In PM 2008, how can you spend more than 100 pts on the issues?

Yeah I agree the number should be upped substantially. While I can see how there might be a potential balancing issue giving unlimited points, 100 is far too few to set up a proper platform. I hope the devs fix this is a patch soon.

I agree that the current situation with initial distribution of issue stances seems a little bit imbalanced.

However, instead of players getting unlimited, how about just giving the opponent 100 also (or perhaps a sliding scale based on difficulty setting)?

I think its more interesting and realistic for candidates to develop their stances over the course of the game rather than start out completely set on all issues.

Right now it feels like you are just trying to catch up for the entire game.

-KnightAV

Exactly, the opponent starts out with a 20 point advantage because the voters know all of his stances, so you spend the entire time catching up and (hopefully) eeking out a victory.

I want the computer to out-strategize me, not have ridiculous advantages like this.

Hopefully it's a mistake, and not an attempt to cover up poor AI. I haven't bought 2008 yet, but one of the major selling points for me was better AI from the 2004 version.

That was one of the first things I noticed. I really hope they come up with a different system, currently I can take a stance on maybe three or four issues if I limit myself to 'slightly' and one 'moderately', while the AI has more or less a defined stance on all issues.

can one of you that has the game make a video review of it? That would be great considering none of the gaming websites have done it yet.

can one of you that has the game make a video review of it? That would be great considering none of the gaming websites have done it yet.

One of the reasons we limited the points to 100, is because you if you are not a honest person you could just go through the issues and make yourself 100% for everything that everyone supports, and 0 on anything that is more evenly split. This would give you a big advantage in the late game and kill game balance entirely.

By limiting the issue points you can establish a platform to start from, and by using speeches, ads, and appearing on TV shows, you can build that platform into a tower. And have a much more challenging game to play.

By the way, unless the issues is set for the candidate, which you can also use, the AI Always stats in at 0 as well, so you are on even ground.

If the computer is limited to 100 points, then why does McCain have a stance on almost every issue at the first turn?

Also, doing it this way completely takes the minor issues off the table. Why spend precious points or TV ads taking a stance on the missle defense system if no one cares? There are about 20 or 30 issues that become completely irrelevant and not worth taking a stand on.

Can you give me some more details on this particular problem? This shouldn't be possible. I just started up a game on Masochistic as Obama and played against McCain and, at the beginning, McCain has a -1 stance on Illegal Immigration and -95 on Withdrawing from Iraq. At end of the first turn his stance on Illegal Immigration changed to -5 after he made a speech on the same issue. His candidate issue page, though, still showed only those two issues - nothing else.

Also, what window are you looking at that is giving you this data? Are you looking at the Candidate Details/Issue window or the State Details one?

If you're talking about the State Details window then the stances on issues for each candidate is decided by the default position/importance that each party has on an issue. A Republican candidate has a default stance not in favor of Withdrawal from Iraq whereas a Democratic candidate has a default stance in favor of it; the actual values for this can vary from state to state. Both parties have these default values but the extent of the score for each issue varies by issue and by state/region.


Actually, the minor issues can be used as a strategy. When you give a speech on an issue (or take an ad out, though that is a more progressive change) you're making the issue increasingly important to people regardless of whether you favor it or are not in favor of it.

So, let's say that "Law Enforcement" is a particularly important issue for my campaign. The left, the right, and independents are in favor of enforcing the nation's laws; the variance on the issue is how important Law Enforcement is to each party. So I give about four-five speeches on the issue and it rises to the second most important issue in the state. Now my candidate, Obama in this case, is triple-thumbs-up in favor of Law Enforcement and I've raised the importance of the issue across both Republicans and Independents ten-fold.

So don't completely discount the minor issues; they can almost always be used as a strategic platform.

Yeah I figured that was the reasoning behind it in the first place, and can see where it could be abused if given too many (or unlimited) points. But 100 surely seems a bit thin for the vast amount of issues in the game, perhaps upping the ante a tad whilst maintaining the integrity of the game wouldn't hurt?

It could even be tied to the campaign mode itself, where your character can earn more points after every candidate it beats.

Ok, I think I can nail down the problem more specifically.

Custom candidates are not receiving the benefits of their party's positions.

When I start a campaign with a custom candidate, and view the state issues in my starting state, I have a column of 5's except where I put points for issues during candidate creation.

When I start a campaign with a predefined candidate, I have a vast array of 2 digit numbers ranging from 20-50 on the issues in my starting state.


I think it's only a problem with custom candidates.

-KnightAV

By the way, you can manually edit a candidate's issue values, the default candidates are found in the game directory, the custom ones in your user directory, for example:

C:\Documents and Settings\keith.lamothe\My Documents\My Games\PolMachine2008\Candidates\KeithLaMothe.candidatexml

Vista users would find a somewhat different structure.

For my single custom candidate, the file looks like this (after editing, but all I changed was numbers) :

(note, I had to change the angle brackets to parenthesis to get this to display at all)
(?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="yes"?)
(PresidentialCandidates)
	(DataChecksum NoParse="1")
		(Ignore)Image,Config,FirstName,LastName,Gender,CopyNumber(/Ignore)
	(/DataChecksum)
	(Candidate InternalName="KeithLaMothe" Custom="true")
		(FirstName)Keith(/FirstName)
		(LastName)LaMothe(/LastName)
		(Image)(I've taken out the image path here)(/Image)
		(Config)KeithLaMothe(/Config)
		(Gender)0(/Gender)
		(FundRaisingAbility)4(/FundRaisingAbility)
		(Stamina)5(/Stamina)
		(PoliticalParty)1(/PoliticalParty)
		(HomeState Map="USA")42(/HomeState)
		(Money)5000(/Money)
		(IssueStanceMap InternalName="Default")
			(ABORTION)-100(/ABORTION)
			(AFFIRMATIV)-40(/AFFIRMATIV)
			(ALIVINGWAG)-20(/ALIVINGWAG)
			(ANWR)10(/ANWR)
			(BIGGOVERNMENT)-40(/BIGGOVERNMENT)
			(CAPITALPUN)40(/CAPITALPUN)
			(CLIMATECHA)-20(/CLIMATECHA)
			(DEFICITREDUCTION)20(/DEFICITREDUCTION)
			(EXPANDINGE)-10(/EXPANDINGE)
			(FARMSUBSID)-10(/FARMSUBSID)
			(FEDERALEDUCATION)-80(/FEDERALEDUCATION)
			(GAYMARRIAG)-100(/GAYMARRIAG)
			(GUNCONTROL)-60(/GUNCONTROL)
			(HARSHINTERROGATIONS)-20(/HARSHINTERROGATIONS)
			(HIGHGASPRI)-20(/HIGHGASPRI)
			(HOMELANDSE)20(/HOMELANDSE)
			(ILLEGALIMMIGRATION)-10(/ILLEGALIMMIGRATION)
			(IRAQWAR)-10(/IRAQWAR)
			(JOBS)10(/JOBS)
			(KATRINAREL)10(/KATRINAREL)
			(KYOTOTREAT)-40(/KYOTOTREAT)
			(LEGALIZINGMARIJUANA)-20(/LEGALIZINGMARIJUANA)
			(MISSILEDEF)10(/MISSILEDEF)
			(MOREJOBS)10(/MOREJOBS)
			(NAFTA)-20(/NAFTA)
			(OUTSOURCINGJOBS)-10(/OUTSOURCINGJOBS)
			(SCHOOLVOUCHERS)20(/SCHOOLVOUCHERS)
			(SOCIALSECU)-50(/SOCIALSECU)
			(STRONGFED)-50(/STRONGFED)
			(STRONGMILITARY)30(/STRONGMILITARY)
			(TAXCUTS)50(/TAXCUTS)
			(TORTREFORM)10(/TORTREFORM)
			(TRADITIONALVALUES)50(/TRADITIONALVALUES)
			(UNIONS)-30(/UNIONS)
			(UNIVERSALHEALTHCARE)-50(/UNIVERSALHEALTHCARE)
			(_CHARISMA)10(/_CHARISMA)
			(_COMELINESS)5(/_COMELINESS)
			(_CREDIBILITY)5(/_CREDIBILITY)
			(_EXPERIENCE)6(/_EXPERIENCE)
			(_INTELLIGENCE)6(/_INTELLIGENCE)
			(_RELIGIOUS)10(/_RELIGIOUS)
		(/IssueStanceMap)
		(FileHash)YzEYDN3udzspFAoFvd5vt///f7/+////JJJJJCcT(/FileHash)
	(/Candidate)
(/PresidentialCandidates)

My guess is that the file hash is checked in a multiplayer game so you can't cheat in multiplayer, but it works ok here.

Of course, I probably nuked the game balance with this... but actually ol' Carter gave me a pretty good run for my money because I'm still learning to play.

Keith

In case anyone is looking for workarounds for the bug where issue stance resets after you make speeches or put out ads, I've got the Republican party defaults saved. If you set your character with these numbers, your candidate's issue stances will respond properly to change.

However, the computer candidate will still be suffering from the bug so unless you want a really easy game you will need to doctor their stances too.


Republican Default Issue Stances

Democratic Default Issue Stances