Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
Criminal Spawns, Investigation and Arrest
Criminal Spawns
Criminals and Law Enforcement personnel are meant to be eternal foes locked in a struggle that may change throughout the ages but has never been officially won by either side, nor will it ever be. But this conflict has, like warfare, given birth to an incredible amount of development and growth of the intelligence of mankind. As criminals figure out how to get away with a new schemes, Law Enforcement isn't far behind and quickly innovates new ways to detect these ploys.
Despite its massive impact on history, the Civilization game franchise has never attempted to model this eternal conflict and its role in the development of society. Criminals can be our saviors when governments become too constrictive, and they can be the boogie men that keep us awake at night. How we judge and manage criminal behavior in our society is a measure of who we are as a people.
Most criminals are not people who come from outside our nations, sent in to deter and hamper progress. No... most criminals are simply people that grew up in this society and made a career path out of breaking the law in some manner. This will happen most where others have found this path successful and can teach and guide associates into using the same proven effective techniques to cash in, often far more powerfully than any conventional career could offer.
Therefore, in C2C, as your crime increases, so too does the chance for neutral (barbarian) criminals to spawn inside your cities. These are simple criminals who consider themselves locals and do not have international interests, just personal ones that keep them rooted to the city, spreading crime in their own backyards.
As crime goes up, crime effect auto-buildings emerge, but so do unsanctioned criminal lairs. When a player chooses to build a Bandit Hideout, he is in effect choosing to accept that there will be some crime in his nation but let that crime be harnessed by the state so as to train specialists that can be paid to go and perform those criminal specialties elsewhere.
However, if crime becomes rampant enough, similar lairs and organizations emerge that have no ties to the state or any other government. These are very dangerous to your society because they can give rise to effective revolutionaries and renegades.
Sanctioned crime buildings can spawn independent barbarian criminals as well, but you usually won't build them unless you can manage the crime levels effectively. The unsanctioned versions are completely out of your control, being a criminal spawn generator that you can eliminate only by reducing crime levels.
The chance of a barbarian criminal emerging in a city is .01% per crime level point per active potential source of crime spawn per round. The overall chance is then reduced by on tenth per criminal that exists inside the city already, regardless of who owns these criminals. Therefore there is a limit to how many criminals a city will spawn depending on how many criminals are already there, and that limit is 10.
Thus, if you have 100 crime and no existing criminals, you have a 1% chance of a criminal emerging each round from each potential source (building that can spawn) in the city. Sources defines what KIND of criminal would spawn as well. You'll be able to see if a building is a source of a potential spawn, and what type, in the building's help hover tool tip and pedia entry.
One special type of criminal is the first type that becomes available in the game, the Exile. Exiles, when they are trained, are moved to the outside of your borders and they may NOT move back inside your own borders until they upgrade later on. Barbarian Exile spawns are similar... they recall what nation spawned them and they will not enter the borders of that nation. So really, if you can get more exiles to spawn from your lands, they can only be helpful by going and harassing other nations! But all other types will just sit in your city and infest the city.
A big reason for this criminal spawning system is to enforce that you, as the player, learn how to deal with criminals inside the city, whether they be from within or from other players sending criminals to cause trouble. In v38, criminal AI and AI player generation and use of them is now much more lethal, so watch out! This spawning system gives you the opportunity to practice eliminating criminals from your cities even if you have been able to keep all foreign criminals out. And criminals caught can often become captives which can be very handy and difficult to obtain without war otherwise.
Plus, a while back one of the modders on the team expressed some boredom with an aspect of city developing where it seemed to have become a solid and unchanging routine with every city you plant. With the threat of criminal spawns looming, balancing the risks and needs to control difficult to maintain crime levels in your new frontier city sites now interrupts other clearly beneficial procedures in maximizing your city growth. Constructing production and food generating buildings must be balanced with anti-crime efforts immediately, or you'll quickly have a runaway crime situation that requires far more law enforcement units to get back under control than perhaps would have been necessary if you weren't trying to grow the city at breakneck speeds, as players tend to do for international strategic value. It makes a perfect procedure for city development a much more difficult thing to define!
It also helps crime to be the threat it was intended to be... something that if you turn your back on it and assume it to be well managed for too long, you'll turn around and find out you have a severe problem that's going to take a lot more investment to uproot than if you had been careful and kept it in check.
But if you don't know about the potential for these buggers popping up in your city, it'd be pretty frustrating!
To help you to understand how many criminals are currently in the city, whether you can see them or not, look in your city screen and hover the mouse pointer over the rook symbol on the upper middle panel to the right of where the city name is. That city defense help hover will tell you if, and how many, criminals are lurking in your city. Just keep in mind it counts even your own, and other criminals you may be able to see, into that total.
Investigation
Once you have criminals in your city, what do you do? In an effort to create a game model that closely emulates reality, while creating balance for the players that would use criminals to their benefit by injecting them into enemy cities with the awareness that if they are very clever and successful they may be able to avoid being eliminated for enough time to be useful, the system of Investigations and Arrests has been designed and implemented .
Each round, for each criminal in a city, a single Investigation check is made to see if that criminal's activities have led to the criminal being placed on the 'wanted' list for local law enforcement. This check is also often made when criminals attempt to perform a dangerous crime mission in the city, so a city with a good investigator can be protected from being taken advantage of by criminal foes.
This check is made by the most investigation-capable law enforcement unit in the city. His own Investigation ability is the root of the chance of success. However, there are many other factors that then play into that check:
Improvements to investigation and insidiousness are measured in decimals of percentages so it seems difficult to improve investigations, and once you have investigation values in the positive over the insidiousness of the criminals you're trying to catch, it will still take some time for the criminal's luck to run out. But if you strive to achieve as high a level of investigation and as low levels of local insidiousness as you can, it will eventually happen.
The Wanted Status promo
Arrest
So what happens when you do successfully investigate a criminal? They pick up a 'Wanted' promotion.
IF you can SEE the criminal AND the criminal has the Wanted promotion, you may take any Law Enforcement unit and enact an Arrest attack action, which is an attack on the same tile against that criminal.
If you are using the Without Warning option, your Law Enforcement unit that is using Arrest is going to get the benefit of Stealth Strikes and Stealth Combat Modifiers, but unless the Criminal cannot see your Law unit, which would be very unusual, they will get their Stealth Combat Modifiers as well in this fight (but not Stealth Strikes.)
Unless bravely promoted, criminals usually don't stand much of a chance against similar era Law Enforcement units, but they certainly can win and slay the arresting Law unit so don't get too cocky with arrests.
Once arrested, criminals are commonly captured. Sometimes they resist capture enough and end up dead instead. This is all managed by the Capture system as explained elsewhere in this guide.
Captives are the jewel that this problematic system generates for the player who overcomes the challenge. They are very useful and sometimes you can really only get them via warfare, so this system does grant a secondary means of collecting these valuable prizes.
Losing the Wanted Status
Unlike other Status promotions, which Wanted really isn't technically among anyhow, you cannot simply choose to stop being Wanted. However, if you can get out of the city and out of sight of the forces of the player who investigated you, all Wanted promotions will be removed during the end of the turn processing.
You may notice that I said ALL Wanted promotions. On the Hide and Seek option, there are many levels of being Wanted. Each Wanted promotion assigned to the Criminal, by a successful Investigation effort, reduces his invisibility values by 1 for each type. This means that a criminal may be able to hold out in the city even if he has been successfully investigated, provided that he is so good at blending in with the urban environment that his exact whereabouts is still as of yet undetermined by Law officials. Remember that to arrest a criminal, he must be Wanted (by being successfully Investigated) AND seen. One or the other, alone, is not enough.
You can try to continue to take your chances after being tagged as Wanted, or you can take advantage of this aspect of the system and try to sneak out of town or use the Infiltrate command to go all the way back to the capital, bringing with you information on the city and the owning player (espionage.) But on non-Hide and Seek games, you're probably being arrested in the same round you've been Investigated so you better have Criminals that can hold their own in the shootout that erupts during the sting.
Your Own Criminals and how they interact with these systems
Note that you CAN investigate and arrest your OWN criminals if your own criminals are in your cities! Limited information is given on the criminals you are given to target when arresting so you may end up accidentally arresting your own criminal if you've investigated him. Then again, this could be a good way to generate captives for yourself AND impede crime spawns at the same time, while minimizing the crime spreading developments on those criminals you've trained. But it does mean you are taking the production and time to train them. Still, criminals can often be better at SEEING other criminals than Law Enforcement officers (ever heard of informants?) So it may help to use the 'it takes one to catch one' theory to your advantage.
Hopefully, these new Criminal interaction mechanisms will be as highly enjoyed for you as it has been for its designer so far. I find that full awareness of the system can lead to it being a much more pleasant experience, but if you don't know the inner workings of what's happening and how to address it, yes it can be very frustrating. The system has undergone significant refinement in v38.
Criminal Spawns
Criminals and Law Enforcement personnel are meant to be eternal foes locked in a struggle that may change throughout the ages but has never been officially won by either side, nor will it ever be. But this conflict has, like warfare, given birth to an incredible amount of development and growth of the intelligence of mankind. As criminals figure out how to get away with a new schemes, Law Enforcement isn't far behind and quickly innovates new ways to detect these ploys.
Despite its massive impact on history, the Civilization game franchise has never attempted to model this eternal conflict and its role in the development of society. Criminals can be our saviors when governments become too constrictive, and they can be the boogie men that keep us awake at night. How we judge and manage criminal behavior in our society is a measure of who we are as a people.
Most criminals are not people who come from outside our nations, sent in to deter and hamper progress. No... most criminals are simply people that grew up in this society and made a career path out of breaking the law in some manner. This will happen most where others have found this path successful and can teach and guide associates into using the same proven effective techniques to cash in, often far more powerfully than any conventional career could offer.
Therefore, in C2C, as your crime increases, so too does the chance for neutral (barbarian) criminals to spawn inside your cities. These are simple criminals who consider themselves locals and do not have international interests, just personal ones that keep them rooted to the city, spreading crime in their own backyards.
As crime goes up, crime effect auto-buildings emerge, but so do unsanctioned criminal lairs. When a player chooses to build a Bandit Hideout, he is in effect choosing to accept that there will be some crime in his nation but let that crime be harnessed by the state so as to train specialists that can be paid to go and perform those criminal specialties elsewhere.
However, if crime becomes rampant enough, similar lairs and organizations emerge that have no ties to the state or any other government. These are very dangerous to your society because they can give rise to effective revolutionaries and renegades.
Sanctioned crime buildings can spawn independent barbarian criminals as well, but you usually won't build them unless you can manage the crime levels effectively. The unsanctioned versions are completely out of your control, being a criminal spawn generator that you can eliminate only by reducing crime levels.
The chance of a barbarian criminal emerging in a city is .01% per crime level point per active potential source of crime spawn per round. The overall chance is then reduced by on tenth per criminal that exists inside the city already, regardless of who owns these criminals. Therefore there is a limit to how many criminals a city will spawn depending on how many criminals are already there, and that limit is 10.
Thus, if you have 100 crime and no existing criminals, you have a 1% chance of a criminal emerging each round from each potential source (building that can spawn) in the city. Sources defines what KIND of criminal would spawn as well. You'll be able to see if a building is a source of a potential spawn, and what type, in the building's help hover tool tip and pedia entry.
One special type of criminal is the first type that becomes available in the game, the Exile. Exiles, when they are trained, are moved to the outside of your borders and they may NOT move back inside your own borders until they upgrade later on. Barbarian Exile spawns are similar... they recall what nation spawned them and they will not enter the borders of that nation. So really, if you can get more exiles to spawn from your lands, they can only be helpful by going and harassing other nations! But all other types will just sit in your city and infest the city.
A big reason for this criminal spawning system is to enforce that you, as the player, learn how to deal with criminals inside the city, whether they be from within or from other players sending criminals to cause trouble. In v38, criminal AI and AI player generation and use of them is now much more lethal, so watch out! This spawning system gives you the opportunity to practice eliminating criminals from your cities even if you have been able to keep all foreign criminals out. And criminals caught can often become captives which can be very handy and difficult to obtain without war otherwise.
Plus, a while back one of the modders on the team expressed some boredom with an aspect of city developing where it seemed to have become a solid and unchanging routine with every city you plant. With the threat of criminal spawns looming, balancing the risks and needs to control difficult to maintain crime levels in your new frontier city sites now interrupts other clearly beneficial procedures in maximizing your city growth. Constructing production and food generating buildings must be balanced with anti-crime efforts immediately, or you'll quickly have a runaway crime situation that requires far more law enforcement units to get back under control than perhaps would have been necessary if you weren't trying to grow the city at breakneck speeds, as players tend to do for international strategic value. It makes a perfect procedure for city development a much more difficult thing to define!
It also helps crime to be the threat it was intended to be... something that if you turn your back on it and assume it to be well managed for too long, you'll turn around and find out you have a severe problem that's going to take a lot more investment to uproot than if you had been careful and kept it in check.
But if you don't know about the potential for these buggers popping up in your city, it'd be pretty frustrating!
To help you to understand how many criminals are currently in the city, whether you can see them or not, look in your city screen and hover the mouse pointer over the rook symbol on the upper middle panel to the right of where the city name is. That city defense help hover will tell you if, and how many, criminals are lurking in your city. Just keep in mind it counts even your own, and other criminals you may be able to see, into that total.
Investigation
Once you have criminals in your city, what do you do? In an effort to create a game model that closely emulates reality, while creating balance for the players that would use criminals to their benefit by injecting them into enemy cities with the awareness that if they are very clever and successful they may be able to avoid being eliminated for enough time to be useful, the system of Investigations and Arrests has been designed and implemented .
Each round, for each criminal in a city, a single Investigation check is made to see if that criminal's activities have led to the criminal being placed on the 'wanted' list for local law enforcement. This check is also often made when criminals attempt to perform a dangerous crime mission in the city, so a city with a good investigator can be protected from being taken advantage of by criminal foes.
This check is made by the most investigation-capable law enforcement unit in the city. His own Investigation ability is the root of the chance of success. However, there are many other factors that then play into that check:
- The criminal being checked has a rating called Insidiousness, that resists this check directly. The total Insidiousness of the criminal being investigated reduces, point for point, the chance of the Investigation to be successful. A criminal may develop improved Insidiousness levels with promotions and upgrades, just as the Law Enforcement unit can develop Investigation levels in the same manner. Generally speaking, it's not unlikely that if both Law Enforcement unit and Criminal are of the same general tech levels and have both taken full advantage of their promotions to develop these abilities, they'll pretty much cancel each other out, leading to no chance of success of investigation. But obviously, this is likely to vary somewhat between the Law and Crime units involved.
- Insidiousness can be generated from local buildings, making it easier for the criminals in the city to avoid being investigated. Much of the insidiousness that can be generated in this way comes from crime autobuilds. So if you are trying to catch lurking criminals, fight your crime levels as a major priority so as to leave these rats nowhere to hide!
- Investigation can be generated from local buildings like police precincts and so on with examples of Investigation enhancing buildings throughout all eras. THIS is what will mostly tip the balance for you if you have ridden your city of crime otherwise.
- Buildups can help with both insidiousness for the criminal and investigation for the law enforcement officer.
- The sum total of Investigation values on ALL other Law Enforcement units present in the city will be divided by 10 and added to the total Investigation amount of the lead investigating unit. This isn't much but can add up a lot, so once crime is controlled, switching other Law units over to Investigation efforts can help to mop up.
- There are specialists, most notably the Detective, which add Investigation values to the city which adds directly to the checks made to investigate in that city.
Improvements to investigation and insidiousness are measured in decimals of percentages so it seems difficult to improve investigations, and once you have investigation values in the positive over the insidiousness of the criminals you're trying to catch, it will still take some time for the criminal's luck to run out. But if you strive to achieve as high a level of investigation and as low levels of local insidiousness as you can, it will eventually happen.
The Wanted Status promo
Arrest
So what happens when you do successfully investigate a criminal? They pick up a 'Wanted' promotion.
IF you can SEE the criminal AND the criminal has the Wanted promotion, you may take any Law Enforcement unit and enact an Arrest attack action, which is an attack on the same tile against that criminal.
If you are using the Without Warning option, your Law Enforcement unit that is using Arrest is going to get the benefit of Stealth Strikes and Stealth Combat Modifiers, but unless the Criminal cannot see your Law unit, which would be very unusual, they will get their Stealth Combat Modifiers as well in this fight (but not Stealth Strikes.)
Unless bravely promoted, criminals usually don't stand much of a chance against similar era Law Enforcement units, but they certainly can win and slay the arresting Law unit so don't get too cocky with arrests.
Once arrested, criminals are commonly captured. Sometimes they resist capture enough and end up dead instead. This is all managed by the Capture system as explained elsewhere in this guide.
Captives are the jewel that this problematic system generates for the player who overcomes the challenge. They are very useful and sometimes you can really only get them via warfare, so this system does grant a secondary means of collecting these valuable prizes.
Losing the Wanted Status
Unlike other Status promotions, which Wanted really isn't technically among anyhow, you cannot simply choose to stop being Wanted. However, if you can get out of the city and out of sight of the forces of the player who investigated you, all Wanted promotions will be removed during the end of the turn processing.
You may notice that I said ALL Wanted promotions. On the Hide and Seek option, there are many levels of being Wanted. Each Wanted promotion assigned to the Criminal, by a successful Investigation effort, reduces his invisibility values by 1 for each type. This means that a criminal may be able to hold out in the city even if he has been successfully investigated, provided that he is so good at blending in with the urban environment that his exact whereabouts is still as of yet undetermined by Law officials. Remember that to arrest a criminal, he must be Wanted (by being successfully Investigated) AND seen. One or the other, alone, is not enough.
You can try to continue to take your chances after being tagged as Wanted, or you can take advantage of this aspect of the system and try to sneak out of town or use the Infiltrate command to go all the way back to the capital, bringing with you information on the city and the owning player (espionage.) But on non-Hide and Seek games, you're probably being arrested in the same round you've been Investigated so you better have Criminals that can hold their own in the shootout that erupts during the sting.
Your Own Criminals and how they interact with these systems
Note that you CAN investigate and arrest your OWN criminals if your own criminals are in your cities! Limited information is given on the criminals you are given to target when arresting so you may end up accidentally arresting your own criminal if you've investigated him. Then again, this could be a good way to generate captives for yourself AND impede crime spawns at the same time, while minimizing the crime spreading developments on those criminals you've trained. But it does mean you are taking the production and time to train them. Still, criminals can often be better at SEEING other criminals than Law Enforcement officers (ever heard of informants?) So it may help to use the 'it takes one to catch one' theory to your advantage.
Hopefully, these new Criminal interaction mechanisms will be as highly enjoyed for you as it has been for its designer so far. I find that full awareness of the system can lead to it being a much more pleasant experience, but if you don't know the inner workings of what's happening and how to address it, yes it can be very frustrating. The system has undergone significant refinement in v38.
Last edited:
