I think Morvran's idea about mission chains/mission expansions is a good one - it would be nice for these missions to 'emerge' from selected existing policing missions.
I would just like to chip in that I would want such chains not to count under mission expansion for the purposes of the settings option to disable expansion. I regularly turn expansion off so that I can play when I am time-limited and don't want to come back to an expanded mission held up for missing units.
In addition to these chains, I feel some CID missions should be their own thing, and spawn independently rather than emerge from other missions.
I like Morvran's idea about investigations being a more involved thing than just missions, although I feel practically that may be quite ambitious due to the necessity for new game code in those circumstances, where a new extension/training etc is a much more minor code change or may even be done entirely in the database depending how they have things set up. I've limited my suggestions below to being more 'traditional' for missionchief, but I just want to be clear that Morvran's more in-depth suggestion is cooler than what I've brought to the table, and if the devs were up for a more code-intensive pack then I think a proper investigation system would be excellent. That said...
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1. Gameplay:
- How would you expect / envisage CID to exist in-game?
- What training and vehicles would you expect?
- What extensions?
- How would you price it all?
- What would the requirements be at missions?
CID could exist in a few different ways, but I think being realistic about the amount of dev time that will be reasonably spent, I'll tailor my views towards something more in line with how other content packs/extensions have worked.
I would expect CID to be an extension of a police station, requiring staff trained in Criminal Investigations (or whatever course title). I feel there should be one extension for CID, but possibly a couple of different advanced additional trainings on top of Criminal Investigations: Financial Investigation, Public Protection Investigation (or Missing Person Investigations), Intelligence Gathering, and possibly Vehicle Crime and/or Cyber Crime Investigations depending how wide the scope of the pack will be. These would be courses and would match with mission requirements for X personnel trained in Y, rather than to man specific vehicles (eg., no 'fraud squad car' etc), and generally not '3 detective cars' or whatever.
Vehicles-wise, I would think about an unmarked car to represent unmarked pool cars to transport detective personnel to missions, and a covert car for surveillance missions. I'm a bit stumped about what other vehicles I'd expect from a CID pack, given that we're not including forensics which I think would otherwise be a good fit (but I understand why it may not be going into this pack).
In terms of pricing, I wouldn't mind if the extensions were a touch on the more expensive side (as many more specialist things seem to be).
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2. Mission Content:
- What crime types do you want to see?
- What types of missions would you be comfortable with?
- What types of missions would you be uncomfortable with?
Congruent with the above:
- General crime/district crime: stuff like burglaries, robberies, arson, etc. These are the types of non-specialist crime covered by the generic Criminal Investigations training, and the default missions granted by the CID expansion on its own. Could cover some rural crime stuff too.
- Financial crime: fraud, money laundering, seizures of proceeds of crime, identity theft, etc.
- Public protection: a little limited due to sensitivity questions on some of the stuff, but I think missing persons stuff is fine, modern slavery (might need to workshop the titles of missions there to get the devs to go with it, I reckon), kidnapping (refactor the existing Kidnapping mission here, or add a similar one).
- Intelligence gathering: surveillance, interviews at stations or at random addresses, managing/meeting/rescuing CHIS.
- Vehicle crime: county lines (given we probably won't get specialised drugs stuff), plate cloning operation, chop shops, high value vehicle theft ring, etc. Crime occurring thanks to the roads, or directed towards vehicles.
- Cyber crime: computer misuse, hacking, ransomware, etc. I feel this could be a little thin on its own, but then we do have some extensions and/or training with basically only one or two missions, so maybe we don't need to overthink how many missions we can get into this category.
Personally I am comfortable with any kind of mission. I recognise that the developers want to steer clear of some types of mission. I do think it would be a shame not to be able to include some of the HMET and/or organised crime stuff, I think it's possible to be vague enough on some stuff, and justify others with what's permitted in other game versions. For example, the US version has more variations on kidnappings and similar serious crime, so I do think if possible some kind of major enquiries training/extension would be welcome by most players, even if it rolled some non-sensitive organised crime in there. This could allow for content covering things like armed robbery, smuggling, serious assaults, major manhunts, etc.
In terms of what I think ought be avoided, obviously no death/terror, and I think anything that touches on sexual offences is asking for trouble. I also get the sense that - given we've previously had missions with a named illegal drug in their title subsequently renamed a few days after being published - being specific about drugs might not be wise; I assumed there might be some app store-related issue there.
One additional thing I'd like to highlight is that the pack should maximise cross-operation with other content packs. Let's see a mission or two that ties into airport policing and railway policing (smuggling investigations, serious assaults); tie some misper missions into search and rescue; require some regular traffic cars and recovery vehicles in the vehicle crime missions. Include some armed police requirements on some missions. Also look at which POIs that are either unused or under-used might be included. I know for example banks are totally unused and are a good opportunity for a robbery/armed robbery CID mission to include. Basically look to use this CP to add incidentally to other CPs which are less feature heavy - the railway CP did this really well.
Apologies this is late - have been fighting to find the time to it and organise my thoughts on this. Likely incoherent as I'm tired, but I think a CID pack is a great call and has strong opportunities to be interesting.
