Issue: Criminal Syndicate, The AI and endless enforcer spam....

[Tyrax Lightning]

Surely this has to be fixed soon... cause one can't help but to wonder if this could get cheesy... Make Fanatic Militarist Criminal Megacorp, use Crime Branch Offices to overreact NPCs into killing their own Economy while ya run yours just fine, ya can sustain strong Fleet, they can't, ya Curbstomp'em all. Seems kinda Cheesy Exploity... like the Artificial Stupidity really needed more such problems...

 

[faljen_isus]

I'm talking about actual authoritarians, people who believe in the ideology, they obey the state, they do as they are told

What most of us see are regimes where you have an autocratic elite that rules over many different ethos that are unsopportive, which is correctly done in game where your factions and happiness, your auth faction will be happy and egal be pissed, but auth won't be if you are acting the part, never

In stellaris pops are true believers in what they say they do, authoritarians believe in social stratification, egalitarian in freedom, materialists in what they can prove everything by science

In that 0/1 setting certain true believer ethics, when combined with the correct civic and AP should in fact be capable of eliminating crime all together, or at least 99% of it

 

[Kharrus]

Hello,

In my last game, I started as a "Criminal Church" and after meeting every other empire and spreading.... the love *cough* and totally legal things.... have I come across a major Issue.

The AI spams, as it seems, Precinct Houses, once crime gets over 10-20%, AS SOON as they get the next building slot and they don't stop, every time you try to get the crime back up they just throw in another Precinct House and they keep them for ever until they run out of building slots.

Through this have I not only lost every branch office, but I can't open any new ones! Because I would need to create in most empires over 100 crime, before they shut it down.... which in my futile attempts they did before the second building was even up, every, single, time. (And yes I even started with the Smuggler's Port for the +50 Crime)


The only work around I found was to wait until the Planets have only 1-2 Building slots left, or have over 100 Pops to get enough base crime.... but I really hope this is not what you had in mind for this mechanic. If this is working as intended then the best way to play criminal syndicate, would be to not be a criminal syndicate until the endgame....

Step 1: wage ideological war to convert them.

Step 2: bomb the shit out of their populated worlds, and ruin as many buildings as you can. Nihilistic acquisition works really well for this.

Step 3: open branch offices on the worlds you bombed. The AI will repair their buildings as the pops grow back, and will not build new precinct offices to replace them and shut you down.

Step 4: Now with your cult entrenched, repeat step 2 and 3 as needed until you can vassalize them, or conquer them entirely

 

[Iosue Yu]

Could I suggest a simple solution?

Each Enforcer only lowers Crime by 1. Governor also lowers just by very little, perhaps also 1 for each level.

Then, the Enforcer Jobs provide a value called Anti-Crime, or Enforcement.

Crime should not give any any problem to the planet by default. But if Enforcement is much lower than Crime, then you get problems and the Criminal Events.

Say, you have 25 Pops, creating 25 points of Crime. Then, you have a Governor at Level 4 and 3 Enforcers. So you will get 18 points of Crime. But your Enforcers give 15 points of Enforcement, so it is merely 3 points lower. Then, your Stability suffers a very little bit, and you will have a very small chance, like 3%, to have Criminal Events happening each month.

Much better than just a Precinct House completely storming all the Crime.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

My solution would be that Enforcer reduce stability, that way theres a direct feedback on creating a tightly controlled police state with atendent social tensions, and would as stability adds to crime at low levels, create deminishing returns on enforcers.

 

[Dementor4]

I found that playing a criminal empire required a mix of opportunism and restraint. If you dial crime all the way up on every planet you can manage, of course there's going to be a massive police response, so you only go "all in" on the crime on planets where there's just no way they can manage to fight you off, planets that have +crime modifiers already in effect, or planets with massive populatons that simply cannot be policed effectively when you've got 3 or 4 crime factories.

Most of the time, aim to create just a few percentiles of crime. Not enough to provoke a massive immune response, but enough to keep you from being shut down.

I don't find this behavior a problem: it makes perfect sense that a government would respond with overwheliming force to a criminal element that's turning their planet into a shithole. And as a player, how do YOU respond as a player to a criminal megacorp setting up shop on your world? Police them into the ground, I expect. So it's hard to fault the NPCs from doing the same.

All that said, I'd like to see more nuance. I'd like to see NPC empires use the "Make a deal with the Underworld" planet decision that raises crime but reduces crime's effect on stability. Have that be more likely the better your relationship with that government is. I'd like to see a way to proactively fight back against the police by corrupting it, putting their cops on your payroll. Make it expensive, but a good way to survive on a world that's really pulling out all the stops in getting rid of you, forcing the other empire to either put up with you or go to war. A way to target their governor and add the "corrupt" trait would be great.