Dearmad Dearmad

Election Night Suggestions (Improve the drama of the final night)

▼

Election Night Suggestions (Improve the drama of the final night)

from PolMach Forums
Per Brad's suggestion, here's a thread for our suggestions. Sounds like Stardock will improve this part of the game if we can come up with some good suggestions. So ADD yours people!

Here are some of mine:

When a state is voting, and after we've zoomed in have the game display an overlay that displays the state along with it's population and other details, pretty similar to the state info screen only add some room below for: running the popular vote counts up (or to the side if screen realestate is precious) on bar graphs as the returns come in. Republican elephant on one side, dem. donkey on the other.... if people withhold or vote indy that's in the middle.

If a state is NOT in contention the returns come in FAST- so if it's 80%-20% then this goes FAST. IF it's a state like Florida and it's 53-47... the returns come in slower... so the drama is played out a little bit.

So, non-drama states= FAST
high drama states = slow....

Leave DONE button on overlay so player's can skip a state or cut to it's results quick.

ADD a button, something like: RESULTS which cuts this whole process out for those players who want the end to go by really fast like it does now. Or maybe make this an option in the game setup- DETAILED election night or QUICK election night. Although I think players who don't want the details ought to be playing some FPS or something.

That's all for now.
23,794 views 27 replies
Reply #26 from PolMach Forums Top
In my humble opinion: The present "election night" is definately too fast and boring. But I think having animations of commentators and such is getting carried away. My suggestion:

Show the complete map -- not the zoom and autoscroll. But reveal states in an order resembling the order in which they'd be called: Put a clock in the corner showing the time on election night -- start out at 7:00pm and advance in some reasonable increment, maybe 30 minutes. For each "tick" color the states called in that time. States in the east tend to be called first because their polls close earlier, but mostly the wider the margin the sooner a state is likely to be called, with the 50-49 states being called last. Put the running total of electoral votes somewhere, so the player can watch has he slowly rolls to victory (or quickly is steamrollered to defeat as the case may be). Of course you don't actually take hours to go through it, maybe 30 seconds or so for each tick, a long enough for the player to see which states have been called and see the new totals. For anxious players, put a button on the side that they can click to immediately jump to the final total.

If you REALLY want to drag it out: Make the user click a button to go to the next click of the clock, i.e. have an "election night turn". Then when the user is looking at the election map display, let him cick on a state to see what percentage of precints have reported and the vote so far. Then you'd simply have some approximate rate at which precincts report per hour, beginning when the polls close in each state, obviously vary it a little with some random number, and I don't think it would be tough to write an algorithm that generates a running total that can vary pretty wildly when the percent reporting is small but tends to get quite close as the percentages go up. Of course as some friends of mine and I were discussing while watching returns last election, you don't know where in the state returns are coming from, so for example here in Ohio Cleveland is overwhelmingly Democrat while Cincinati is overwhelmingly Republican, so if Cleveland returns come in first ... you see where I'm going. Of course you wouldn't have to really simulate that level of detail, just add some random variation.

Someone mentioned electoral ties. How does the game decide the winner in such cases? My suggestion: given that in real life it gets thrown to the House with each state delegation getting one vote, I would think that -- given you're presumably not going to add a complete simulation of Congressional elections for this one remote possibility -- that you assume that the party who's candidate won a state also won Congress, and so give the election to the candidate with the most STATES. Maybe add a bit of randomization if it really comes out close to 25-25.

Hey, by the way, what happened to the District of Columbia in this game?
Reply #27 from PolMach Forums Top
Good suggestions, Citizen old geek. I would still have a board of each state showing it votes for each candidate and a projected winner. Leaving the closest states for last, or behind other states in the same area would make the game much different from the current format of simply east to west.
Hey, by the way, what happened to the District of Columbia in this game?

Its part of Maryland, hence 13 EC there.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion