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Constructive Results of AMPU Summer Playtest


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11 hours ago, Cal said:

Throughout history, we’ve had a few repeat nominees and it seems likely that President Trump will run for office in 2024. William Jennings Bryan, Trump, and George Wallace are the three that come to mind. All fit into the populist category. In fact, these are really the only populists that ran for President in any serious manner that I can think of, so it’s significant that ALL of them did not retire after electoral defeat.

It seems to me that retirement rolls should be modified to reflect this. Populists with controversial have the option of using the military to overturn an election in game, but I would argue that the chance that a populist nominee or president retires from the game after electoral loss should be lower than a non populist given the sample of populists IRL. I’m not sure exactly what would be the exact numbers, but here is what I would consider.

Losing populist presidential nominee 50% -> 25%

Losing populist President 95% -> 75%

is it a huge change? No, but it is still significant and gives populists a bit more realistic flavor IMO. Without this sort of change, it’s difficult to see WJB seeking office the amount of times he did IRL or for Trump to even have the possibility of running again in game.

I had planned to make a change similar to this, and I made my change. Basically, any one-term president that loses will have only a 50% chance of retiring now. Any losing nominee that is under 60 years of age will now have only a 25% chance of retiring.

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33 minutes ago, Cal said:

Am I crazy, or were there once rules for presidents/VPs gaining command or other traits/abilities on election/reelection?

Should be there unless it got deleted in the various copy+pasting of the rules through various versions of the rules. 

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38 minutes ago, Cal said:

Am I crazy, or were there once rules for presidents/VPs gaining command or other traits/abilities on election/reelection?

 

5 minutes ago, vcczar said:

Should be there unless it got deleted in the various copy+pasting of the rules through various versions of the rules. 

They must have been deleted. I added some new ones.

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13 minutes ago, Cal said:

Great! I was so confused not seeing them in either document.

Yeah, this isn't the first time that something disappeared. Sometimes, I can't remember if I did so purposely or if it happened on accident. I'll admit, I'm a cluttery, disorganized person. I've had to really strengthen a lot of weaknesses in the process of making this game.

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Finally got through the Congress in Session part of the rules, adding in the new traits. Nothing big, just more flavor. I kind of like the idea of the "Passive" trait. Why it might suck to have a "Passive" Speaker, for instance, an ally who doesn't want a Speaker of their party swaying things too much, might help vote for a "Passive" Speaker, which means their faction will have less interference from the Speaker. 

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There's now more flavor to signing/vetoing a bill. It's now possible a president is basically a puppet. If they are both "pliable" and "passive" then a manipulative Key Advisor, VP, or relevant cabinet member will make all the veto decision. Having both of these weak traits is rare, but could lead to interesting situations in which a player props up an electable president and maneuvers their presidency with an unelected "king"

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Added rules for "predictable" Congress people. They can pose a problem for a faction if they don't align with the faction leader. 

A president with both "passive" and "pliable" will be a puppet when it comes to Pres Actions.

A president with "Crisis Manager" gets an extra command to deal with a crisis. 

"Jurisprudence" and higher Judicial ability plays more of a role in SC compelled retirements, nominations, and confirmations.

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I'm now splitting up the election tab into separate docs and adding in the new traits. 

Primaries are mostly unchanged. 

Convention has more inter-ballot actions. The most unique is that a candidate with both "Controversial" and "Propagandist" can lie to get momentum at the convention. 

The Platform Creation now holds some issues for a "Micromanager." Someone with this trait must approve any plank made by an ally. He or she can block it and replace it but at the risk of gaining "Disharmonious" and a drop of the snubbed faction's ideological enthusiasm. 

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26 minutes ago, MrPotatoTed said:

Sure thing. If you do change it on the master, be sure to change it on ours too.

Yeah, I'm going to change it sometime this weekend. Tomorrow, most likely. I hope I can get to it before you start Congress in Session. I'm still trying to think on how to fix it. I got an idea. 

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24 minutes ago, vcczar said:

Yeah, I'm going to change it sometime this weekend. Tomorrow, most likely. I hope I can get to it before you start Congress in Session. I'm still trying to think on how to fix it. I got an idea. 

@MrPotatoTed I'd advise not moving to the Congress in Session until I figure this out. I thought I had a simple fix, but now I'm just confused by my own creation. I need a solid hour at the CPU undistracted to figure it out, which is something I usually can't get when I'm at home. Supposed to rain this week so won't have my CPU on campus. This means my best time to figure it out is to wake up really early before I go to work and try to figure it out. 

The right fix might be to re-separate these meters. But that might also make it more confusing. If I re-separate them. I might want to remerge them. Maybe the way it currently is makes the most sense but for whatever reason I forget what my logic was. I may just need to recalculate the Rev-Budget part on all the proposals, but I'm not sure how I can do that in a way that will quickly allow me to copy+past what you have. The master sheet is a little different than what you have right now. 

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@MrPotatoTed Ok, I think I figured out the first step. I'm deleting the part in the meter that has "Revenue Crisis" and "Budget Crisis." They are not merged to "Rev-Budget Crisis." From this, I'll likely have to change some of the Rev-Budget things on the Legis Props, Exec Actions, etc. This might take make a few days to fix the Legislation. Stop at Congress in Session, when you get to it, and I'll let you know if things look fine. 

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@MrPotatoTed So, just merging "Revenue Crisis" and "Budget Crisis" to create a "Rev-Budget Crisis" seems to have done the trick. Pretty simple. 

I'll just have to explain to players that the good end means that the country is basically saving money -- Revenue is greater than Spending. The worse part is that Spending is greater than Revenue. The confusion was that I was trying to account for the amount of revenue and the amount of spending sort of separately but in the same meter. Just having one allowable crisis for the meter fixes that. I basically took away the Revenue Crisis mainly, which implies that underspending was due to little revenue. That's not necessarily the case, so it was easy to get rid of that one.

I'm now going through every legis prop, Pres Action to see if the #s align with this change

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@MrPotatoTed Alright, the Rev-Budget % seem fine in Legis Prop and Pres Actions. Will probably mess around with them when the game is being developed, but they're good for the playtest. On the master sheets, I've marked them for what crisis they work with. For the playtest, if anything improves a meter in crisis by 10% chance or more, it is a crisis legislation. Since the master sheet is different and has more columns than your sheet, I can't easily copy+paste the differences. The 10% should be easy to follow. I advise having players mark a bill as dealing with a crisis when proposing a bill or proposing a repeal. Keep in mind that some repeals are crisis bills because they may help the Rev-Budget meter with a repeal. For instance, "Troop Surge" hurts the Rev-Budget meter by more than 10%, so repealing it will help. 

If identifying these really slows you down, let me know and I'll go through when I have over an hour free to mark all of them. 

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For the master sheets, I've also now finished marking those that need to be repealed to help with a crisis. Lots of options for every ideology. Some things can "help" both as a proposal and as a repeal. That's because a lot of bills and actions have a chance of working, doing nothing, or backfiring. 

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@MrPotatoTed clarified the rules for retiring to run for office. This only happens in the primary era. That is, to run in the primaries, some offices will require a resignation to run. This is an issue only once primaries are nationwide. If only 10 states have primaries, a candidate might hold on to their office and stay out of those primaries and just try to win it at the Convention, for instance.

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Now reading The House by Robert V. Remini, which is about the US House and it's history. This might help in fleshing out some US House members and possibly could lead to some minor changes in the Congress in Session. I had read a book on the history of the Senate two years ago. 

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