Suggested fixes Fall 2022

[ebrk85]

13 minutes ago, pman said:

Yeah, that's a good point Orange- for example Great Depression for the economy leads to a -3 for incumbent party in elections. Anyway, the 2016 Playtest is wild. Spending is maxed out, we're in a Great Depression, our military is in crisis mode and all this is after a third party challenge and the incumbent President just had a majority of their cabinet rejected.

You are looking at the meters after I did the lingering phase which I hadn't posted on the forum yet. The meters are all tanked because you rejected the majority of the cabinet.

[pman]

19 minutes ago, OrangeP47 said:

The way I see it the current system is as it needs to be.  The meter penalties represent the people who will vote against an incumbent, regardless of party, when times are tough.  Party preference not being maxed negative at the same time represents high polarization meaning there's a lot of people who, regardless of tough times, will never ever ever vote for the other party.  Seeing as this is the year 2022 AD I think we can all understand that mindset and declare it realistic.  If it isn't you personally, it's likely your neighbor.

I agree to an extent. Form a multiplayer game playing extent, I agree. It encourages cooperation, especially in a divided government. With that said, I am not sure Congress gets held responsible for public frustration the same way the executive branch does, unless of course they're controlled by the same party.  In other words, I think the election bonus/penalty should be applied to the President's party, instead of simply all incumbents, at least not to the same extent.

It's hard to find a case study to test my point because divided governments during times of crisis are pretty unique. I'll cite 1992 because it comes to mind first. Mini crisis, small recession but divided government. The House Dems (majority) lose 9 seats or 2 % of their majority, the Senate Dems (majority) don't gain or lose any seats while the incumbent President loses 370 to 168. Now I know there was Perot and it was an odd election but it's hard to find an election with a divided government and a crisis so I think 92 is the best example of what I am trying to say. In that election, under the current penalty system, all incumbents would have been equally penalized. I am just not sure that holds up historically. It's just something I thought was worth mentioning, not a big deal either way!

Edited December 10, 2022 by pman

[pman]

10 minutes ago, ebrk85 said:

You are looking at the meters after I did the lingering phase which I hadn't posted on the forum yet. The meters are all tanked because you rejected the majority of the cabinet.

Of course, that makes sense!

Edited December 10, 2022 by pman

[ebrk85]

2 minutes ago, pman said:

I agree to an extent. Form a multiplayer game playing extent, I agree. It encourages cooperation, especially in a divided government. With that said, I am not sure Congress gets held responsible for public frustration the same way the executive branch does, unless of course they're controlled by the same party.  In other words, I think the election bonus/penalty should be applied to the President's party, instead of simply all incumbents, at least not to the same extent.

It's hard to find a case study to test my point because divided governments during times of crisis are pretty unique. I'll cite 1992 because it comes to mind first. Mini crisis, small recession but divided government. The House Dems (majority) lose 9 seats or 2 % of their majority, the Senate Dems (majority) don't gain or lose any seats while the incumbent President loses 370 to 168. Now I know there was Perot and it was an odd election but it's hard to find an election with a divided government and a crisis so I think 92 is the best example of what I am trying to say. In that election, under the current penalty system, all incumbents would have been equally penalized. I am just not sure that holds up historically. It's just something I thought was worth mentioning, not a big deal either way!

I believe that is how its works. At least as explained to me. The penalty for the Great Depression of "-3 to incumbent party in all elections" applies to the party of the President. Not all incumbents regardless of party.

[pman]

Just now, ebrk85 said:

I believe that is how its works. At least as explained to me. The penalty for the Great Depression of "-3 to incumbent party in all elections" applies to the party of the President. Not all incumbents regardless of party.

That makes sense, sorry for my misreading of it. I saw "-3 to incumbent party in all elections" and thought it applied to all incumbents.

[ebrk85]

1 minute ago, pman said:

That makes sense, sorry for my misreading of it. I saw "-3 to incumbent party in all elections" and thought it applied to all incumbents.

I wasn't sure myself the first time I read it and had to ask so totally understand why you thought of it that way.

[OrangeP47]

Yeah to be fair it's not worded the best, pretty sure in 1840 we had this conversation a few months ago when we first started.

[vcczar]

@OrangeP47 and others

I'm not going to touch the meters until the game is computerized. They're going to take a lot of tweaking and they are, I confess, the most experimental part of the game. I can't tell you how many times I've gone back and forth over the meters in the first year of working on this. At one point, I considered just have a simple up arrow and down arrow for all the categories with no measure of severity just because it was so difficult to get them "right." The current system has been the most successful in the sense that we haven't had massive issues with them, so I'm a little loathe to tinker with them until we can play the game on the computer so we can simulate a lot of results. 

One thing we don't know is how the meters are working though, say, 50+ years game time. Manual playtesting is so slow we haven't gotten there. You know, for instance, what happens when we have like 750 spending bills active that are impacting the meter? Fortunately, I added the repeatable increase debt ceiling legislation.. 

The one weakness I have as a creator is that I don't have Paradox's team of mathematicians and economics and---number savants--to figure this stuff out after brief trial and error. I'm a decidedly non-Math person (my weakest subject in school, although I aced logic classes and was great at chess) trying to create a very math-related mechanism in my game. 

What I expect is that early release comes out, through 100-200 playthroughs from players were find some flaws in the meters--nothing gamebreaking, probably--and some sort of numbers guy that loves to game volunteers to help figure something out. I'm hoping the early release phase brings in a lot of new people into the forum that are experts on economics, math--things I'm not an expert at. 

Overall, I do expect 50 pages worth of suggested changes in a couple weeks of early release. I'll be shocked, however, if there's anything gamebreaking. If there is, it will probably be a coding mistake and not any major issue from the Table of Contents rules. 

[ConservativeElector2]

On 12/10/2022 at 1:07 AM, vcczar said:

Maybe, I'll make it a % chance of automatic declining if someone has held elected office. 

Yeah imho it's better to have the possibility instead of saying it's forbidden. I mean it's technically not forbidden in real life as well to become FBI Director or Fed Chair after serving in Congress or as Gov.

[ConservativeElector2]

There are two Gov actions: use the office to criticize/praise the President. The outcome is that the president might be more likely to win or lose the next election in that state. But what happens if the President is already term-limited? Will the nominee of the same party be effected instead?

[pman]

26 minutes ago, ConservativeElector2 said:

There are two Gov actions: use the office to criticize/praise the President. The outcome is that the president might be more likely to win or lose the next election in that state. But what happens if the President is already term-limited? Will the nominee of the same party be effected instead?

Within this, I believe there is an additional 5% clause which says the President's party could receive -1 in the same election. So my understanding is that it there's 3 possible outcomes 1) nothing, 2) Incumbent President receives -1 (10%chance) and 5 % chance of -1 for President's party in next pref. 

I wonder why we were both looking at that, haha 🙂

[pman]

I found this legis prop "breakup the Duopoloy with Strict Regulations, Weaking the Two-Party System. Does anyone have any experience with this? Could a third party actually win or are the meters/state bias so pre-set that it's impossible to win as a 3rd party?

[Murrman104]

In the Nuclear age start the Dixiecrats i.e the Traditionalists in the Democratic party don't start with anybody who is able fo filibuster bills in the senate. This leaves it very smooth to pass a civil rights act immediately. I would suggest giving someone like Richard Russel, James Eastland  or John C Stennis Puritan to counteract this. 

Edited December 12, 2022 by Murrman104

[Ich_bin_Tyler]

In the Civil War playtest we had the Prohibition in Kansas even trigger, which awards extra points for Govs in the Great Plains passing prohibition laws. None of the CPUs chose this option, so the event really didn't do much.

I would suggest for events like this to maybe limit what Gov Actions can be taken so that these types of events are more likely to result in some historical actions. I saw that there are events to trigger prohibition laws starting in the Gilded Age, so maybe this event needs to be removed altogether or changed in some way.

[vcczar]

46 minutes ago, Ich_bin_Tyler said:

In the Civil War playtest we had the Prohibition in Kansas even trigger, which awards extra points for Govs in the Great Plains passing prohibition laws. None of the CPUs chose this option, so the event really didn't do much.

I would suggest for events like this to maybe limit what Gov Actions can be taken so that these types of events are more likely to result in some historical actions. I saw that there are events to trigger prohibition laws starting in the Gilded Age, so maybe this event needs to be removed altogether or changed in some way.

I'll have it automatically trigger prohibition in Kansas, it it isn't already. 

[vcczar]

47 minutes ago, Ich_bin_Tyler said:

In the Civil War playtest we had the Prohibition in Kansas even trigger, which awards extra points for Govs in the Great Plains passing prohibition laws. None of the CPUs chose this option, so the event really didn't do much.

I would suggest for events like this to maybe limit what Gov Actions can be taken so that these types of events are more likely to result in some historical actions. I saw that there are events to trigger prohibition laws starting in the Gilded Age, so maybe this event needs to be removed altogether or changed in some way.

Actually it already does that. So I'll just keep it. 

[Bushwa777]

Just found one in the game.  Last night when doing the zoom call, VC said that we can only pick the people in white outline but I was just "playing" and I was able to choose greyout people 

Edited December 14, 2022 by Bushwa777

[vcczar]

31 minutes ago, Bushwa777 said:

Just found one in the game.  Last night when doing the zoom call, VC said that we can only pick the people in white outline but I was just "playing" and I was able to choose greyout people 

Oh, you just reminded me that I am allowing for a small chance of taking greyout people, but you risk a larger chance of losing your draft pick. I don't know if he programmed that in. So I misspoke. 

[Bushwa777]

2 minutes ago, vcczar said:

Oh, you just reminded me that I am allowing for a small chance of taking greyout people, but you risk a larger chance of losing your draft pick. I don't know if he programmed that in. So I misspoke. 

What does that mean losing your draft pick?

[Willthescout7]

24 minutes ago, Bushwa777 said:

What does that mean losing your draft pick?

If you fail to draft that person, you get skipped in line. You don't get to pick someone else ans try again

[10centjimmy]

Raising this due to the recent elections in the Civil War playtest. Full disclosure, I'm not a playtester in that game just an outside observer so I'm not party to their internal discussions. 

Reconstruction has nowhere near the level of impact it should. IRL the electorate was solely made up of people who swore loyalty To the union and did not fight for the confederacy. As such, the electorate and candidates were mostly recently freed slaves and republicans to a T.  In the playtest,  democrats (all of whom left the union) dominated in elections). This would've made it very difficult IRL to get 13, 14, and 15 amendments passed.

This can be open for discussion, but this needs a pretty big rework for historical play. 

Edited December 18, 2022 by 10centjimmy

[OrangeP47]

2 hours ago, 10centjimmy said:

Raising this due to the recent elections in the Civil War playtest. Full disclosure, I'm not a playtester in that game just an outside observer so I'm not party to their internal discussions. 

Reconstruction has nowhere near the level of impact it should. IRL the electorate was solely made up of people who swore loyalty To the union and did not fight for the confederacy. As such, the electorate and candidates were mostly recently freed slaves and republicans to a T.  In the playtest,  democrats (all of whom left the union) dominated in elections). This would've made it very difficult IRL to get 13, 14, and 15 amendments passed.

This can be open for discussion, but this needs a pretty big rework for historical play. 

We will be preparing a large document of suggested changes based on this experience, but we're waiting for the dust to settle a bit more.  We feel we need to process everything as it's originally written first to get the full picture before we can make our recommendations.

What I was thinking, so far though, is that Southern Reconstruction while active moves those state leans more red, and Northern Reconstruction while active moves those states more blue, which could achieve the desired effect while leaving the a la carte choices in place, but we have a few more things we want to check out first.

Edited December 18, 2022 by OrangeP47

[OrangeP47]

@10centjimmy since I edited it real fast you might not have seen it, but I added in what I was thinking one potential fix is.

[10centjimmy]

1 hour ago, OrangeP47 said:

@10centjimmy since I edited it real fast you might not have seen it, but I added in what I was thinking one potential fix is.

Ah yeah. Well that's something, but it doesn't feel big enough you know? The goal of blue Party for this period should be to prevent the Civil War in the South at all costs, especially since they're geographically dominant. Vice versa for the red party. And the opposite holds true for Essex in the north. The punishment angle should be dramatic where a single party will dominate and turn inwards for a few cycles competing with themselves before ultimately reenfranchising the South/ North in return for domestic stability. 

Either no elections/delayed in the seceding states or only eligible candidates (pols that didn't abandon the union during the Civil War), or a massive + party preference for the other party, in this case red. 

Edited December 18, 2022 by 10centjimmy

[OrangeP47]

9 minutes ago, 10centjimmy said:

Ah yeah. Well that's something, but it doesn't feel big enough you know? The goal of blue Party for this period should be to prevent the Civil War in the South at all costs, especially since they're geographically dominant. Vice versa for the red party. And the opposite holds true for Essex in the north. The punishment angle should be dramatic where a single party will dominate and turn inwards for a few cycles competing with themselves before ultimately reenfranchising the South/ North in return for domestic stability. 

Either no elections/delayed in the seceding states or only eligible candidates (pols that didn't abandon the union during the Civil War), or a massive + party preference for the other party, in this case red. 

That's why this is a prototype solution, we have a lot of disparate legis props and things we need to consider we're only going to find by advancing the playtest a bit further and doing some dives into the files.  We're not ready to propose a fix just yet.