[suggestion] Career Mode

[enemyviolent]

Instead of a story or campaign mode (or as well as, I'm just making a comparison), Career Mode would be a series of goal-oriented scenarios with special conditions or objectives, that would have you going from one place to another, building prisons to specifications, getting paid upon completion, and then bringing that money to the next scenario in the same way that selling a prison allows you to bring money to your next project. In this way, you can complete easier scenarios to save up cash to take on the harder ones, giving a feeling of progression and allowing players to manage their own difficulty to some extent.

Completing all the Career Mode scenarios makes you the World's Greatest Prison Architect!

= For Profit Prison =
Wilks-Barre, PA

Income for just housing prisoners is halved, but income from exports is tripled (or more). Objective is to have a large working prisoner population and become very profitable. Special grants for getting workers educated and working help to bridge the financial gap.

= Incarceration for the Rich and Famous =
Los Angeles, CA

You may only take in Low Risk prisoners, but their Needs deteriorate more quickly. They have the power to have themselves transferred to another prison if they're too unhappy, and if this happens too many times you'll fail the scenario. Special grants exist for giving prisoners luxuries, like TVs in their cells, a well furnished common room, and lots of free time in their regime.

= Prison Island =
San Francisco, CA

The prison is surrounded by water, making escape improbable. However, you may only take in High Risk prisoners, and space is more limited. A few grants exist for taking in notorious serial killers and escape artists.

= Highly Confidential Facility =
???, Cuba

Continuous intake of high risk prisoners, with an even more likely chance of rioting. However, calling in SWAT is cheaper, and there's more tolerance for deaths before a failure state occurs. Special grants give you more money for dogs, armed guards, and CCTV.

= Too Many Prisoners! =
New Orleans, LA

Continuous intake of various prisoners in high volumes. Grant money is available for those taking in prisoners even faster than necessary.

= The War on Drugs =
San Antonio, TX

Drugs are more easily available, and more prisoners come in with pre-existing addictions. Grants award finding drugs, getting dogs, and curing prisoners of addictions.

...and so on and so forth.

I would prefer this type of system to a story mode greatly, myself! I always found the tutorial stuff annoying. I'm sure people will have lots of ideas for Career Mode scenarios!

[xander]

I am guessing that most of those scenarios would be doable within the current modding system. I haven't played around with the lua scripting that much, but I think that things like prisoner needs are accessible via the scripting system. If nothing else, you definitely have an interesting (set of) idea(s) which highlight some of the items that really should be accessible to modders.

xander

[WarpedPerspectiv]

Isn't Introversion going to eventually add a campaign mode, though? I do believe it's hinted at through the menus in the Alpha release videos.

[Kirbyfreak411]

I actually suspect that they're gonna put in stuff like this when they've got all the general game-play aspects done and gotten most of the bugs ironed out of the system.
For now of course, they've only got "sandbox mode".