Overview
So PA is a lovely game about being efficient and having forwards thinking, but what if you just want to play dungeon keeper again? Maybe you already made a dedicated reform prison for hardened criminals or a minimum security utopia for embezzlers and drunk drivers. A truly horrible prison is an art, and not just the sort you got on your first playthrough. Or perhaps you’re already struggling to maintain a hellhole, barely able to drag yourself to work each morning for fear of finding out how many more prisoners died overnight, well this guide is also designed to teach you the ancient and secret art of diging upwards.-Kalimist
Evil Evil EVIL!!
Okay I’ll admit that was a stupid place to put the armoury but the door clearly said staff only
Basics
Lockdown regime
Riots
“A good prison has a morgue larger than the holding cell”
-Anonymous
An evil prison has to be layed out just as you would want a good prison to form. It’s not about making it hard to get to the lunchhall or having a work only regime. Sometimes you need to think outside the box, or, in this dudes case, inside it.
We gave him 400 hours, any more would have been excessive
If you like having a self contained building with a system of rotation you can, or if you like to have the buildings spread out and surrounded by a fence do that too. The trick is to look at what you can get away with. The rooms tab tells you the minimum you need to make a room ‘work’. showers don’t need to be indoors, solitary has no size limit, etc. Look through and see what you can come up with.
And we also saved a few quid on drain covers, yeah, let the earth do the work.
A lot of this is purely cosmetic but it’s good to have your prison looking the part before you get going. If you prefer to play with continuous intake then you should be getting your first vict.. ah inmates already, if not open up your doors and get ready for some fun. (Mwa ha ha etc)
Overcrowding is easy to achieve and a good way to get the pressure cooking. Build cells if you wish but cramming everyone into a few holding cells for the first week is a great idea and cheap.
Beds! you gave them beds! How much did it cost?
Another good key to a hell hole is keeping an atmosphere of constant agression, a fight should be able to break out at the slighest, er, slight. I’ll talk more about riots below but you don’t want it to be totaly out of control. Taser rollout is handy but far too humane, instead only issue them to armed guards (don’t research taser rollout) and keep two or three heavies in your employ. If you’re playing with failure conditions on it becomes imperitive not to let a riot get out of control but you can still run a successful evil prison with it on. If a fight starts to over run the basic guards you can hot drop a few armed guards into the action with free fire already turned on, as long as you have one armed guard already somewhere on the map. For an extra bit of fun put the armoury in an easily reachable place with minimal locked doors around it and see if any plucky volunteers want to boot the door in and grab a shotgun.
No no this is all wrong, how on earth is anyone supposed to steal a gun from there?
Oh, and food. Food is an important part of making people unhappy, all you have to do is give them rubbish. Research prison policy and in the policy tab change the ammount and quality. I like to give them only one option but lots of it, as starving them can over do it. Feed them well but make sure they only get pots of green stuff. Whats that, you don’t like the food, don’t worry theres tons of it.
This is so totaly not a really stupid idea
Once the prison starts to get full you can put them on what I call the lockdown regime. This is a great way of getting a real feel of evil around the place. You’re going to need about 1 to 5 guard to prisoner ratio and a couple of large, easy to reach infirmaries with plenty of doctors on hand.
Now arange the regime thus.
And hit bangup. Yep. Now at first this is going to cause a lot of fights and your guards will be making an ant line to the medical wing but that’s okay. By the end of the first day you will have almost certainly called in the riot squads for backup, hopefuly the paramedics too, but with some work you can avoid an all out riot. Use free fire sparingly, relying on your armed guards tasers. If you’re lucky one of your heavies will get taken down and his shotgun repurposed for no good. This is excellent as it means the new owner might try to shoot out a door and leg it. set dogs on him or block the way with the riot cops. At any point you feel things are getting too hot release bang up and they will flood to the canteen. Expect more fights there too but when that gets too blood soaked hit bang up again and move the quieter ones back away from the fights. By nightfall anyone not dead or in solitary will be able to sleep and the trouble metre will go back down. Of course you still want to keep from an all out riot so try not to let too many shotguns get stolen.
Hang on, remind me why we’re having gun racks installed in the cells again?
Another thing you need for this to work is either lots of solitary cells and spare guards or a policy of not using solitary. In a terror prison I only have serious injury set to solitary, everything else is lockdown. The main trick is to only have a short amount of time for the lockdown, that way the most potent troublemakers are back out of cuffs with minimal turnaround and ready to fight again. Make a few slots for showering and hose them down in the yard from time to time as well to prevent all out riots. Every other day or so is usually enough but a shower helps lower the trouble metre a bit if it’s really hot.
we got him, good job boys
This isn’t a guide how to get into a riot, but how to avoid it for as long as possible. This is where playing a hell hole gets challenging. Eventually the lockdown regime will cause a riot, there’s no way around it without going back to a normal regime but we don’t want to do that just yet. For now we’re going to try to hold back the tide. You can deploy three, six man riot squads for a hundred dollars apiece. There’s no need for a riot to be underway for them to be deployed either so you can send them in pre-emptively if the day looks to be starting out good. You only need to put them near the trouble and they will get stuck in but keep an eye on them. If an area is getting very rowdy deploy an armed guard to patrol but keep the main reserve of heavies locked up in the armoury.
Oi, Dave, I reckon we’re expecting trouble again
Now, you can opt to either shoot a few people every day or loads every week or so. I know it’s hard, both sound fun but you can try either, we’re flexible. Shooting a few every day means less calls from the C.E.O. but he can be dealt with easily. If a small riot starts you can set free fire and shoot your way in then, or wait a little for the individual pockets of trouble to join up. Now, before it gets too bad unlock the armoury, hot drop anymore troops you need and set free now. You can usually expect your armed guards to cull, ahem I mean kill about a fith of your prisoners but it’s not always that high. At this point you can just zoom out and drag abox around the whole prison. Any basic guards on their own are done for in a riot so have everyone congregate on the armed guards this way for saftey.
Right, settle down
-Coming next: Redemption, how to make it all better. Thanks for reading