Prison Architect Alpha 25

[FlowerChild]

Ok, I'm excited. Just watched the release video (they're always entertaining...some of my favorite developer vids), and they seem to finally be trying to address the absence of challenge.



I have my reservations about whether the new systems will actually result in some level of difficulty, but will reserve further comment until I have a chance to sink some time into it. Regardless, haven't been this excited about a PA update in a long time.

[Katalliaan]

It definitely looks good. I haven't yet loaded my prison in the new version, but I plan on doing so when I get back from work tonight.

[Mason11987]

I haven't yet looked into this game but I'm a few minutes into this video and I love these guys. I gotta give this a shot.`

[FlowerChild]

It definitely looks good. I haven't yet loaded my prison in the new version, but I plan on doing so when I get back from work tonight.

No way I'm using an established prison where I have a boat load of cash for this one. Want to experience it from the start :)

I haven't yet looked into this game but I'm a few minutes into this video and I love these guys. I gotta give this a shot.`

Yeah dude, Introversion rules. In a lot of ways, they were the first successful indie studio and have been at it for quite a long time.

The only game they've made I consider somewhat "meh" was Darwinia, and even that was fun for awhile. Uplink was frigging brilliant, and Defcon was probably one of the most disturbing games I've ever played, and definitely the best treatment of nuclear war that's been made.

If you were alive during the cold war, it's hard for stuff like this not to send chills down your spine:

[Mason11987]

I haven't yet looked into this game but I'm a few minutes into this video and I love these guys. I gotta give this a shot.`

Yeah dude, Introversion rules. In a lot of ways, they were the first successful indie studio and have been at it for quite a long time.

The only game they've made I consider somewhat "meh" was Darwinia, and even that was fun for awhile. Uplink was frigging brilliant, and Defcon was probably one of the most disturbing games I've ever played, and definitely the best treatment of nuclear war that's been made.

If you were alive during the cold war, it's hard for stuff like this not to send chills down your spine:

Didn't realize this was the same people, I have all three of those (Darwinia, Uplink, and Defcon) and enjoyed them all (even if I was only 4 at the end of the cold war :P). Consider me sold.

[Taleric]

This is a beautiful and clever solution to endgame! Very DF in nature, there guys really do have talent designing for our gamer type :D

[dawnraider]

I haven't bought this game, but I've been loosely following its development, and this update is definitely an awesome change. I'll have to look into getting this game.

[Dreambolt]

If you were alive during the cold war, it's hard for stuff like this not to send chills down your spine:

You don't need to have been alive during the cold war to get shivers, you just need to think about the consequences of those little lines pittering out, and how the kill counters from the nukes stopped about half way through the bombardment. If you think of that in human terms, well I don't think I need to say more.

[FlowerChild]

You don't need to have been alive during the cold war to get shivers, you just need to think about the consequences of those little lines pittering out, and how the kill counters from the nukes stopped about half way through the bombardment. If you think of that in human terms, well I don't think I need to say more.

Oh, for sure man, but it also does a great job of recreating the feelings of what it was like growing up in an environment where it felt like you could wake up to what is being represented in that game any day.

Youngins today are spoiled in that their sense of impending doom and constant paranoia are coming from so many directions at once that it's hard to pinpoint exactly what is responsible for your dread and hopelessness ;)

[Katalliaan]

Well, played it last night with my existing 400-man prison. Didn't realize just how much tasers were doing to help keep things calm before - at the start of the rollout, I couldn't go very long without a guard needing to call for help and seeing 3-4 guards subduing a prisoner. I wound up countering the problems by ramping up the armed guard patrols and letting them go on freefire when things started to get nasty and running something like 8 certification classes in a day to speed up my guards getting their tasers back.

Prisoners using things from the room they're in when they start fights is definitely a neat feature that's caused at least one death in my prison. It makes my workshop a lot more dangerous, since my setup means that any prisoner leaving the workshop has to go through a couple sets of metal detectors, with doors to slow them down. A prisoner that's able to grab a drill and then go nuts is a lot more dangerous.

The Supermax tag is very helpful, though - I've been tagging some of the more violent guys with that and set its schedule up so that they don't work and that they're not sharing a meal time with the rest of the prison. The hope there is for them to not get pissed while working and grab a drill or such and also to keep them away from the canteen should a riot break out.

I have yet to assign one to protective custody, but I suspect that's more a case of "I don't care enough about these guys to want one in particular to stay alive". Maybe once we get a reason to like them as individuals I'll use it.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, I played some last night, and got up to the point where I think I have around 120 prisoners (vast majority normal security with a few min security mixed in from my first couple of days), but no workshop yet.

I like that there are more incidents that occur (fights and such), but I haven't found that does much to increase the difficulty level. I'm a little tighter on cash than normal, due to hiring more guards to take care of those fights, but I'm still running a profit even though I haven't started producing anything with my prison labor.

Will give it a try again and get the workshop up and running, but unfortunately it feels like what I was worried about while watching the video: that while the systems introduced are cool, they are enough on their own to really make the game more challenging.

I haven't really felt the need to segregate my prisoners by security level for example, which seems to be what this update was aiming for. More fights break out, my guards beat them down, and occasionally a snitch gets shanked and dies, but that doesn't seem to have any real lasting effect on my prison, at least not a significant enough one for me to be motivated to start building additional wings.

Anyways, I will say the game is more fun for it though, even if not that much more challenging. Having fights break out here and there and the janitors coming in afterwards to mop up the blood is always good for a chuckle :)

[Gilberreke]

I think they should push the stuff like fights in the workshop being deadly. If they do, you add player agency that's lacking right now. Do I take the risk of letting certain prisoners work in the workshop? If I don't, will I have enough cash?

Like really push the risk/reward system?

I need to give this game another go, been a few months.

[FlowerChild]

I think they should push the stuff like fights in the workshop being deadly. If they do, you add player agency that's lacking right now. Do I take the risk of letting certain prisoners work in the workshop? If I don't, will I have enough cash?

Well, they have. That's a big part of this update in that prisoners grab nearby objects during a fight. Heck, I'm finding that fights in the canteen are quite deadly now as I guess the prisoners are grabbing forks and butter knives, making me wish I could research plastic utensils :)

In theory, that's really cool and all, and it does at least motivate me to *think* about segregating meal times for prisoners at different security levels.

However, the problem I'm finding right now is that the penalties associated with having an occasional death aren't enough to justify the effort in the above, so each time it happens, after briefly considering doing so, I then think "Meh...whatever, I have other stuff I want to build" and then promptly forget about it until the next time it happens.

So, it just never really reaches critical mass for me in terms of motivating player intervention given you can largely ignore the isolated incidents that occur beyond maybe putting a few more guards in the canteen to break up the fights, which in turn puts a *bit* more financial pressure on your prison.

On the other hand though, I'm not convinced it even does that, because prisoners now get time added to their sentences for incidents while they're inside, and since longer sentences adds up to more profit in the long run, I'm not sure if a few fights and the occasional murder here and there doesn't actually increase your profit over time.

The above is kinda reminding me of Oz actually, and that character that is a totally straight-laced guy that goes in for manslaughter on a DUI and winds up slowly becoming a hardened criminal with an ever increasing sentence. I need to check some of my min-sec prisoners to see if they wound up serving a life term for getting dragged into this kind of stuff ;)

[Katalliaan]

Yup. When I get a death, I jump to the spot, mark the murderer as a supermax, and check to see who died. If it was a staff member, I'd replace him; if it was a prisoner, I'd go back to what I was doing.

As far as following a minsec guy: they said something about prisoners having their security level automatically upgraded when they cause problems, so you might want to take note of his name.

Additionally, it looks like they added in a starvation effect, where prisoners who haven't eaten in a long time slowly take damage. However it's not really a big factor; as long as the prisoner catches the attention of a doctor, he can go without food indefinitely. He won't be happy about it, but it probably won't kill him.

[FlowerChild]

Yup. When I get a death, I jump to the spot, mark the murderer as a supermax, and check to see who died. If it was a staff member, I'd replace him; if it was a prisoner, I'd go back to what I was doing.

Hmmm...an experience system on the staff would probably take care of the just replacing staff thing, and also make casually dismissing staff to temporarily cut costs a bigger deal than it is now. Just something simple like a bonus to efficiency the longer they work in the prison so that the individuals become more valuable with time.

Actually, even just requiring a basic training course for new hires or at least have them enter the map like visitors or *something* to make dropping a bunch of new guards on a bad situation to fix it would be really nice too :)

You've gone a step further than me with the assignments though. I haven't even bothered with that except for one particular guy that is labeled as "extremely volatile" and haven't even bothered to set a separate regime for him. Really, I just did it so he'd be a different color and I could spot him easily.

Yeah, he's starting fights pretty frequently and busting up his cell on occasion and he should probably start accumulating frequent flyer miles with the taser manufacturer, but without any real lasting consequences to it, I'm just finding that entertaining :)

I think the next time I play I'll go maximum security prisoner intake only to up the chaos factor. Unfortunately though, that means I'll also be making more money, which will make other aspects of the game easier :\

[johnt]

A couple things off the top of my head I'd think about to increase challenge and realism would be:

A) Gangs/factions
B) Corrupt guards.
C) Wrongful death lawsuits.

[FlowerChild]

With the exception of the lawsuits (which I assume would equate to a cash penalty on death), those aren't really gameplay mechanics as much as they are thematic elements which could have mechanics associated with them, and which could serve to wind up making things easier or harder depending on how they're implemented.

I know "we want gangs!" is a common thing to chant in the PA community, but it's a rather meaningless statement that's just going for low hanging fruit in terms of what is thematically associated with prison life.

I could also say "I want prison rape!" and it would be just as meaningless in terms of what that would actually do to the game, although I'd probably have a harder time getting other players to chant it along with me :)

Like, if you were to say "I want gangs as a means for prisoners to have associations so that if they're in the same place at the same time, and one gets involved in an incident, the others will be much more likely to join in which can rapidly escalate a fight into a riot motivating the player to split gangs up into different cell blocks and on a different schedule" I'd say "hell yeah!". If you were to say "I want gangs so that my prisoners can accessorize with various bandanas", I'd be less enthused :)

Actually, I think we may be seeing the beginnings of such prisoner associations in alpha 25, as they've got prisoners forming "teams" to work together on digging tunnels now. I wonder if that might be part of a larger system they're working on, as I think those kind of group fights causing all hell to break loose would be a great addition to the game.

[Sarudak]

Or maybe if gangs had an element of tying your hands so you might be afraid to punish gang members or especially the leader in fear of inciting riots?

[FlowerChild]

Or maybe if gangs had an element of tying your hands so you might be afraid to punish gang members or especially the leader in fear of inciting riots?

Yeah, for sure. I could see several psychological effects associated with them, like similar to what you're saying, "perks" being granted to one gang member helping to appease others, and splitting them up into different parts of your prison causing them to get pissed off (maybe with associated "treatment" programs to ween them off of gang life and convert them back to unaffiliated, potentially marking them as gang targets in the process).

I think it would be very interesting too if gangs basically acted as a virus within your prison, so that unaffiliated prisoners in proximity to them had a chance of becoming "infected" and joining the gang, meaning that your different cell-blocks would slowly become dominantly affiliated with one gang or another making them larger and more difficult to manage, promoting further segregation of your prison and greater chaos should the different gangs become intermixed over the course of a day.

[johnt]

there are a couple of interesting mechanics around gangs, I think. One is the whole segregation of prisoners where one guy getting targetted could lead to a whole gang warfare situation, but also wardens and guards in real life have intentionally encouraged gangs as a means of preventing mass action by prisoners. If the white power guys are more afraid of the Hispanic gangs than they are of the guards, that can be good for generating snitches and so on.

The other interesting mechanic is that gangs have reach outside the prison, so a gang leader could be corrupting guards and even political officials from inside a prison I could even see a whole dark-side method of running a prison where you take bribes from gangs to give certain people special privileges and so on, the extreme case of that being like the prison in Venezuela where the inmates essentially run the place-- the only thing they can't do is leave.

[Taleric]

Got some time in, budget still pretty easy to balance. Had one sneaky guy get loose and another OD after I just caught him with the meds WTF.

The feedback from misshaps takes a bit and would be better if you had to pay upfront. Such as a fine to the city for chasing an inmate or mourge/lawyer fees for deaths.

I do like having a reason to interact more with the prisoners than extra story. Gangs sound good but really if you have a design set for proper segregation it is just a mandate then to build that way.

[FlowerChild]

Gangs sound good but really if you have a design set for proper segregation it is just a mandate then to build that way.

Sure, but that could likely be said about any feature: once you know how to deal with something, well...you know how to deal with it :)

What's interesting about it though is that it introduces addition design constraints into the equation making the game more interesting overall. It also gives the player more plates to keep spinning at once, which inevitably will lead to mistakes.

Right now I just don't feel there's sufficient incentive to build more elaborate prisons with different wings and such. My prison designs ultimately devolve into big blocks of cells as a result with a central area to serve common needs (like food and workshops) and an outer ring of service buildings surrounding it to basically provide a wall out of my structures.

I just don't feel any push to deviate from that in any way and start building branches off the design or what have you, and I'd really like that kind of variety to be introduced into the game.

[FlowerChild]

I continued my prison last night and got it up to around 250 or so prisoners, and I must say, the changes in .25 do make the later game more interesting.

I hadn't clued into it before, but there is indeed an economic hit for having incidents in your prison, as there's a "days without incident" modifier to your income that you can check out in the finance tab which can greatly impact your daily income.

Once I realized that, I began segregating, and that made several of the systems "pop". Primarily, I needed to get anyone with the "snitch" trait out of gen pop as quickly as possible and keep them isolated so they wouldn't get shanked, which would usually occur at meal times when all the prisoners congregate in the cafeteria. I get the impression that prisoners get bolder when they are in large groups, as the cafeteria seems to be the primary source of trouble overall.

So, at first I tried putting anyone in protective custody on a night time schedule so that they'd sleep during the day and only come out to eat separate meals and get a bit of yard time at night.

That didn't work so well for a couple of reasons: first prisoners seem to really dislike sleeping during the day, and they'd wind up sleeping right through any activities I scheduled for them at night.

So, I tried putting them on separate meal times during the early morning while keeping the others in lockup during that period. I also put supermax prisoners on an evening meal time so that there would be very little overlap between the two groups.

That didn't work so well either, and actually caused my prison to almost devolve into a full scale riot. Kitchen staff seem to get very confused if you have too many meals scheduled during the day, and wind up ignoring the cleaning of trays while they cook non-stop causing them to stockpile in the cafeteria. I get the impression they don't realize that certain meals are for only a few people and thus try to prepare food for the entire prison population for each one. Meanwhile, for reasons unknown but which I eventually figured out were related, ALL my prisoners basically stopped eating. They'd go to the cafeteria, but wouldn't pick up any food to consume it (maybe there were no clean trays left or something?), so most of my prisoners wound up maxing hunger and entering into starving.

When I realized all this I decided losing a few snitches was probably better than a full scale riot, and switch back to two shared meals per day for everyone, and eventually my prison returned to "normal" again. There was one point though were the number of tazers going off during the day were sounding like popcorn :)

So, on to plan B (or C...), I then decided to build a separate protective custody wing that was attached to the kitchen, and which had its own little private cafeteria. Each cell had its own phone, TV, and shower so that I could keep those guys in lockup most of the day without them going completely nuts. This worked well other than a couple of guys tunneling out as I hadn't enclosed this new wing properly as keeping these guys alive was a little more on my mind than preventing their escape :)

All that was very cool other than what seemed to be buggy meal-time behavior. I really enjoyed having to think in a different way about how to design my prison to keep prisoners away from each other.

One thing I'm also enjoying is the personality it gives some of your prisoners. Like I got one "extremely volatile" guy that's been the start of most incidents in my prison and I must admit I'm growing rather attached to him. He's caused me to crack up laughing more than once when he's freaked out and started busting up his cell only to have a guard wander by and casually taze him through the bars before walking off again as if it were business as usual.

Towards the end of my play last night though he managed to finally get his revenge: out of nowhere I got some kind of indicator that a fire had started in my prison! I have absolutely never seen this before, and while I had seen the fire trucks in the emergency services tab, I had figured they were just placeholder for an unimplemented feature (kinda like the electric chair or what have you).

So, I called them in and set them about fighting the blaze that was going in one of my cell blocks. By the time they put it out, it had damaged or destroyed maybe 20 cells, and while I was fighting it was when I had a "wait a minute..." moment.

He was nowhere in sight while all this was going down (turns out he was in the cafeteria having a bite to eat as I did check on his whereabouts), but it turns out the epicenter of this fire was right on my friend's cell.

I'm still not absolutely certain if he did it, but he now sleeps with the first sprinkler I've ever installed directly over his bed :)

[Mason11987]

I've been all over this game the last few days. I feel like I'm still missing something because even with low-risk people I'm still losing money. I try to do programs is it that I'm trying to do them when they aren't necessary? I wanted to pull off one of the grants which require the education class so I needed those programs.

I also seem to always get fights, so I can't get the days without incidence reward anymore, with 60+ prisoners. They seem to fight in the showers or in the canteen. Do people normally separate these a lot? I just have big ones that support everyone well enough. Any tips on good strategies out there that are up to date?

[FlowerChild]

I've been all over this game the last few days. I feel like I'm still missing something because even with low-risk people I'm still losing money. I try to do programs is it that I'm trying to do them when they aren't necessary? I wanted to pull off one of the grants which require the education class so I needed those programs.

I still haven't completed the education grant in this game, so that is not one that is really worth pursuing early on. With 250 prisoners and having the foundation program going for most of my game, I still only have completed 60% of the first requirement and still don't have a single prisoner that's been through the general education one :)

But yeah, look at minimizing your costs. Employee salaries are a big one, so try to only have as many guards and workmen on staff as you actually need.

I find workmen are a big one: if you have a bunch standing idle a lot of the time because you can't afford to build new stuff, it means you have too many. Ideally, you should have just enough that they're working around the clock and you're spending as much as you're making on new construction. Fire a bunch until you get there. You can always hire more later if you need to.

Workshops can also be a huge source of cash although I put off constructing them until quite late in this game, and they also take much longer to get up and running now given the requirement of the safety course before prisoners can work in them.

But yeah, as a more immediate solution, look into minimizing your expenses.

I also seem to always get fights, so I can't get the days without incidence reward anymore, with 60+ prisoners. They seem to fight in the showers or in the canteen. Do people normally separate these a lot? I just have big ones that support everyone well enough. Any tips on good strategies out there that are up to date?

I haven't had a single fight in the showers, but that might be because I don't schedule shower time causing all my prisoners to congregate there at once. Instead, I usually schedules blocks of free time which allows the prisoners to take care of whatever needs they have, including showering. This means that I get a slow trickle of them in the showers during that time instead of one big mob.

I pretty much have all my major incidents occurring in the cafeteria though. Beyond that I just have the occasional volatile prisoner being tazed when he decides to bust up his cell, and I don't think that even counts as an "incident" as far as finances are concerned.

Like I said above, it's just a theory, but I think the greater the number of prisoners in an area (maybe relative to the number of guards present), the bolder they become and thus the more likely an incident will occur.

Eventually, what I think I want to do is build separate cafeterias for each of the different security levels so that I can minimize the number of prisoners in one place at a time, and load up the higher security ones with armed guards to keep those guys suppressed.