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So, upon much reflection, the game really does need a way for players to protect against being assassinated or harmed. It can be expensive and and hard, but that ability needs to be there.
It's called police protection, and it happens automatically. You can also pass bills such as congressional protection and martial law to increase the baseline protection level. It's very effective. If you don't want to be assassinated easily, the best protection is to not do so many drugs that any successful assassination kills you because you constantly hover at 16 health. Every single person who has died from an assassination with the exception of Jenkins was already low due to their own actions. The person that assassinated jenkins just got extremely lucky.
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Sorry to get your hopes up, I was referring to events in-game. (Though we seem to be well over-due for a real life Political Pieing)
I was hoping for a way to respond to other players actions, in-game, that didn't resort to thuggery. I guess that what investigations & slander are for.
But as an interrupter for Filibuster, that works too!
Thanks!
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In light of recent events...
I think we should be able to pie people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieing
Perhaps the target would loose some CS, and a tiny bit of health or energy if successful. This is more intended to embarrass (and protest another players actions) than actually do physical harm. Perhaps a news story in-line with the embarrassment?
Would cause a smaller scandal than the other skullduggery options.
Thanks!
Wait, recent events? Link me. Also, I don't think I'd want this as a general mission, but I've been trying to figure out a semi-realistic filibuster interrupter, and I think I can work the pieing into that somehow.
The name of an item will generally give you some idea of its stats (there are obvious themes), but I don't list the stats because I'd rather people wear actual outfits than just try to powergame their equipment to be the "best". Realistically, no items are better than others if you're spending an equivalent amount of money. I use a rigid formula to determine item stats to ensure that items are balanced AND useful compared to other items at a similar cost level.
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so now that we've released ufo documents what happens.. i'm very interested in what effect this could possibly have on the nation...
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there really, REALLLY, needs to be a way to tell what a drug does, i have -19 energy and had no way to know it was going to happen...
Investigations do more than just uncover scandals. You know how you look at someone at most of their stuff says "unknown"? The stuff that isn't is revealed because of your investigations into that person.
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Uuuuh Q, also, there is a way to abuse the crony system. The maximum for cronies is 5 so you can't add everyone and get the bonus for everyone, right? But what if every time you're going to help one of your associate's bills you demote a crony and put the associate in his place, and then repeat for all others?
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I know about the protection level, but people are saying you added a feature who makes it so high after some failed attempts that it is literally impossible to assassinate someone. If this is true and people can still launch assassinations while it is under effect, the effect will keep growing and render that person forever invincible if the assassinations keep coming!
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Also, when the protection is in place for people that are frequently hit by assassinations, dont let people launch more assassinations against that target. Something like "Dave, that target is guarded flawlessly. There is no way we could get an assassin in there. Sorry."
Because else people are going to keep trying and some people will end up having infinite protection because of the ever-growing effective time.
Just the description you see when their CSP is maxed out/near maxed. It implies that they have unwavering support like you might find towards the leader of a cult from their cultists.
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I think exact numbers and graphs for those statistics would make the game too easy... Perhaps an estimate with its accuracy based on how much funding a research to produce those estimates gets?
I do apologize for the delay on that. It's a combination of the running string of crap ever since I"ve been trying to work on that and some level of general exhaustion from all the coding. Again, sorry for the delay and it will be done soon along with other planned features I have mentioned.
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Based on what I have seen, I will make the most aggravating comment to delosford possible.
"Good, good, let the mothercrap flow through you [insert accusation of ripping off LCS here]"
While the game is coded such that adding parties isn't hard, the real problem is adding them to the character creation screen. The way it is now makes it pretty tough, and adding another party mid-way would be kind of infeasible at this point since they'd be screwed on number of members.
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that last comment screwded up a bit, but i got investagated about 30 times, stolen from, ruffed up 4 times, assassination attempt 2,my stress was so high that i couldnt play on any bills effecively so i took soom campainge offers instead.
That is a good point. I hadn't figured anyone would ever get hit that hard. I'll give you your weekly salary manually, and will implement something that checks for high stress/low health or something like that. You are definitely correct that this shouldn't happen.
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You didn't receive your weekly salary because you didn't act on any bills in the last week. Try actually working this week!
I think this a a little unfair because i was still active every other day.
02/09/13 08:24 -- You have the feeling that you're being watched
02/09/13 07:24 -- An assassin made an attempt on your life, but the police assigned to protected you thwarted the attempt!
02/09/13 01:56 -- You have the feeling that you're being watched
02/08/13 12:24 -- An assassin made an attempt on your life, but the police assigned to protected you thwarted the attempt!
02/09/13 07:24 -- An assassin made an attempt on your life, but the police assigned to protected you thwarted the attempt!
That is just the tip of the ice burg.
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New suggestion: Crime rate percentage. Could make population leave the country, there would be bills to fund police operations and such to decrease it. Another suggestion is Situational Constitutional Support Altering, which basically hurts some of your CS when you play abilities on bills that are not good for the country at the present time. I mean, why would your constituents approve of tightening immigration restrictions if the populational growth is negative? However i don't think it should surpass the base gain from supporting bills that your party is in favor though.
I have considered implementing a system that changes constituents' feelings on issues based on the nation... but then I remembered that people don't actually do that. We already have the lowest taxes out of the entire developed world (by a good margin), yet our right always pushes for more tax cuts. And no matter how high the deficit goes, people will still demand more social programs and bizarre subsidies that seem borne of crony capitalism. Essentially, I ended up feeling that the partisan hackery was actually more realistic than an informed populace with moderated views based on changing world events and factual occurences. As for the crime rate... that's sort of worked in to bills with population growth and public health... but it's hard for me to say too much without revealing specific bill stats.
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Indeed, Patche. However it should never be a libertarian or something like that, because honestly what kind of Warlord fights for freedom? lol
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Is there plans for a better way to see other people's bills without having to scroll through the entire 'Current Bills' page?
You can see your cronies' bills via the cronies/associates page. That means you'd generally only be searching for a player to attack their bills, which I'd prefer not to encourage. There's plenty of bills to fight against; no need to pick on one person endlessly.
Nope. The clout tiers are to split people into levels of fair competition/for autobalancing. Unless I made a while new tier of abilities that were super expensive or restricted to above T4, there would be no point.
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"Choosing to vote against this bill would be incredibly irrational if you have any interest in seeing this country thrive."-increase congressional salaries
Conversely, we could claim that high salaries are necessary to mitigate corruption and also entice more people into political careers, thus improving the distribution of our supposedly representative sample ;)
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woah, people actually managed to cut nasa's funding? looks like we might actually deal with the nations debt finally!
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NationStates should not be cast as a Civilization-type game. Civilization is an example of a 4X (explore, expand, exploit and exterminate) game. NationStates is a government simulator. The main similarity is that in both games the player is the uncontested leader. Nevertheless, they represent two distinct genres. NationStates is politically-themed because players are faced with a daily policy decisions and the totality of their decisions serve as inputs into the government simulation. Clout is a granular version of this. The players in both Clout and NationStates are making policy decisions that influence the outcome of their nations. There is far more player interaction in Clout and no big policy changes are made unilaterally, but that does not detract from the political nature of NationStates. On balance, NationStates is far more similar to Clout, in theme as well as substance, than Civilization. What does it matter if Clout isn't the first politically themed multiplayer game?
First things first: the only claim I ever made is that Clout is the first politically-themed MMORPG. Nation States obviously isn't an MMORPG. The core game of NationStates is a nation building game. You enact policies, your nation grows, it's ranked against other nations. There really aren't any politics because you are an omnipotent dictator. The abstraction layer of "choose an argument" is vaguely similar to clout, but the mechanics behind it are completely dissimilar. You are simply choosing an action that you could choose in a less abstract way in any nation-building game like Civ, Caesar, or the slew of browser-based ones that lack a 4X element. There isn't any real difference between picking the "tax increase" argument and hitting the "tax increase" button in Civ. At a base level, Clout is an RPG. Most of what you can do in-game has absolutely no equivalent in NationStates (and vise-versa). Clout is closer to Final Fantasy than NationStates.
You regain 3 health/day, 6/day if you're in the hospital. You also receive automatic police protection if you've recently been hit by a violent mission.
Well, doesn't everybody? :P Stress can be reduced with drugs or other things from the black market, and you can also alter your playstyle to reduce stress. Introducing your own bills (especially repeatedly introducing small bills) is much more stressful than acting on the bills of others. Additionally, when you reach CT2, you will gain more options in Campaign Management for energy use without the same level of stress generation caused by acting on bills.
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Jennifer Government's NationStates is a multiplayer political themed online game that predated this game by several years. Nonetheless, it's existence doesn't detract from Clout's uniqueness.
I do not believe the victory criteria for any party is achievable. It'll be a 1-4 battle passing the bill, and with equal access to sex, drugs and rock & roll on both sides, I don't see any single party with sufficient resources to push it through. So are those bills just available for people to waste clout on and cause drama?
Finally, I think that having a suicide option should be available. After all, politicians have the right to commit suicide in real life. The lack of such an option deprives my digital avatar their rightful civil liberty and surely goes against the Constitution.
NationStates is a nation-building Civ game. It seems to have added an opt-in multiplayer voting element on top of the basic Civ formula, but it would be an extraordinary stretch to call it "politically-themed" the way Clout is, and such a stretch would end up including many other games that predated NationStates. Maybe "Government Themed" or something would be more fitting? There aren't really any "politics" in your nation since you just choose what to do. Anyway... yes, win condition bills are intentionally incredibly hard to pass. Certainly you agree that passing such a bill through congress would be pretty difficult? Killing yourself is not an option for gameplay fairness and balance reasons, but if you would like to have your character removed so you can make a new one, feel free to let me know.