Well, I managed (after about a year or two with on-and-off playing) to finally get the whole power system liberal.
I've gone a bit in circles wondering wether or not to suggest some balancing, but now I decided to do so, and feel free to bring whatever feedback you have:)
Infiltration is most likely the biggest source of frustration in the new versions of the game (Previously, for me at least, it was that the smallest of crimes would lead your safehouse raided and more often than not, made you lose the game). The problem as I see it is that the more you pump up the juice of your political soldiers, the bigger the chance that they will die a horrible death, and that all their recruits will vanish into thin air. In my succesful playthrough, I didn't dare to use my founder for anything at all, and even when several of my soldiers had far above 100 in juice, the habit had burned itself so far in, not to mention that my founder was probably one of the least skilled and one of the one with least juice.
Another problem, I feel, is that infiltration feels a bit unbalanced in the sense of what rewards it brings. Towards the end of the game, I had the "throw the conservative swines out of the country" amendment proposed, and in the beginning an overweight of people voted no. The solution? Infiltrate a couple of HQ's and police station and just spread my graffiti around, stealing a bit of loot and leaving long before the conservatives smelled my liberal arse.
The solution, as I see it: reduce the infiltration difficulty in terms of death-rate and reduce the rewards infiltration gives in terms of popularity.
As an example of the former, there could be a big gap between a fainting and a death. A bit before the soldiers die, they will faint, making them much less of a target. If the whole team faints during an infiltration, a percentage of them dies, and a percentage of them are captured. If a team containing someone who has fainted gets out, the player must pay a hefty fee to have them stay (for a fairly long time) at a hospital to recover, removing some skill points, but maintaining (or maybe even giving a slight bonus) of juice.
Some might say that this would make the whole game a whole lot easier, but for those I propose two play-styles configurable at the start of the game, normal mode or hardcore mode.
And now for my other point. I do realize that this will of course require quite a lot of programming, but I fail to see how tagging will generally increase the whole countrys liking for you. I can imagine that the country was divided into several sub-groups, examples being youth, elder, working class, upper class, intellectual elite, and so on. Doing one action, like tagging, would increase in ones favor with the youth-class, but may damage ones standing within the intellectual elite.
To not make the whole game too much like games like Democracy and the likes, the bonus/loss ratio could be unbalanced in favor of the player, meaning that the fall in rep would be quite lower than the rise in rep with the subgroups, calling more for a variation of actions instead of forcing the player into constantly worrying about damaging a group too much.
Well, that's my "small" suggestion. As a little addition, I have a little trouble realizing when my soldiers gain juice or not, a small text after infiltrations where we could be informed that "(name) has been remarked for his actions. juice up" or "(name) did a good job doing (this or that), but since he has done this so much, he was not specially remarked" (No extra juice)
Other than that, thanks for keeping up developing an excellent and thoroughly addictive game, not only for the experience, but to show the world that excellent gameplay does not equal state-of-the-art graphics or a million dollar budget!
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Topic: Suggestion: balancing infiltration (and a few others) (Read 969 times)