.

Do not allow anyone with less than 100 juice to be arrested, as they may rat out your main guy, destroying the entire operation. Let anyone with 200 or more juice get arrested to get it over with. Get them to defend themselves. If they get sentenced, send someone to free them from prison.

These guys with 200 juice will have fantastic  statistics. They can be your generals. They take the fall for all charges, leaving your main guy completely safe. They won't rat you out.

Make one the head of a brownies cluster, for example.

Rather than grabbing Sweatshop Workers, who are criminals right from the start, put in a little more time and get yourself some Fashion Designers at the Juice Bar. Promote them to being contacts of your main man, as they won't be doing anything illegal. Train them to level 12, at which point they make everything perfectly. Money!

Don't run special editions EVER, so that you don't get hit by random raids.

At this point you have unlimited money and a bunch of high-heart, high-charisma guys. Also, you're 100% legitimate. Sleeper time! Get at least five sleeper News Anchors/Radio Personalities, preferably more.

Now the country is under your firm liberal grip. Feel free to (W)ait away the remaining days without fear. You'll get to see the long-term behaviour, which is quite interesting.

2006: House turns Elite liberal, Senate turns moderate.

2006 - 2008: No bills are approved. The House shoots down all conservative bills, and those liberal bills which make it through the split Senate are vetoed by the conservative President.

2008: Government becomes Elite Liberal, with perhaps a normally Liberal Senate.

2008 - 2010: The laws gradually become 90-100% Elite Liberal.

2010: Elite Liberal senate.

2006-202x: Supreme Court *slowly* becomes Elite Liberal.

202x: Win! (With no criminal record on main guy.)

[Jim]

There are other cool ways to get juice too.  I usually get unlucky at the AM radio station or the cable news station because for some reason I often run into a radio personality or a news anchor who "debate" my characters to conversion.  I go to the garment makers place or other industrial areas and have the gang members wear matching clothes (or lack thereof) for each site.  Then I train security and disguise skills by exploring as much as I can in each area so they're competent at causing trouble.  Then I destroy every single machine that I see (with no one looking).  Conservatives might become "suspicious" but they won't yell out because of the good disguise skill.  Every time you destroy a machine your juice increases, which is really useful.

[Jim]

I just figured a way to win LCS that's probably the most boring way of all.  You don't need any weapons.  All you need to have is a decent charisma and enough persuasion skill and you can completely dominate this game.  Increase your leader's persuasion skills by having him stand on trial.  When you first make your leader, have him be a C/A character.  Keep on hitting C until you get to the part where you have a choice between stealing a car and such.  From that point on, pick only A.  Check your charisma and if it's around 7, 8, 9, or 10 (if your charisma is too low, just keep on increasing your juice) and if you have a persuasion of about 4 or 5 you should be able to convince a radio personality to join the LCS.  Once you have a radio personality (who always starts with about 10 charisma and may have a persuasion skill of about 7 or you're ready to kick some major butt.

Have the radio personality find a taxi cab driver.  Have your leader (he should have high security skills) steal a car.  Then make one squad with the radio personality and the taxi cab driver.  Your squad can walk into apartments and increase the amount of radio personalities (or if you can't find them, journalists are decent too) it has.  Place your leader in this squad as well, since you will more often than not need a security skill.  Everything all set?  You've got a car, a taxi driver, four radio personalities and your leader.  Don't bother with weapons.  If you ever run out of money the radio personalities and your leader can sell brownies, and even if they get arrested they can defend themselves and they'll get off because of the high persuasion skill (which will only increase more).  

Then, go to the AM radio or Cable News station in your car.  People should find the show pretty good with the amount of charisma and persuasion you have.  When the security team arrives, don't fight.  Just "T"alk to them.  Pick the squad member with the highest bluff skill and the enemy will be fooled.  Keep on doing this in every single encounter.  In turn, your persuasion will only get higher and the conservatives have no chance.  When you're driving away from the scene, there is a chance you might be chased by mean conservatives.  With your Taxi Driver, keep on dodging them, and you'll be fine.  The number one rule here is to never ever fight.

You should also free some half-decent garment makers so they can make police uniforms, army uniforms, and black suits if you get raided.  In a raid situation, just do the same thing.  Never fight them.  Just keep on lying to them, and they'll never fight you.  Soon enough, you'll have a public that loves the LCS.  Have your leader surf on the internet and witness its glory.  

However, this brings up an important point about the game, and it's the combat system.  I am going to be honest.  I hacked my leader to have stats of about 50.  I also hacked my leader to have a sword skill of about 15.  Granted, I did do a lot of damage to conservatives, but there was one situation in which I died that didn't make any sense.  When I came out of the cable news station, there were four "yokels" chasing me.  My leader managed to sever arms on each yokel, and managed to sever a leg of two yokels.  However, one yokel, with merely a pitchfork, hit me in the "body" and I died instantly from perfect health, stressing my complete and utter failure.  I don't know about you, but if I was able to sever the arm of a yokel, shouldn't he be completely unable to do something like that?

It's not that the combat system is terrible; it's just that it has some flaws.  That's why I just relied on persuasion, because even if you spend so much time on your gang members or your agents, they always find some way to die.  For some reason, I mainly use my imagination to think about a storyline and a story for each of my characters.  It's not at all fun to wait an entire month for a secret agent to get out of the hospital because he was hit on the head by the fist of an office worker, and it's not fun to have your best secret agent or gang member to get killed by one shot from a security guard.  For me, I have found that combat situations are usually hopeless for either side.  What usually happens is that one side will strike first, and when they do, they'll more than likely obliterate the other side.  The other side is too busy bleeding and crying to fight back, and then it only gets worse from there.  

It'd be ok if weird situations happened once and awhile, but the frequency at which things go wrong all the time is hard to believe.  Someone could tell me that you shouldn't even care and the whole point of the game is to get huge numbers of fighters and unleash them everywhere, but that is quite repetitive and takes a long time to accomplish.  I never played Oubliette, but was it an RPG where your "main characters" (in LCS I guess it's your own decision who your main characters are) died constantly without any way of reviving them?  In most RPGs, your characters can die, but you can revive them in some way.  In an RPG like Angband or Moria, you only have one guy, but the guy doesn't normally get killed in one hit by a mediocre monster.  I feel that the game is imbalanced because the combat system can be easily ignored and you can dominate the game through persuasion.

[Toady One]

I agree that the game balance is awful.

My brother and I have a much better combat system that we use in our other games (nothing released)...  LCS was originally a small project, and I never got around to updating the combat (focusing instead on bloating the other parts).  You'd still be able to be skewered by a pitch fork, but it would be less likely, and the arm severing would preclude it.

In Oubliette, characters die like crazy.  It  can be very annoying.

Roguelike games have hitpoints to prevent character death from smaller creatures.  I don't like hitpoints linked to experience, especially in modern settings.  Even if it is frustrating, you should really be able to get wasted by one shot, except maybe in games with fixed plots.  A better skill system can get you around it seeming unfair as well as maybe more tactical decisions, such as taking cover etc.

[X]

Hehe!

No hit points! More skills! Better tactics!

CARDS....

X

[xriso]

These dying problems are the reason I try to never ever fight security guards.

It's tempting, especially when you have 6 gunners against 1 alone guard, but I've had one of my Generals die in a situation like this.

That's also why I only start fights at the entrance. Once the conservatives are alarmed, get out ASAP!

Unless you have excellent bluffing.  

[Jim]

I guess the one-shot-one-kill idea is realistic, but I remember in an old game I used to play, Covert Action, you had a choice to pick up a kevlar armor suit.  Without it, you could die in two hits, but with it, it would take four hits until you were defeated.  Perhaps LCS can have some sort of armor you could wear under your clothes?  Granted, if the armor was shot it would have to be repaired to be useful again.

Then there could be a balance problem with the guns, but then, I thought of another idea about guns.  Whenever my character has an AK-47 or an M-16 in combat, I notice that there is a lot of ammunition per clip.  Then I wonder, why does my character just shoot one bullet at a time?  In Grand Theft Auto III, your main character hardly ever shot one bullet at a time with those weapons unless you wanted to be extremely accurate.  I suggest that maybe weapons like the M-16 or the AK-47 could maybe fire 3 or 4 shots per round.  Maybe the .45 semi-automatic could fire two shots per round?  The Magum and the Shotgun are quite powerful weapons, and perhaps their power could be increased a little.  It's hard to believe, but one of my characters did indeed survive a shotgun blast to the body.  Also, I have another bug to report about the shotgun.  In my game, if you shoot conservatives with the shotgun, the rifle skill doesn't increase, but the pistol skill does.  

Anyway, it's just an idea.  I always waste so much ammunition on the AK-47 and M-16 because even if I just shot three bullets of the clip, the characters automatically reload the gun when they come back to the base. Lots of good clips go to waste.

[Floydman]

I like the kevlar idea (I think it should be worn along with other clothing, not just by itself, so that you cna have both disguise and protection) and especially the multi-shots gun idea.  It is true that in the current version, it does not make any real difference to the player using handguns, semi-auto or full automatic guns, as they all shoots one bullet per turn.

Count my vote in for these two propositions