Wow, thanks everyone! Words can't express how much this encouragement and feedback means to me! I'm really excited, and hope you all are too!
Yes! And I not only want to do different maps, but different *types* of maps, which will present the player with different challenges. You could have a small town surrounded by interstates, and as such your primary responsibilities relate to highway patrol. Or you could have a busy metropolis, with rough inner-city neighborhoods. Or a college town. And ideally, players would be able to create their own maps either using a built in map editor, or something easy that's fairly easy to use. This would require additional effort so no promises, and it would probably come later on.
Fantastic, thank you for the detailed feedback! Excellent call on the aux units, and that was poor naming on my behalf. You'll be able to request support from state police or other neighboring agencies if you don't have the resources to handle a particularly complex call (especially when you're first starting out). I'll make sure units like that are more appropriately named in future demos! That said, it's an interesting idea to have a reserve officer program, I could definitely see that making its way into the game.
Complaints, inquiries, internal investigations, and lawsuits -- definitely! Your decisions will affect the frequency of those things occurring in the first place (based on the types of officers you keep on staff, the situations they find themselves in, your departmental policies, etc.) and your decisions will affect their aftermath (whether you apply punishments, whether you voluntarily compensate complainants, how you handle the press, etc.).
Union relations are an area I'd thought about but never really finalized which pieces I wanted to incorporate, so it's nice to have some feedback there, and those are interesting ideas. I want players to feel like they've invested a lot in their officers -- most will start out very green, and will gain competence through training and experience -- so the implications of morale problems that lead to attrition should be painful for the player. Which would make those dynamics quite interesting.
Dynamic patrol events: definitely. Everything from traffic stops (which can go in all sorts of different directions), to crimes in progress (or suspected ones), to Terry stops. What pops up will depend on the unit's patrol priorities (traffic enforcement? community policing?), your policies, and the neighborhood the unit finds themselves in.
I definitely want players to be able put their own personal spin on their department, and I think customizing uniforms will be a good way to help do this. Especially since in one game you might run a Sheriff's department responsible for long stretches of highway...in another you might run a big-city department...most people would expect to see different uniforms. And vests and such would certainly have a practical impact on officer safety though maybe -- at least for the sake of interesting game decisions -- there would be a small cost to officer mobility. Interesting tie in with union relations there, hadn't thought about that!
Thought long and hard about shift schedules as well, and ultimately decided to abstract them out of the game. Officers will be able to be on the road 24/7. There will be so much other complexity in the game already, I decided there just wasn't room for shift scheduling, and the way the time system will work, units would spend too much time just starting and ending their shift (though I recognize there's realism to that). *That said*, there will be time management, in that you'll constantly be making tough decisions about where you want to allocate your units (proactive patrols? responding to incidents? investigating past crimes? running initiatives like DUI checkpoints or buy-busts?). Also, if you keep sending officers, especially inexperienced ones, to extremely stressful situations (especially alone), you will see it eat away at their health and morale, and you might eventually have no choice but to bench them for a period of time (assuming something more dramatic doesn't occur first).
Completely agree with you about the need for dynamic events. The set up will be that event types (say, an arrest warrant) are "templates" rather than blueprints. There will be many different variables within each -- some will be random, some will be quasi-random because they could be influenced by the neighborhood, crime patterns, etc. -- that dictate things like (a) the background/context for the event (what crime is the arrest warrant for?), (b) the location of the event (indoors, outdoors? every single place in your jurisdiction could host any type of event, as long as it makes sense) and with that the layout of the area, any fortifications, the surrounding terrain, potential approach and escape routes, (c) the nature of the "opposition" (how many people are in the house? are they armed? are they fully willing to surrender, or would they rather die than be apprehended?). And then there could always be other mitigating factors....are there innocent people in the area? Is it day or night? Weather? Are your best officers on the other side of the city? And some event templates would be programmed with many different contingencies. A peaceful protest, for example, could go in many different directions as it progresses, and you'd have to be prepared to react quickly to anything.
TBD on population, but to your point, I think the limit will be what players decide is overwhelming. And that will have to come from playtesting. That said, I've taken a lot of influence from the grand strategy genre, and there are opportunities to help the player automate routine tasks as they master them and the game progresses, so they can focus their time on bigger, more interesting things. For example, in the beginning, you might have to personally dispatch your units to every car accident and domestic disturbance. But as your responsibility grows, maybe you can choose to automate that task so you can focus on other things.
Thanks!!!
