I agree. Seriously, I do not even know how to increase relationship with big business without accepting bribes. At low relations, refusing to veto the opioid bill is literally guaranteeing a lost for the midterms. And I do not know how to even raise the relationship high enough to not guarantee the -2 to the midterms. Can someone please tell me how to increase the relationship?
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Be rich, and work for him in your early career, appoint his preferred secretary of the treasury, you really have to go out of your way to make nice if you don’t want to completely piss him off while vetoing the opioid bill. I’m actually fine with the midterms as they are, with the caveat that I would prefer Popularity adding to the midterm score if it’s somehow above water even after the Iran thing and the end of the honeymoon period. Outside of that, historically, the incumbent president almost always loses Congress no matter what so. I do you think there should be more incentives to getting better midterm results, if only because those who invest money into it deserve something. A greater popularity jump, more willingness for some members of the opposing party to compromise, realizing that they need to play nice and look like they’re doing something to try and reverse the results next time, more opposing party members voting against the impeachment effort and even trying to kill it in committee, that sort of thing. The State of the economy almost never comes up at all, and I feel like that would be nice context to understand why/how The MC might get completely crushed in the midterms. I know you wanted to push that off for the second game, but the occasional mention of how bad/good things are right now, probably bad, my guess, would help
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I’ve made my fair share of notes on feedback thus far, but I’m in Chapter 5 and I really need to explain how much the continuity bothers me. (just got past the re-election announcement, so don’t spoil the rest)
The chapter starts with Year 4’s State of the Union Address (I presume it’s Year 4). It’s hard to tell exactly when this is due to the horribly mixed context signals we get - ‘past 3 years’ in the SOTU, ‘over a year until election night’ (is it not in November?!) ‘past 4 years’ in cabinet meeting, ‘a little over a year until election day’ from Jackson at Camp David? GUH!?
The current time-frame assumes that US politics has been overhauled in terms of timings over the next two decades. Obama announced his intent to run for a 2nd term in April 2011; W. Bush in May 2003; Clinton in April 1995. They had over a year and a half until election day. It’s necessary to announce this early so that they can get their campaign team (back) together ahead of the actual elections, put their name on the ballot for the (presumably ceremonial) primaries, etc. Realistically, the President starts considering the re-elect following the midterms. Which is pretty weird, yes, but that’s how the bizarre carousel of US politics operates. In a way, it’s weirder for them not to do so. Even if the norms have changed so that the President announces later by the 2040s, they would probably still have to make their decision in Year 3, out of respect for the primary system.
The fact that we seem to skip the third year entirely - the way that the first and fourth years get most of the focus - is a matter I’ll save for general feedback. All I ask is that the matter of announcing your re-election happens before the fourth year, because it honestly kills the immersion the way it works now. Of course, it’s also possible that the start of Chapter 5 does take place in Year 3, and I’m just not able to tell from the context indicators. Either way, it hurts my head.
I’m a pedantic guy who pays pretty close attention to the time in all manner of things, so I appreciate that not everybody cares as much as I do. However, on a basic level, it’s not hard to rectify the whacked-out context indicators, and it would do wonders for the immersion to patch that all up.
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Yeah, that’s just the way the game is written, the announcement is supposed to be year three, after the impeachment so I would place it late summer/early autumn, but we don’t get a specific timeframe for it. I agree it probably should be a little bit earlier
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But we see the State of the Union first? Were it not for that it would be easy to place it in autumn, but, last I checked, the SOTU happens in January-March. It would probably be fine if those two events were just switched around - Camp David trip, early campaign stuff (this in Year 3), then the SOTU (for Year 4). The problem as it stands is that it looks like you’re delivering the Year 4 SOTU before any of the Year 3 campaign stuff.
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Yeah, the pacing and order of events is a little bit too funky for my liking, as well
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Update coming out later today but I wanted to quickly comment on the timeframe of Chapter 5!
I’ll try to make this clearer in the writing, but the Chapter 5 SOTU is Year 3 (sometime between January and February since that’s customarily when), not Year 4. This is why you mention ‘past three years’ in your Address and why the election is still over a year away.
When you do make an announcement, it’s meant to be set around April or May of Year 3 – I’ll be sure to go back and make this clearer in dialogue, too.
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Ah, cool. That makes more sense, it’s just difficult to discern due to
A) The impeachment saga. Given that this starts right after the midterms, one infers that it drags on into the first few months of Y3, so we’re led to assume that the next Chapter takes place substantially later.
B) The aforementioned context muddling. Mentions of ‘the past 3 years’ in the SOTU (whereas 2 years would have passed by then, surely?) then ‘the past 4 years’ in the Cabinet meeting (it can be inferred that’s about the country not the administration, but still) and ‘a little over a year until election day’ at Camp David (not ‘a year and a half’) just make it pretty confusing.
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Definitely valid criticism and I’ll try to make it clearer – it was one of the downsides that came with deciding not to set the story in a specific year though since I can’t easily mark where years end. I’ll try to add in some changes before I release the update later tonight.
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Writer’s Diary #49/Public Beta Update #1
September 8th, 2024
The first update to the Public Beta is now here, and with it, all other versions of the demo have been deleted! I still have a lengthy to-do list, but I’ll get into the fixes and updates here!
- Broad changes: the midterms should now be easier to get a slightly better result in (you now get a +1 or +2 boost depending on your approval rating) and the election should now be much easier to win without corruption
- For the election, your running mate now has a slightly bigger role and I’ve also given you the opportunity early on in Chapter 5 to fundraise, boost your approval rating, or directly increase your campaign stat to help
- I’ve also tweaked the PAC Pledge question a bit – I’ve firstly added another way of answering and I’ve shifted when your approval rating is calculated so that the approval boost you get from taking no PAC money will boost your campaign stat
- The threshold for getting the spouse ultimatum has now been lowered by quite a bit – it should be possible to avoid the ultimatum from your spouse when announcing you’re running for re-election
- With that, a lot of the relationship checks for dealing with Bill have also been lowered – it should be a bit easier to get positive interactions without making every decision a pro-business one
- A bug has been fixed where New York and some other states were listed as safely Republican while playing as a Republican character, as has one where Democrats won over 3,000 seats in the Senate
- I’ve also tackled most (if not all) of the simpler grammar and typo fixes – thank you to everyone whose pointed those out to me! Notably among these were some pronoun issues. If you notice any additional ones following this update, please be sure to send me a message. Still, I think I’ve caught most of them!
To-Dos
- Revamp the impeachment sequence to allow your character to take a more active stance in combating it; part of this will also be including a mediaRelationship stat check to determine how the news (broadly) reports on the scandal/impeachment inquiry
- Making the Presidential debate slightly easier to win
- Including more decisions in the aftermath of Teddy following your return from your trip abroad
- Implement a few smaller-scale crises to allow your character to act more proactively rather than reactively (one of these will be the ability to use your pardon powers which I’m still brainstorming) and another two of them will allow you to use your powers as Commander-in-Chief & Chief Diplomat
I would love your help in pointing out where in the story you think these mini-crises would be best-placed! I think that later in Chapter 3 and throughout Chapter 4 are the best locations for them, but some specific areas within that general timeframe where you feel the story might lag a bit (or where you feel your character is being too passive) would be helpful. As I mentioned, I have a total of three of these smaller sequences planned.
Once again a quick thank you to all of you who have left comments and suggestions! I just haven’t had the time to give unique responses to all of them, but I assure you that every message is being added to my notes.
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Sharing feedback from a friend:
Hi! I played the game for the first time and I liked it. I have a small nitpick tho. I play with a fem MC and a male spouse. In the proposal scene, I wished he was the one who proposed to me rather than the other way around since the scene felt to me like it was made for a dude pov. It would have made it much sweeter for me if he had been the one to get down on his knee. Like making it a choice who is the one to propose.
She’d be grateful and I’m sure she’s not the only one who’d prefer to choose who proposes in that scene
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We get the chance to bribe Jacob Warner right at the beginning of the game, but just a thought, who said we need to bribe him with money? When it comes to access to the White House, the press tank is a feeding frenzy and you have different outlets all fighting over scraps and rumors. Offering him a direct lifeline to the presidency and sources is a very risky strategy, but it should keep him plenty happy while possibly letting a president favorable with the press manipulate what comes through the news a little. Teddy Roosevelt was a huge fan of the strategy.
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Great advice, at same time you can make an argument that an Mc with decent/high charisma+media rel should be able to negotiate a lower price for the information.
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The debate thing, right? Agreed there, but I was more thinking of during your inauguration when you’re talking to everybody at the party; I didn’t like how you could just blatantly bribe him right there and figured easier access to information would actually be better currency for a reporter
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I’m joking here but you could always write a side story about us using it to pardon a turkey.
But for the pardon powers what are you thinking about in such a scenario? Pardoning who? For political gain, personal reasons, idealistic reasons, etc?
I read you were thinking about a war scenario at some point in the story, is this still something you want to do? Otherwise are you thinking about doing something more simple like military operations?
Are you thinking about doing an expansion within the current diplomatic framework you have or is this going to be similar to the scenario of Saudi Arabia’s new King challenging us?
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I got the same issue…
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Something that kept nagging me is how little actual gridlock there is in Congress because in modern times, the opposing party loves to spam the filibuster. The game is fine as it is right now, but I thought, maybe a mention somewhere that the talking filibuster got reinstated? This would drastically cut down on how often it would get used, to the point where it would only be considered a last resort option instead of a general fuck you to whoever’s in power at the moment. It wouldn’t change anything mechanically or with the games events, but it would strengthen the worldbuilding and narrative framework
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Me too
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This should be fixed now!
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