YMMV / Liberal Crime Squad

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The majority of players use rifles, as they have good capacity, high damage, and decent performance against armor, and there are both semi-auto and full-auto rifles, the latter being extremely good at dismemberment.
• Crosses the Line Twice: LCS attempts to satirize terrorism, to the point of inserting humorous elements into the torture-and-brainwash minigame.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Any firearm-wielding (and likely armored) Conservative can, if the RNG is particularly unkind, instantly kill one of your Liberals.
  • Possibly worse are the Arch-Conservatives, who attack psychologically rather than physically. Their psych attacks are not only very difficult to resist, but can take hundreds of juice away from a liberal and leave them unable to attack should one succeed. If your Liberal hits below -50 Juice due to this, they become a Conservative themselves. Thankfully, however, you can shoot them first before they attack, or just plain kidnap them if you've got a gun, since Arch-Conservatives must be unarmed to attack psychologically.
  • The Conservative Crime Squad will never let up their attack efforts once they discover your safehouses, continuing monthly sieges until either the LCS or CCS is destroyed.
  • CCS Bosses themselves also pack Heavy Ceramic Armor (making them near-impossible to kill even with a six-man squad concentrating their fire) and an AA-12 Shotgun that can hit twice compared to regular shotguns, easily capable of killing a Liberal.
  • Guard dogs. Their ability to notice stealthy characters is above anything else's (with 10 stealth skill, you have a just above 9% chance not to be noticed if you're alone), which makes a stealth run that much more harder than necessary. And of course, you'll find them at high-security areas, so you'll have agents or tanks after you depending on your location.
  • The military is full of Demonic Spiders, as nearly everybody wears army armor (which is the second-most powerful, to the point of providing minor protection from rifles) and has good combat skills and attributes, and most members are armed with the M16 rifle or the M4 carbine. Navy SEALs and tanks, in particular, can quickly end the lives of your squad, as the former have extremely high stats and skills, while the latter have high armor and a One-Hit Kill attack.
• Game-Breaker:
  • If one is hauling a liberal, they can threaten them as a hostage. This would be glaring enough, but cops— who usually take the hostage away in exchange for (temporary) freedom— will also go in for this, but with your "hostage" remaining with you. You can use this to get out of nearly any high-security area without trouble.
  • Reporters and similar news agents were this as sleepers in old builds of the game; getting a few news-oriented sleepers was almost an Instant-Win Condition. They've been severely nerfed in more recent builds.
  • Violence is also overpowered. Get a squad of Liberals that can consistently massacre the Police Station to shut it down (meaning no heat gain, no police raids) and the rest of the game becomes a boring cakewalk, with the only threat to your liberals being stupidity (hanging around too long and getting massacred in a vehicle chase, for example), overconfidence (attacking the army base) or bad luck.
  • An exploit related to the first CCS Safehouse, the Desert Eagle Bar and Grill, allows you to farm CCS Bosses for Sleeper agents or new Liberals easily. CCS Safehouses are defeated only if the CCS Boss is killed. Seducing and datenapping a CCS Boss before enlightening him (giving you a free Sleeper Agent or a Liberal with high stats) does not count as defeating a CCS Safehouse. You can have a potentially infinite amount of highly skilled Sleepers or LCS Members (enlightening a hostage doesn't count towards the recruitment cap) as long as you never shut down the Bar and Grill.
  • Assault rifles are ridiculously powerful, as they combine high damage with the ability to fire 3-round bursts which have a high chance to dismember enemies, to the point that even the heavy ceramic armor doesn't help enemies that much. The M4 carbine is particularly good, as it only loses out 30 points of maximum damage (while the potential damage is still in the hundreds) in exchange for a decent accuracy bonus, making it much easier to destroy tanks and bypass the Dodge skill of other enemies.
  • Bank Robbery is ridiculously powerful, as giving the teller a note doesn't even raise the alarm (unless you're in high security, in which case it always fails), making it an easy way to get $5k quickly and safely, albeit putting the bank into high security for several weeks. Alternatively, you can rob the vault, which can grant you $140k if you loot everything, possibly without ever fighitng the SWAT team (either by sneaking in, or by taking a hostage to use in negotiation). This gets even more overpowered in the National LCS mode (which is standard in New Age), since you now have four banks to rob at the same time, making it possible to rack up a starting capital of $20k by visiting all the banks with your founder at the start of the game.
  • Police armors (including SWAT armors) work as disguises in every infiltration, regardless of where you're going. While they do provide a minor penalty to Disguise rolls (compared to proper disguises), high skill will near-guarantee success anyway, and the protection of the armor is much more important, as several site actions will trigger alarms automatically.
• Good Bad Bugs: As weapons in your inventory can't be noticed by conservatives or metal detectors, it's possible to sneak heavy weapons anywhere just by unequipping them. Notably, some locations seem to be deliberately designed to prevent the use of the exploit, as you'll be instantly met by security upon entering them.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One of the standard methods of affecting public opinions is to engage in mass murder of conservatives. While mass shootings were not unheard of at the time of the game's release, it hits rather differently nowadays, as politically-motivated mass shootings became far more common in USA. New Age, notably, prevents you from engaging in mass shootings due to that, as raising the alarm will make it impossible for you to attack noncombatant conservatives.
• Ho Yay: Bouncers at the Gentlemen's club may react to naked liberals by saying "Naked? That's hot. But no, you can't come in", regardless of the genders of both parties. Even more hilariously, they're conservatives working at the CCS front, and thus extremely homophobic.
• Nausea Fuel: The combat descriptions go for this with gusto. Automatic weapons frequently blow heads apart, shotguns can blow limbs off, and the text constantly describes wounded characters reacting to their injuries by pleading for mercy, vomiting, and so on.
  "Liberal shoots at Police Officer with a M16! Liberal hits the torso. Police Officer gasps a last breath and soils the floor."
  "Liberal shoots at SWAT Officer with a M249 Machine Gun! Liberal hits the head five times BLOWING IT APART! Swat Officer squirts blood out the neck and runs down the hall."
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Try beating the game on We Didn't Start The Fire Nightmare Mode, no crimes (ergo no juice) and no recruiting people into the active LCS. It has actually been done.
• Scrappy Weapon: Several weapons suffer greatly from being underpowered, which is why New Age has merged them into Firearms and Martial Arts:
  • Clubs don't do much damage compared to sharp weapons, and they don't have the concealability of knives or unarmed combat. You'd be better off using swords or axes.
  • Shotguns and SMGs suffer from low damage, low capacity, and zero armor penetration. While they're supposed to have the advantage of being concealable under a trenchcoat, the trenchcoat itself provides no armor or disguise capabilities, and is thus never used by players
  • Incendiary weapons can set tiles on fire, thus passively damaging conservatives and breaching walls. However, you aren't immune to fire, and molotovs also require your liberals to spend a turn "reloading" after attacking.
  • The .38 revolver has the lowest capacity and damage out of all guns. While it does have the advantage of dropping from security guards and armed civilians at C/C+ gun laws, police officers (who you'll often have to fight) drop the much better 9mm pistols, which do more damage and have 2.5x capacity.
• Solo-Character Run: A very common challenge, as managing multiple liberals can get very cumbersome, and using a single character makes stealth much easier. Variations allow for sleepers and/or active LCS members, so long as they don't go on infiltrations.
• That One Level: The army base is likely the hardest site to infiltrate if you're not simply shooting people on the exit and immediately leaving, as it's large, full of soldiers (who are extremely dangerous, capable of killing armored liberals in a single burst), and has few unarmed conservatives to take hostage. To make things worse, it's your only reliable source of machine gun and flamethrower ammo, so if you're reliant on heavy weapons, you'll have to go there frequently.
• Values Resonance: The game's portrayal of a politically polarized USA and domestic terrorism can seem rather prescient, as concerns are raised about these exact issues in the current day. Most of the political issues covered by the game are also still relevant to this day, and the game had a very tolerant portrayal of LGBT people way before it became more mainstream.
  • Notably, New Age, in the process of updating the game to reflect the 2020's, doesn't actually change the politics all that much, with most issues remaining unaltered.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The game is obviously based in the post-9/11 Bush-era politics, with many mentions of terrorism and foreign wars. The public figures mentioned in the game are also those who were relevant to that period, with several of them falling off in the following decades. The game's LCS also takes a harsh stance against nuclear power, whereas contemporary liberals and left-wingers tend to be more split in opinions, with some considering nuclear energy to be the best choice for eco-friendly power.

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