Shady Deals v0.4 Sneak Peek

v0.4 finally brings some retaliation for the player's actions, with the whole update centered around the new "Heat" mechanic - and the ways to manage it. Plus, a few nice QoL improvements along the way.

Preliminary Changelog:

Heat

• Any criminal activity now increases your general heat level (I'm planning to add faction-specific heat later when I expand the gang wars). Petty crimes generate only a small amount of heat, while major heists will draw a lot more attention to you;

• Criminal activities carried out by your gang will also increase your heat by varying amounts - you can check the potential heat gain for any gang position on the Whiteboard. It also includes hostile actions toward other gangs;

• Reaching 100% heat will trigger a Heat Event that will hit your gang or your finances very hard, also scales;

You'll be able to see the full heat meter on your Whiteboard if you have a scout. Otherwise, you can only read the approximate heat amount there. Also, you won't see your heat meter before your first heat event.

Heat will mostly be felt at the gang stage. It's basically another resource you have to plan around. Early on, it shouldn't be a big problem - though you're kinda supposed to hit your first heat event during the pre-gang stage, but it's not necessarily the case.

So, how to counter this heat?

• Heat cools off slightly every day, scaling with your reputation;

• There's a new thief position in your gang: Damper - someone who handles heat management. The amount of heat reduced depends on the damper’s cunning stat.

• A Policeman NPC now spawns in City Center. He can help you to lower your heat... once. He can also get your accomplice out of jail - for a solid price. And yeah, your accomplices can now end up in prison through a heat event, not just by failing "Cash on the Wheels.";

• Volkov (the biker gang leader) can now stir up some noise with his gang once a week to lower your heat - for a fee;

• There's a new upgrade available for your nightclub that passively cools off your heat;

• A new gang type focused on anonymity that passively reduces heat;

And main source of heat reduction is a new enterprise, called "404 Bleach":

"404 Bleach"

A new enterprise that can be unlocked by reaching your very first heat event.
It's a pretty simple biz, fully focused on heat reduction and small-scale money laundering by providing fake cleaning services under contract and doing setups, blackmail, and intel work.

• Unlocking "404 Bleach" will allow you to take contracts for any skill with random difficulty (difficulty changes daily). Each contract is a simple skill check that is either completed successfully or failed; it will reward you with heat reduction accordingly;

• Contracting work has a cooldown of 3 days, so you won't be able to spam it to dump heat. More advanced means of heat reduction will become available if you decide to buy "404 Bleach."

• Buying "404 Bleach" will let you assign your girls to work there as fake maids - the higher their rate, the bigger the heat reduction and money laundering;

• Biz upgrades will help you to increase the amount of money laundered, the number of girls working there, and will unlock new contracts for you personally that yield additional rewards;

And that's basically it. At first, i wanted to add some mini-game or make managing this thing a bit more complicated - maybe by requiring extra resources - but honestly, it would just be too annoying for something that's basically a must-have if you wanna reliably negate heat passively.

Other changes:

• Redesign of the Contacts page: now you can sort male NPCs by their jobs or traits, accomplices by thieves and thugs, and girls are sorted by their jobs and work locations by default;

• A lot of work done on EndDay formatting, though I'm still not fully happy with it.
  It's kinda hard to fully redesign it because a lot of things happen on pages included into EndDay, so this definitely won't be the last iteration of it;

• New Raw Format tag "Uniform" added to all police-themed events and "404 Bleach" events;

• New trait "Maid" - gives cunning. Pretty self-explanatory how to get it, right?

In the pipe:

• Deposit account in the bank, accessible only once a week. It'll add a way to prepare for heat events;

• Apparently, there's a problem with cunning. It's pretty easy to stack up charm, and there's enough combat traits to beat everyone, but not enough cunning stuff to reliably pass skill checks if RNG isn't on your side and you haven't picked cunning traits. So I'll add something to Gold Digger that will boost your Cunning for gold bars;

• T3 clothes;

• Hints on how to get all traits in the Red Phone;

• Racketeers gang position that will yield dirty money, with the amount of slots based on the number of captured turfs;

And that's probably it. Patrons can expect a v0.4 update in a few days. I'm also still counting the maximum possible heat and heat reduction - it was quite a chore to come up with somewhat balanced numbers for heat gains. So yeah, expect a raw start for v0.4.