[Help] So I *completely* broke the Syndicate...

Soooo... I wanted to get a Research Safehouse with Vorici in it, and maybe some others. Boy does this game ever NOT want me to have that. Seriously.

GGGRNG decided I wasn't going to ever get any Syndicate labs, so alright. I looked up what to do and the recommendation was to pack safehouses until you had them all researched.

See, when a division has a safehouse ready, you're spared from encounters with them for a few turns, so the idea is if you do this to ALL the safehouses, the game is forced to give you the remaining safehouse encounter, the one you really want - in this case, Research. Over and over, I tried to get those Research encounters with little to no luck. More importantly, the game simply refused to ever send any of the unallocated agents to a research encounter, even on the three times I DID get one out of about the 100+ encounters it took to reach this point.

So I threw Janus' only henchman, Jorgin, in jail, under the assumption that

1) The only encounter the game was currently able to give me was research.
2) The only free agents not in jail were ones I wanted to see in Research (especially Vorici)
3) Therefore the game MUST give me a Research encounter and Janus some of the free-agent Henchmen in order to have the minimum 2-3 members for a lab encounter... right?

That was when my investigation board reached this point:



Annnnnd it's been stuck there ever since. Somehow this exact setup has locked the Syndicate!

Instead of giving me Research encounters, the game simply refuses to give me ANY Syndicate encounters AT ALL. I ran Ossuary, Blaqueduct, maps... zip, nada, nothing. Gone forever. And because the "turns" can't process without encounters, everything stays stuck where it is. Jorgin never gets out of jail, neither does It That Fled.

I think it may be a bug in that the system can't account for the fact that the sole open leader has no subordinates, and no Janus having no trust links to anyone (hey, I can't blame anyone for not trusting Janus, I mean come on).

It's definitely funny, but it's also frustrating as hell! I just want one simple minor goal and no matter what I did the game worked against me, until it finally BROKE rather than letting me have the encounter I wanted to set up even after I did everything I was supposed to do to set it up.

So, uh... What do I do?

Should I crack a Safehouse to rearrange some trust links? Presumably that will get things moving again, but if my goal is to get Vorici and maybe Leo or ITF into Research, which one should I crack? Intervention, since everyone's in bed with Haku? Should I just go do Katarina and blow the whole thing up and try to get a Research lab in the last 5-ish days we have left (in which case, I might as well crack ALL the other safehouses, seeing as they're all ripe)?

What's my choice here?

"Working as intended".

Heh.

"

FramFramson wrote:

"Working as intended".

Heh.

You forgot the rest of his comment. This seems to be working as intended to prevent easily shaping the syndicate.

He's not wrong, but there's a multiplicity of factors here which produces a conflict that stops an ordinary player dead for no discernable reason. I know what's going on because I've done the research.

On top of that, the player is expected and intended to game the Syndicate quite a bit anyway - it's very much the point of being able to shuffle members around.

... Which I was trying to do in response to a failure of the game mode to provide so much as even a semi-quasi-balanced outcome (even when accounting for the fact that some safehouses/encounters are rarer than others).

Something can be working as intended without being good or correct. This is just silly.

"for no discernable reason"? If you had paid attention while interacting with the league mechanic you would know exactly why this happens:

Any Betrayal encounter must be led by a non-leader member of a faction which doesn't have a safehouse ready. Even if Jorgin wasn't in jail, Janus could never ever be the leader of a research encounter other than the safehouse (he could randomly show up as an accomplice to Jorgin though, or to anyone else he has a relationship with).

Incidentally, if Jorgin had been rank 1 when you sent him to jail, the game would've noticed "oh, he won't be part of research anymore when he gets out", and then assigned a new person to research for you, thus letting you continue to farm research. It's a smart system. But the way you want the system to work, it'd be way too easy to just force a syndicate faction packed by sending everyone in it to jail while at a high rank.

Also, protip, you're not even setting up your syndicate correctly in the first place. "Remove all rivalries" is the absolute most trolly option in the entire league--you want as many rivalries as possible. The people at league start making "syndicate guides" that said that rivalries prevented people from spawning together were wrong (and also stupid, they do the opposite of that).

Oh my god, that is just the worst I've seen so far. Is there just one syndicate member in the right branch and position? I don't think so. This has to be the only setup possible to get nothing out the the safehouses. Woow..... just woow!