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[Kay12]

Ok, this is just something I've been toying around with and not to be taken very seriously (feel free though)...

SUPER MEGA LIBERAL COMPLEX OPERATIONS! (SMLCO)

The concept of assassinating the C+ president or senators has been mentioned several times. I've been thinking about this too, but after all... you raid ONE measly site, and if you get lucky, the prez dies? Pretty boring, too easy.

What I'm thinking about is that there possibly could be larger operations requiring (or rewarding) multiple squads, taking place in different (but related) sites during the same day. For example, the president case could feature a single group of liberals aquiring (stealing) invitations to a gala ceremony where the president will be, a second group will start an unholy racket on the other side of the city to draw away the police attention, and the third squad will use the invitations to smuggle a bomb designed for conservative demise. Should the first squad fail, the third squad will have to break in instead of being let in, and if the second squad fails to create enough police attention the third squad will be in trouble once the bomb is noticed (or goes off...).

This would add some interesting elements to the game - not only having multiple squads would be properly rewarded (a single AK47/guitar group is often enough in the current version), but having different squads as well: in the prez example, you'd have a sneaky sneaky group for acquiring the invitations (or an artist group for forging them), a traditional AK47 group for keeping the police occupied and a smooth-talking party going group for getting the bomb in place.

I'm not saying that these complex operations should be only used to kill the president: other large scale liberal actions could be implemented too. I've always wanted bomb strikes in LCS, but they'd be way too easy without a system like this. Some things determined by the RNG, like cracking the CEO safe, could be tranferred to SMLCOs. Some site actions would remain single-squad, but would allow better SMLCO alternatives - you could still just barge in the prison and get your liberals out, OR another of your squads could cut off the electricity or disable the alarms or whatever, so you'll find it easier not to get shot at on your way out.

So. Whaddya think?

[tehstefan]

Well, all I can say is that it would be a lot of work to program that in, in all likelihood. If it could be done easily, I'm all for it, though, cause it would be a lot of fun!

[Wimdit]

Argh. That's a really cool concept, but I'm not sure how much it would do in terms of game balance. I mean, recruiting three highly-skilled squads isn't much harder than just recruiting one, it's just more work. I think the real problem here is the combat mechanics, and this is just a workaround.

Of course, that line of thinking leads to the possibility of making the game more realistic: sort of like X-Com in terms of the survivability of your grunts. I mean, the LCS is an untrained band of terrorists, with only the fire within their Liberal hearts to give them an edge over trained and well-armed soldiers. A few raids worth of experience in gunning down automatons wouldn't allow them to stand up against National Guard troops in the real world, after all.

But both of these approaches sound like a whole lot of work, like tehstefan said, and I doubt our friendly Fox has enough time on his hands to implement this.

Hm. I think special objectives during raids might be good anyway. Cut the power and barge in, just like the Agents do to you. And complex operations that occur over multiple raids might be good, but more like preset missions. Or hell, randomly generated, if it can be managed. Like, detective work to discover a CCS plot, track down the conspirators, and finally confront them in a duel in broad daylight. With deathsquads aiding the CCS. Man, that sounds like it would be good for an FPS, but I'm not sure if it would work out in LCS.

[Kay12]

Well, having beaten the game several times, I find the raid system boring. Basically, you go in, grab some stuff, shoot conservatives and get out. The successfulness is neatly determined by the player's risktaking and the RNG. More tactical opportunities would be nice, forcing the player to think and renew their approach, as just repeatedly pushing the fight key wouldn't always do the trick any longer. In any case I'd like to see a version of LCS where having different squads would really be useful: in the current version one can easily beat the game with just a single squad of guitars, stealthy bastards or AK47s.

And on to the coding! Implementing such a system would be a big change for the gameplay and the code, but many features are already in place: raids (obviously) and simultaneous raids (or rather multiple ones during the same day) for example. The game currently also has the ability to track the actions done on site, so I don't think it will be too hard to implement a system that allows one raid to influence another.

[Innominate]

There would have to be a lot of changes to raids for this to be viable (or at least interesting). The order in which raids were carried out would have to be determined by the player, or by a pre-fabricated SMLCO (as opposed to an emergent one), and there would have to be some way of saving and accessing actions between raids. It's all doable, but it will make the code even more convoluted than it is currently.

A less ambitious target would be any interaction between raids. Currently the only way two raids can interact is by shutting down or increasing security on the same target - 5 raids on the genetics lab can open all the cages 5 times. Things like shooting up/shutting down the power plant resulting in the prison, court and police station holding cells bursting open would be awesome. Bonuses to sneak, reflecting the fact that the lights had gone out, would also be cool. The police/SWAT/Death Squads could be slower to respond if they previously rushed to a (different) location on the same day. Hostage situations could distract the authorities, etc.

It would be nice, but more difficult still, if raids could be 'paused', while another raid 'resumed'; a way of pretending that they were being executed simultaneously. This pausing would have to be managed somehow to maintain that illusion, but ideally it would look like any planned-robbery movie (e.g. Ocean's Eleven). That's entirely a pipe dream though.

Also, why doesn't the LCS' city have a bank? One that we can rob? It's not like money's hard to come by in LCS, but it could be fun.

[Demonic Pancake]

I haven't been playing too much LCS recently as I have found it to be too repetitive. (And it takes too long to get to a good part of the game...) However, I think that something like this would break up the monotony.

The only major problem I see is the issue of time. For example, one squad could be out to distract the cops while the other kills a high ranking conservative, but the first squad might end up causing trouble after the second squad attacks.

It would be cool though if we could have a mission planning screen that would allow us to coordinate squad actions throughout an entire day and possibly switch between squads every hour or so. This would let us control squads based on what other squads have accomplished so far. So if one squad fails to distract the cops significantly, another squad could lay low until they succeeded in drawing them away.

[Kay12]

I recently stumbled upon this hacker Roguelike called Decker. I love the way it handles stealthy actions and combat, and perhaps that could be utilized in LCS as well. That would require a lot of tweaking, however. In short, the Decker system goes as follows:

• The mission area is divided into rooms called 'nodes', nothing too different from the LCS
• There are several classes of security guards, some patrol the area while some lay at rest until an alarm is sounded
• If a patrolling guard sees the player, a query must be responded (failure to respond or a bad response will result in a alarm level being raised and another query)
• Yellow alert only makes patrolling guards more vigilant and careful, while red alert results in the "sleeping" guards being activated and starting to scurry around the area where the player was last spotted (in LCS, this could also mean the Arch Conservatives fleeing the site for safety)
• If there is are hostile guards in the same room, all of them become hostile. Guards aren't automatically hostile though, even during red alert - they may query the player upon seeing them though, resulting in violence if one can't deceive them
• Guards are set upon starting the raid - no random battles like Final Fantasy
• It's possible to flee guards, but they will at least try to follow. In Decker, there's a smoke program that allows one to shake them, in LCS some smoke bombs could do the trick!

While I find the Decker system over 9000 times more interesting than the current raid/combat system, I am very aware that this would be a huge change to everything in the game. And it would need some refinement to actually fit into LCS. And LCS currently has a raid system inspired by dungeon history, so I understand if there's reluctance to change it. And, maybe we don't need two games with similar systems. But I'd like to see LCS raids become somewhat more tactical and interesting.

[Ampersand]

While I doubt a massive change to the raid system is really going to happen any time soon, some of what you put in that isn't too big of a deal, and may even be an improvement in my opinion. We already do have a bluffing system against hostile enemies, but the thing about hostile conservatives in LCS right now is that they suffer from the same sort of effect that we see in games like Morrowind and Oblivion. The psychic guard effect that magically knows both who they're looking for and where they are at all times.

If you were to, for example, change your disguise and ditch/hide your weapons while no one is around in the midst of a raid, there's probably only one or two guards around whom have actually seen you and know what your faces look like. The problem is actually tracking the position and knowledge-status of each guard individually. The position thing shouldn't be that big of a step, since enemy squad positions are already tracked when your own hideout is being raided, or the Police interrupt one of your own raids, but as far as I know, the actual contents of an enemy squad is always random, and vanish if you escape or bluff past them.

I guess what really needs to happen, then, is for police units to be persistent, rather than abstracted like all other encounters

[Kay12]

I guess what really needs to happen, then, is for police units to be persistent, rather than abstracted like all other encounters

Indeed. It's a major flaw in the current raid system (in my opinion) that basically a half-decent persuader can go to the park, wander around (for hours IRL, no time at all in LCS) until (s)he has managed to get all the important conservatives to listen to him/her. This has, if I've understood correctly, been changed somewhat (only one CEO now), but in my opinion it would be even better if all the security personnel and important figures would be actually present on the site rather than being just a random occurrence. Upon the alarm, most of the security guards would obviously head for the last known location of the Liberals, while some would escort the Arch Conservatives out. If the Liberals manage to bag an Arch Conservative, (s)he'll be replaced in a month or two.