Political Machine election roll-out schedule

from PolMach Forums

For this election cycle we have a ton of updates in store between now and election day.

Below is a tentative schedule:

## Spring 2020 ##

Steam Workshop support for creating and sharing your own political ideologies.

This year is a total, 100% rewrite of the game and while doing so we revisited everything about the game. The feature we like the most so far are the ideologies which will bring immense replayability to the game.

Most of the candidates have their own ideology with them. We also include a few alternative ones like Fascism, Lunacy and Giant Meteorism.

But we suspect other players will want to try making their own and the Steam Workshop support will make it easy to do so.

Scoring Handicap.
Some candidates are easier to to win with than others. To this end, different candidates will get score bonuses based on how hard they are to win with. This will make adding lots of historical Presidents to the game without it totally breaking things.

Spring Issue Update
Every few weeks we'll be updating the campaign issues. Even during our internal beta we've had to make a lot of changes such with "Escalation with Iran" and now with "Coronavirus". We are constantly getting new issues as well as tweaking existing issues to try to keep things as current as possible.

Really Loud Crowder & Rachael Maddox
New podcasts and TV shows are going to be added as we go through this election cycle. The game includes several already but we are looking to add more during the cycle. Two we plan to add this Spring include one based on Louder with Crowder and one inspired by Rachel Maddow.


## Summer 2020 ##

Candidate Architect
We already allow players to create custom candidates. But we also would like to expand on this feature to allow serious political wonks to architect candidates to extreme detail and share them.

State Emergencies
Not national emergencies. Instead, these would be events that affect only a single state. Maybe your campaign can ignore giving support to a tree fungus in Idaho but can you ignore a water contamination issue in Ohio? This will be a feature that players can turn off but will ensure that various states will require special attention.

Throughout this election cycle, we'll be hanging out on www.politicalmachine.com and the Steam forums to listen to ideas and suggestions and see what we can get in before the November election!

## It's a new game ##

We're incredibly excited to get this to you guys. This is the first time we've done a full rewrite since the original 2004 edition.

We added a bunch of new features. Some features in the old game we didn't include. For example, we don't have a "randomize the issues" feature or playing on an alien planet.

We also didn't bring the variable length campaigns and instead focused on 21 so that we could nail down the pacing. Players of previous versions will, we hope, really appreciate how well paced the new version is.

The biggest change you can't really see. It's the underlying simulation. It is so much better. Your actions mean so much more in the game and the game just "feels" better as your actions just make a lot more sense.

Stay tuned!

29,821 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from PolMach Forums Top

Will the ideology's be make-able in game or do we have to use xml?

 If not a feature I suggest allowing it in game

also some other requests

-Election history tab with all elections you have played

-Incumbency feature,which can have like 10 things on a scale of 1-10 the incumbent president did good or bad on which can be clicked on or off,and select republican or dem incumbent

-Unlimited points for custom candidates

-Elections with more than 2 candidates which can sim primaries,or even have like 2 dems to 1 rep to simulate third parties ( I think the more allowed the maryier)

-Let us change states starting %,ev,and delete states (so we can make like a custom old election for example

Reply #2 from LittleTinyFrogs Forums Top

Quoting dakmik20, reply 1

Will the ideology's be make-able in game or do we have to use xml?

 If not a feature I suggest allowing it in game

also some other requests

-Election history tab with all elections you have played

-Incumbency feature,which can have like 10 things on a scale of 1-10 the incumbent president did good or bad on which can be clicked on or off,and select republican or dem incumbent

-Unlimited points for custom candidates

-Elections with more than 2 candidates which can sim primaries,or even have like 2 dems to 1 rep to simulate third parties ( I think the more allowed the maryier)

-Let us change states starting %,ev,and delete states (so we can make like a custom old election for example

A built in ideology creator might be nice but would be very difficult to balance and do in a way that is friendly.

Instead, we're adding Steam workshop support so people can share the ideologies they create.

Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from PolMach Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 2


Quoting dakmik20,
reply 1

Will the ideology's be make-able in game or do we have to use xml?

 If not a feature I suggest allowing it in game

also some other requests

-Election history tab with all elections you have played

-Incumbency feature,which can have like 10 things on a scale of 1-10 the incumbent president did good or bad on which can be clicked on or off,and select republican or dem incumbent

-Unlimited points for custom candidates

-Elections with more than 2 candidates which can sim primaries,or even have like 2 dems to 1 rep to simulate third parties ( I think the more allowed the maryier)

-Let us change states starting %,ev,and delete states (so we can make like a custom old election for example



A built in ideology creator might be nice but would be very difficult to balance and do in a way that is friendly.

Instead, we're adding Steam workshop support so people can share the ideologies they create.

Any idea if custom candidates can actually have more points so they can at the very least be 'average' candidates and not just gimped versions of generic candidates.

Reply #4 from PolMach Forums Top

I've got 2 very basic improvements I would like to see:

1. As per a previous post, no hyphens or spaces in names prevents some high profile hyphenated or otherwise names from being included.

2. There's very little attention paid to the Bobblehead bodies. Every single woman is in a skirt. The two most high-profile female candidates of the last several election cycles wear pantsuits. And I mean, there are frequent patterns to their colors, too. Imagine Tulsi Gabbard. Do you imagine her in a black blazer and a blue dress, or do you imagine her all in white? Imagine Elizabeth Warren. Are you picturing a skirt?

Almost every male character is in the same black suit with either a blue tie or a red tie depending on party. Okay, this is honestly less egregious, but still, just sayin'. The newly added candidates are *fantastic* and distinctive by the way.

Thank you for outlining this schedule!