Dynamic Crime

[Zetesofos]

So, just a little thought I had, but some potential I think.

One of the issues with Crime right now is its relatively static. It's based on how much unemployed pops, and enforcers, once employed can quickly reduce any crime threat. With the reveal of the Infiltration level, however, I think doing something similar for Crime would make it a more interesting metric.

How it works:

Each colony has a Crime Growth Rate, and a Crime Level. The Crime level represents the totality of crime incidents and general lawlessness on a colony, and determines when events can trigger, and detirmines how many Criminal Jobs are on the planet (aside: remove the cap, there should be as many as you need).

The Crime Growth Rate, is detirmined by a few factors, such as total pops, unemployed pops, unhappy pops, previous crime events, and outside actors (Syndicates).

Now, however, Enforcers don't reduce the overall Crime level, they can just impact the growth rate.

What it Means

Because enforcers impact a growth rate, rather than a static amount, you have to plan ahead if you anticipate crime. Enforcers might only be able to reduce growth, not necessarily even stop it without a major civic (police state), or edict. Furthermore, if you wait for crime to build up, it could start to feed on itself, and trying to rein it in will take LOTS of time - leaving ample opportunity for bad effects to set in OR syndicates to take advantage.


Thoughts?

 

[Tamwin5]

Let's say you have a tiny little colony. Less then 10 pops, no enforcers. Might even be one or two. If you enact global population controls, and wait 100 years, suddenly this colony is going to have MASSIVE amounts of crime, more than an ecumenopolis. Or take a midsized planet, just one pop over what the enforcers could naturally support, when you run out of districts, turn pop growth off, and effectively let the planet "idle" at its current level. 100 years, massive crime again. The problem with this suggestion is that all it would take is the smallest imbalance to have a massive problem. And I'm not seeing any benefit to changing crime to work this way, so X from me.

 

[Zetesofos]

Let's say you have a tiny little colony. Less then 10 pops, no enforcers. Might even be one or two. If you enact global population controls, and wait 100 years, suddenly this colony is going to have MASSIVE amounts of crime, more than an ecumenopolis. Or take a midsized planet, just one pop over what the enforcers could naturally support, when you run out of districts, turn pop growth off, and effectively let the planet "idle" at its current level. 100 years, massive crime again. The problem with this suggestion is that all it would take is the smallest imbalance to have a massive problem. And I'm not seeing any benefit to changing crime to work this way, so X from me.

I mean, you would still cap the crime total based upon the total population and/or districts.

Also, its not to say that you can't get crime down, but that it forces you to prepare early for crime, or else it is expensive to deal with later (as opposed to the current system of building a precinct and then BAM, crime is gone).

I also think one of the issues is that we're predisposed to see any crime as untolerable, when in reality, you can easily have 20-40% crime on a planet, and the down sides are honestly, pretty minimal. Its just that our expectations as players are to see anything more than 0 as an emergency, and the overcorrection sort of stymies the gameplay.

 

[Tamwin5]

I mean, you would still cap the crime total based upon the total population and/or districts.

Also, its not to say that you can't get crime down, but that it forces you to prepare early for crime, or else it is expensive to deal with later (as opposed to the current system of building a precinct and then BAM, crime is gone).

I mean, currently the only ways to deal with crime besides enforcers is to enact a planetary decision (anti-crime campaign or deal with crime lords). So if you want to encourage other ways to deal with crime then enforcers, you need to actually add those ways. With the new building slot system it won't be quite as bad of an issue as it is in the current version, but it just means that once crime is an issue you have to wait a while for your enforcers to clean up the crime. Not a bad thing necessarily, but I still don't see any reason to switch to that system.

I also think one of the issues is that we're predisposed to see any crime as untolerable, when in reality, you can easily have 20-40% crime on a planet, and the down sides are honestly, pretty minimal. Its just that our expectations as players are to see anything more than 0 as an emergency, and the overcorrection sort of stymies the gameplay.

Are we? Personally I tend to disable enforcer jobs to get more production on most of my planets, as anything under 30 crime is perfectly safe (30 is the breakpoint where you can get criminal underworld). The downsides aren't minimal, they are nonexistent. I think the current system is fine, as iirc at 30 crime and above the number goes from yellow to red, a pretty clear indicator of when you need to deal with it. If it's a common pitfalls for new players though, might be worth adding something to the tooltip.

Now the AI on the other hand, slaps down a prescint house faster than you can blink. Seriously those weights need to be tweaked.

 

[Pancakelord]

So, just a little thought I had, but some potential I think.

One of the issues with Crime right now is its relatively static. It's based on how much unemployed pops, and enforcers, once employed can quickly reduce any crime threat. With the reveal of the Infiltration level, however, I think doing something similar for Crime would make it a more interesting metric.

How it works:

Each colony has a Crime Growth Rate, and a Crime Level. The Crime level represents the totality of crime incidents and general lawlessness on a colony, and determines when events can trigger, and detirmines how many Criminal Jobs are on the planet (aside: remove the cap, there should be as many as you need).

The Crime Growth Rate, is detirmined by a few factors, such as total pops, unemployed pops, unhappy pops, previous crime events, and outside actors (Syndicates).

Now, however, Enforcers don't reduce the overall Crime level, they can just impact the growth rate.

What it Means

Because enforcers impact a growth rate, rather than a static amount, you have to plan ahead if you anticipate crime. Enforcers might only be able to reduce growth, not necessarily even stop it without a major civic (police state), or edict. Furthermore, if you wait for crime to build up, it could start to feed on itself, and trying to rein it in will take LOTS of time - leaving ample opportunity for bad effects to set in OR syndicates to take advantage.


Thoughts?

On criminal jobs and crime events being static - I found this out the hard way when trying to mod in deviant slaves a few months ago, everything for crime is coded into events and static variables lol (adding more criminal jobs either means replicating all existing event hooks and changing the text/end result - messy/bug-prone, or ripping all crime events out and remaking + handling them all via a custom "Master" crime event - better but I'm too lazy to do it - holding out till I know what code changes are coming in 2.9. There is NO intelligent framework that can pull from a pool of jobs, got to make one via (slow) scripts.)

On crime itself it is possible to make it dynamic sort of, I forget off the top of my head what they are but there are a handful of scarcely used modifiers, I was able to apply these to jobs, pop upkeep (they produced crime) and districts directly in some tests. Crime fluctuated a lot and it did look dynamic. But ultimately... it didnt matter.

Now these tests weren't quite what you were proposing, but I think the issue is the same. Crime - on paper - sounds like a useful mechanic to have for RP and reigning in certain planetary builds. But in practice it just isnt fun or interesting, making it dynamic doesnt change that IMO, it just makes it take more processing power lol.

Making crime "viral" was another idea I had

• so a pop has a 5% chance to become a criminal (Pop_flag) and if there is any criminal pop on a world the base chance raises by 10% and if there is a criminal in the same stratum it raises by 10%, and if there is a criminal in the same job type it raises by 30%.
• Pops working a job with the Pop_criminal flag then had special invisible edits made to them (costing unity upkeep, pissing off pops in the same stratum, influencing their political power level, doing things like that).
• And this led to crime spreading through my miners at one point, and eventually a miner uprising that my army had to put down.

It was more interesting, But it was really processor intensive and unless I was paying attention in the planet screen I didnt really notice it.

And I think thats the biggest issue with crime, not that its static or not fully dynamic but... its just buried in the planet screen, its irrelevance is baked into the UI lol.

I do think more criminal jobs could be interesting - and certain criminal jobs (spawning based on existing jobs) could themselves cause more crime or trigger other events [pissed slaves could spawn deviant slave criminal jobs that increase slave PP or reduce planet wide stability 1% each], and criminals shouldnt automatically be deleted when the net crime level falls, they should demote.

I think you'd need to look deeper at some of the adjacent factors to crime and ask why is it so damn easy to make pops happy. Why are flat stability bonuses dished out like tic-tacs? These also affect how common - and stable - worlds are. It takes a lot of work to actually make a crime-ridden dystopia.