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The file you linked there is giving me an access error, I think you need to make it public. I'm still not really sure how you're getting the issue you're having - I can't reproduce it at all.

This is an odd one - it's hard to tell if it has anything to do with the external drive being disconnected or not, so long as all the files are in the same location they shouldn't have any issues. It seems like this kind of error can happen if a file gets corrupted; maybe try deleting the folder and downloading a fresh install?

No, running the executable after extracting the archive is fine, that's why I was confused about the Unity thing, it's not necessary just to run the game. If you're just getting a black screen on startup there might be an error of some kind but I'm not sure what would be happening that early, especially on a fresh download.

Can you upload the output_log.txt file contained in the game's save folder somewhere so I can check it for any errors? On Windows it's in the folder C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\LocalLow\Lazy Dog Software\LCS. You might need to enable viewing hidden files to see the AppData folder

I'm not sure what you mean exactly - you don't need to download Unity to run the game, the runtime is included in the zip file. You only need to download Unity if you want to modify the game - are you trying to launch it from the editor using the source files?

There is a discord link at the top of this post on the Bay12 forums; it's a general discord for every version of LCS but there is a channel there for the my version: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=159540.0

Hmm, I'm not sure what might cause that, the logic for classic mode is pretty straightforward where it just auto-flags the CCS as having already been defeated at the start of the game. Can you post your save so I can see if there's anything weird in it?

I don't have any specific plans to add more modes, although Democrat/Marathon mode aren't that difficult since all they do is modify the victory condition. I'm not sure what extended endgame is, I don't think that was a thing in the version I based mine off of

Training stealth up from zero is generally pretty difficult because you need to pass a stealth check to actually gain skill. The best way is to just find someone who already has stealth skill to recruit and have them teach others. If you really want to train up from scratch, the best way to pass stealth checks is to wear clothing that's marked "VERY SNEAKY" and have people wander around solo - in a group every character rolls checks individually and if any of them fail, they all fail.

I've looked into this a bit more and I am able to reproduce it locally now, it seems to be an issue that only occurs in the build, not in the editor, which is why I wasn't getting it before. It's an odd issue that seems to be related to some very specific C# functionality so it might be a little bit before I can figure this out but I think I have narrowed down the cause for it at least.

Hmm, I'm not able to reproduce this when loading the save on my system. The next time it happens, can you upload the output_log.txt file (it's in the same folder as the save file)? If there's an uncaught exception it will record in there but it gets overwritten every time the game is started so it needs to be recorded at the moment of the crash.

Ah, I found the problem. It seems like the issue is that locations without loot defined like the Gentleman's club cause an error when trying to have sleepers steal from them which ends all the monthly processing stuff early, which includes moving people from the police station to the courthouse. It's a pretty easy fix but until I get a new version uploaded you can avoid the problem by just not having that sleeper steal.

Can you upload a copy of your save file somewhere? The only thing that would prevent a liberal from moving forward in the justice system is if they were just transferred from the hospital, but this should only delay them a month, so I'm not sure what would be causing the issue here.

Oh, yes one thing to note about when people refuse to talk - if you ask them if they want to talk about the issues and they just say "no", that doesn't prevent you from talking to them again (that is by design). So if that's what you were seeing then it's the normal behaviour.

Reporting bugs here is fine, there's no discord or anything for this version. The first two bugs are easy fixes, the last one seems inconsistent, I was able to get it to happen once but as soon as I went in to look at the code to figure out what was going on it started working as expected so there may be some weird edge case to trigger it.

It's a bit of a mystery to me; first aid doesn't actually restore health, it just stops bleeding (it is only supposed to use one person on the squad to do it so if multiple healers were applying first aid that's a bit of a bug, but not a major one since the effects would be redundant). The only way to actually regain HP is done by resting over time at the hospital/clinic/safehouse, but in any of these cases there's a check that's supposed to ensure they can't heal over 100%.

My only theory is that there is some combination of factors that allows people to take negative damage from attacks, since there's no check against the cap when receiving damage (after all their HP is supposed to be going down, not up), but I'm not really sure how that would occur. Let me know if you see it happen again and maybe what you were doing just before it occurred. I do have a fix that should prevent it by just resetting anyone with too much blood back to the maximum at the end of each day but it's not a huge issue so I will probably just include it with other fixes the next time I do a build.

Hmm, well I can see why it's happening but can't really figure out what caused it - somehow in the save file that character has ended up with almost 4 times the maximum amount of health, which is messing up the calculation that applies penalties based on how damaged someone is. I have no idea how it happened but it's something that should be pretty easy for you to fix yourself - if you open up the save file with a text editor, just search for all the instances of the line "<Blood>" (without quotes) and look for any numbers that are over 100 - if you change those to 100 the characters stats should look a lot more sane.

They are supposed to cap at 20 but honestly that's kind of funny and I'm inclined to leave it - it doesn't actually break anything aside from having skills that high basically rendering it impossible to ever fail a check. You would have to do a LOT of grinding to actually make use of stats that high.

*edit* I am curious about what their main stat screen looks like, the bars must be going off the screen!

*edit 2* actually there may be some kind of bug here, looking into the code it doesn't seem like it should be possible to stack modifiers to get caps that high without incredibly high base stats (which are set when the character is created and never change). Can you upload your save again so I can take a look at what might be going on?

Thanks, I was able to diagnose the issue and it turns out to be a pretty easy fix, so I've uploaded a new build that should resolve it.

Can you upload your save file somewhere so I can take a look at it? The save is located in C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\LocalLow\Lazy Dog Software\LCS

Music + Sound is one of those wishlist things I keep meaning to find the time to implement into the game but I didn't set up the system very well for it so it's kind of a backburner thing at the moment.

Hmm, this kind of thing often happens if there's an unhandled crash - if this happens, can you exit the game and upload the output_log.txt file somewhere? It will be in the same location as the save data but it gets wiped every time the game restarts so it's only good if the error happened in your last play session. Uploading the save would be useful as well if it's something that happens every time you try to go there.

Actually never mind, I was able to figure out what's causing the bug, it's an issue with sleeper recruitment at some locations but it should be an easy fix

Can you upload your save file somewhere so I can take a look? It should be located in the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Lazy Dog Software/LCS (the Library folder may be hidden by default)

I've found the root of both of these issues, they are pretty easy fixes. The former is because it's trying to track events as part of a news story that doesn't exist (this isn't an issue during police raids, which do get news stories), the latter seems to have been an issue with combat paralysis in general but it happens so rarely that I guess nobody ever noticed it before.

Were the laws elite liberal before that? One thing that can come up when you have a majority of Liberal, but not Elite Liberal, justices, is that they don't like laws being all the way at L+. The supreme court behaviour is very basic - every judge just wants the law to match what their personal alignment is, with a bit of bias towards certain constitutional rights (a liberal bias on free speech, a conservative one on gun control, but these are ignored for C+ or L+ judges), so if the law change would push it closer to their alignment, they vote for change, otherwise they vote for status quo. The laws they vote on are random, but there will always be a few, and the more elite liberal laws you have the more likely that there will only be one direction for them to go. The only way to guarantee the supreme court won't push laws backwards is to have 5 L+ judges on the bench.

This is a pre-existing issue from the original game; some versions implement a special case where when the rest of the government is already elite liberal, they can propose a constitutional amendment that flushes the entire supreme court and replaces them all with L+ judges to speed up the endgame, but this isn't (currently) implemented in my version.

Do you have a screenshot or something showing it happening? I've never seen it before and looking at the code there's not really any way that should be able to happen.

What's the makeup of your supreme court? Public opinion has no effect on how they will rule on laws, so a conservative majority supreme court will keep pushing laws back towards the conservative side even if the rest of the government is liberal. The only way to deal with it is to wait for a liberal/elite liberal president and senate to replace them as they retire or die.

It looks like there are a few issues here, I have a fix that should allow the save to load with some error messages rather than just blanking out. Some equipped items may disappear but the game should be fine after that. I should be able to get a build up later, I'm working on including some other fixes to hopefully prevent the issue from reoccurring.

Can you upload your save somewhere so I can take a look at it? I may end up needing to do a more comprehensive overhaul of the saving/loading process.

I have a fix that will allow the save file to be loaded again although I still haven't figured out the root cause of the problem - it looks like one of your characters has a reference in their subordinate list to another character who no longer exists, but it's hard to tell from the log when/why exactly that happened. I should have a build up later today.

Can you upload your save file somewhere so I can take a look at it? I should be able to see what the error is and hopefully be able to fix it. You can find it in the folder C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\LocalLow\Lazy Dog Software\LCS on Windows.

I'm not sure what you mean; the game autosaves every time you advance the day, you should be able to just reload from the last save if the game crashes.

I've been looking into this and it seems like it might be a fairly major issue that I might not be able to fix - the Mac and Linux builds have always been kind of a "hit build and hope for the best" thing since I don't have either system but Unity (allegedly) supports exporting to them. From what I am reading there are problems with doing this now due to recent changes made by Apple to be stricter about unsigned apps. I may need to end support for the Mac version since I have no way to build from a Mac or sign the resulting executable.

If you really want to play, a potential option is to download the source from GitHub, import it into Unity, and do a build yourself. There's nothing that really needs to be done to make the build process work - once the project is imported and Unity has compiled it, it can be built right away. This may still run into the same issue with the resulting app being unsigned, though.

For mechanics reference, the LCS wiki is your best bet: http://lcs.wikidot.com/

The information on there is based on the original ASCII version but my version draws all of its mechanics directly from the source code so they are 99% identical barring some minor tweaks here and there that don't really fundamentally change anything.

"Juice" is essentially experience points. It goes up when you do various liberal activities, but there is a cap based on how risky/illegal the thing is, with more criminal activity having a higher cap (1000 being the absolute cap). Hitting certain breakpoints will boost a character's base attributes and past 50 juice it will increase their subordinate cap so they can start recruiting. Subordinates also pass a bit of juice up the chain every time they get it so leaders can gain juice even without personally committing crimes. It can also drop in some circumstances, down to a minimum of -50, with stat penalties being applied for being below 0.

There's a separate "heat" value that tracks how wanted a Liberal is. This isn't directly displayed on the interface, but it will slowly drop each day - faster while doing community service. Having heat will make a Liberal vulnerable to arrest even while doing legal activities in public like selling T-shirts (community service is always safe, however), and the combined heat of every Liberal at a safe house will add to the safe house heat value, creating a risk of being raided if it passes the safe house's secrecy. It doesn't affect how suspicious they will be as part of a squad when causing trouble on site, but generally committing any sort of crime during a site action will make the whole squad suspicious until they leave.

That's an odd one but it's a false positive - heuristic detection can do that sometimes and it probably just doesn't like the fact that it's an unsigned executable. LCSXMLEditor.exe is a very basic winforms program that I wrote a while ago and should probably just remove because I haven't kept it up to date with the full set of XML tags the game actually uses. It never actually gets run by the main executable itself, it solely exists as an editor for messing with the game data files.

This is very helpful, thank you, I think I've found the root of the problem (it also explains why I never ran into it before, I don't tend to swap weapons while on location so I never thought to test it). When a weapon is equipped, it saves its "location" as the entity ID of the person that has it equipped. The issue is that it wasn't updating this information of the clip item contained inside the weapon, so it was still remembering its location ID to be the NPC that originally dropped it, who isn't persisted in the save file so it ends up as a dead reference. I should be able to have a fixed version up later today.

The fix won't be able to do anything related to issues already in your save file but it will prevent it from re-occurring in the future.

I've never seen that issue before - does it happen after doing anything specific? I'm also not clear on what you mean by clips disappearing - as in they are registered to a character's inventory but don't load in the save, or the clip in the gun itself disappears?

There isn't currently a way to do this but it makes sense as something I could add

I've uploaded a Mac build to the main itch page - I can't test it because I don't have a mac myself but it should work since I've done other mac builds in the past from Unity without issue.

At the moment, but I can do a Mac/Linux build as well

The "cause of breach" messages are intended to be little hints as to what specifically you did wrong, but some are more vague than others (and sometimes the reason it escapes isn't necessarily the biggest thing you did wrong, just the straw that broke the camel's back)