Thoughts on the legislation stuff after a second run through; when you push forward a proposal that deviates from your parties wishes, there should probably be a little bit more into what factors into getting support from the other party. Playing as a Democratic president with a Republican VP And 60+ leadership relationship on both sides, and going for the maximum lobbying effort, my moderate abortion bill died in the house by one vote. Admittedly I’m glad that it’s much harder now, but… Ouch. Makes sense that even Republican leadership wouldn’t have been able to get everybody on their side, but considering how much of a golden ticket was being waived under their noses right there, and especially with how chummy I had already been with them up to that point, I thought I could get more from them. I haven’t tried the conservative abortion bill yet, so I’ll see how that changes the margins
Is high media approval important?
Yep
Does it impact approval rating, or are they two separate modifiers?
Depends, money is more important. In fact I’d rank money at 1, a good touch with the public at 2 and media at 3. Played a rich “man of the people” as a moderate Dem today and got a total blue wave in the reelection and a mid-terms in which the R’s just made fools of themselves with another 32 ballots for speaker and another attempted impeachment that went absolutely nowhere. Seems in this game salon socialism is the best kind of socialism.
Ending Spoiler
“Well folks there is no doubt about it: tonight has been a historic one for the President, securing a landslide victory with 462 electoral votes, becoming the first Democratic candidate since Johnson in 1964 to win more than 400 votes in the Electoral College.”
“Tonight isn’t just about the presidency, Rick,” one of the panelists interjects. "The Democratic Party has also captured commanding majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. With an incredible 62 seats in the Senate and 311 in the House — the largest majorities in modern history by the way
Got this error at the dueling national convention. For reference, I have a liberal republican president and a democratic VP. Currently getting the same error code on both the dueling/home state conventions.
This should be fixed now – thanks for the flag!
Maybe you can get a little boost from keeping the the campaign manager during the iran scandal. Cause it only seems bad for you and has no effect(except relation stats) if you decide to keep her employed.
Are we supposed to lose approval rating following the foreign country trip and doing the populist choice? I did Asia, make SEATO, and refused to drop sanctions and my approval rating dropped from 67% to 63%.
Also got no change in approval rating following my American exceptionalism speech at the UN if there was supposed be an uptick here.
I think it should stay as is. Keeping Lilah is meant to be doing the right thing even if it gets you nothing.
Popularity declining slowly is supposed to be intentional, I’m pretty sure, part of that drop might’ve had something to do with the hurricane response, my guess
There always something that i forget to write, for some reason after i announce i run for second term the breafing said the pac fund raising to around 80.000.000 yet it never rise in the stats it is just some sweet word from my people’s?
Writer’s Diary #50 & Public Beta Update #2
September 15th, 2024
Sticking with my weekly schedule, the second update to the Public Beta is now here! I have a lot on my to-do list still, but this update has come with some new content, with additional new content planned for next week.
Anything blurred is a spoiler either for current story additions or upcoming additions. If you don’t like those – don’t unblur the spoilers for this update.
- Firstly, the boring stuff: I have continued to fix some simple typos and grammatical errors as they’re sent to me. I am aware of a good deal of issues with tense in Chapter 4, which I hope to work on throughout the week
- I’ve also made a few additions, and finally have re-worked the impeachment sequence! You now have the ability to take a more proactive stance in a number of ways, and can now squash the impeachment inquiry to prevent it from ever going to the House floor – your mediaApproval stat will also now play a role
- To make your character feel a bit more “proactive” rather than reactive, a few more decisions have been added in!
- The first is an additional decision in the aftermath of Teddy where you can select a response plan (I still have to write in a later update where the results of your choice are revealed)
- The other is a smaller-scale crisis which you’ll find early in Chapter 4. This involves a cyber attack on a major financial institution and there are a number of ways to respond!
To-Dos
- A smaller to-do, but I am planning on adding the ability to choose who proposes to who in the prologue
- I did mention how I hoped to somehow incorporate your pardon powers into the story – I still have no specific ideas on what specifically to include (or where to place it), so I’m open to suggestions here (I also may just push this depending on how long it takes to write the two additions below)
- As I mentioned in my last update, I have two other mini-crises that I plan on adding:
- The first will be in Chapter 2, right before your first address to Congress. This one will involve a potential satellite collision and will give readers the chance to either get a “win” in early on if their key legislation failed, or notch a second win ahead of their address
- The second will be in Chapter 3, right before your speech to the UNGA. This one will (as I hinted at) involve your powers as Commander-in-Chief as you oversee an operation to assassinate or extract a terrorist leader located within a compound
My last major to-do is trying to improve the interactivity within Chapter 3, as I know the story has lagged a bit for many readers between long periods of text as each state visit slowly gets to its main focus (typically at the very end). Obviously, with four different huge branches, it’s difficult to add in a lot of meaningful choices with each one (and is quite time-consuming for me to go through to re-read and edit on top of other changes).
As such, I’d really appreciate any specific instances where you think a choice (even a less consequential one) would be helpful. One person mentioned increasing page lengths (which I am planning on doing), but any other suggestions would be incredibly helpful! Obviously, the addition of this smaller event at the end of Chapter 3 (in my opinion) will help give the chapter a boost, but that event won’t occur until the conclusion of the state visit portion.
Again a huge thank you to everyone! I’m hoping to get all new content written and tense issues fixed for next week’s update so the next few weeks can just be polishing! If I’m super productive, I’m hoping to release a mid-week update to give more time for workshopping and editing these new events, but no promises there!
While (obviously) everyone will be fictional characters I do have a few ideas. You could have pardon powers be used to be in sync with the legislation and executive orders the protagonist proposed. You could also have the pardon powers be used to pardon allies/high profile personalities (or at least pro-player party) of the party. You can have it be used to issue a blanket pardon, though this is up to your discretion. If there ever was a prisoner exchange needed then a pardon would of course be needed for the prisoners being released.
You could probably place pardon powers as a side plot somewhere in chapter two or three, considering the game has an impeachment inquiry, it might be a bad idea to use it during that time. Of course at your discretion you can place multiple instances of using pardon powers in-game.
I have created a fictitious but plausible pardon scenario that blends together several federal cases, and I invite you to discuss it.
The Supreme Court ordered the execution of the perpetrator of a series of murders that allegedly took place 10 years ago on an Indian reservation in New Jersey. (If the player had ordered a moratorium on the death penalty, the Supreme Court also ordered the cancellation of that order.)
However, the death row inmate submitted a pardon application to MC through his lawyer.
The reason given was that the crime was committed outside of an Indian reservation. He claims that the court made a mistake in determining the location of the crime because he dumped the body on the reservation. (If this claim were true, it would be a grave legal error to sentence him to death, since it is not a federal crime and New Jersey is an abolitionist state.)
He has also filed a preliminary argument for a reduction in his sentence due to racial discrimination.
Should we pardon those on federal death row without sufficient evidence, an unprecedented move since the Civil War and a major interference with judicial power, or risk human life and dignity in favor of precedent and legal certainty?
I would also like to see lack content gaps filled during the current Chapter 3 overseas visits, for example by making the currently defunct Saudi Arabian Human Rights Charter operational and by providing more options in Japan.
The game have don’t have many options to do in the branch of goverment like suzerain and the branching path also not many but still not bad and can be said good 
Also we need more crisis or good impact in the game as result of our decision
Note
Need to delete previous comment because I’m sleepy and i forget to add many words so the review not really saying what i want to say
Thank you for the update and don’t forget to change the update tittle of the thread, stay healthy
Might as well suggest something, Lets say perhaps some of the Big Businesses or Their CEOS are in big trouble and need help from the MC and in exchange for the pardon the MC could request a Favor from them, maybe one of the favors could be something like attacking the Opposing Candidate in the elections and in general help the MC win the election, or maybe help the MC with congress in the 2nd Term
Finished Chapter 5, and oh boy was it gratifying to win re-election. I appreciate you responding to feedback when you updated so efficiently, @RFKramer. With that said, I’ve collated some notes of general feedback throughout the entire book (I haven’t had time to play through the last update just for the purpose of my notes, so forgive me if some of the feedback’s already been acted upon):
From most to least serious
- Major, administration-defining bill in the first 100 Days? Guh? (the Civil Rights Act, Reagan’s tax reform, Obamacare - all late in the President’s first year or second year.) Someone made a comment about how ‘universal healthcare should be impossible to pass.’ I disagree with that, but I think they have a point about how it’s passed quite simply. Taking Obamacare as an example, it was passed a) over a year after Obama’s inauguration and b) after substantial revisions (e.g. taking out the public insurance option). A hypothetical universal healthcare bill could, for example, be proposed to cover preventative care, but have that be bartered out of the final bill. Something like that.
- The state of the economy doesn’t come up much, which is puzzling given that we inherit a recession. I appreciate that reworking the book to take a stronger economics focus would be pretty difficult to say the least, but maybe we could get more updates on the progress of the economic recovery? Of course, I appreciate that juggling everything is difficult, so I can’t ask for much on this front.
- On the election: I won by a margin of 350-188 in the Electoral College (I’m guessing that’s an 8/10 on the victory scale?), but I don’t remember anything about the popular vote. I’m not asking for you to model how many millions of votes each candidate got, but a percentage would be nice. Secondly, my decisive (but not landslide) win spurred me to get congressional supermajorities, which… look, presidential wins do have coattails, but going from a clear minority in Congress to overwhelming dominance just doesn’t happen anymore. Look at 1996 - Clinton swept to victory by a crushing 379-159, but the Democrats made pretty much no headway in Congress. Not that the 2044 election has to imitate the '96 election, but I would like to hear your reasoning as to how a big presidential win translates into massive congressional majorities (again, last I checked).
- I’ve seen quite a bit of moaning about the presidential debate. I don’t necessarily think it should be easy for the President to win the first debate; when do they ever? Since 1976, the President has arguably triumphed in the first debate just once. Great public speakers like Obama and Reagan even bombed in their first showings. The problem is that that’s everything: people are going to be irked if we only get one debate and we’re nearly guaranteed to get our asses kicked. Obama and Reagan got to come back to stronger debate performances; I appreciate that writing two (or more) debates is not strictly easy or necessary, but it’s something to keep in mind.
- This is more of a mechanical question. Correct me if I’m wrong, but last I checked the midterms operate on a ‘counter’ of 0 to 5, with 5 being a very respectable showing and 1 or 0 being a thumping loss. If this is true, why is 0 as bad as 1? Surely if we’ve done at least one thing right in the runup to the midterm, we shouldn’t be punished as if we’ve made no progress?
- I played through the previous update of Chapter 5 with the political spouse, so maybe this is just a them thing, but their approval didn’t drop at all upon learning of the affair (again, last I checked). They did seem upset (I know I would be), but their approval in the ‘stats’ tab was unchanged. Is this intentional; if so, why?
- One of the executive orders establishes the National Economic Council, which… already exists. Fair enough if the NEC was disbanded and we’re re-establishing it (crazy things could happen in this hypothetical future), but I feel like something like that deserves mentioning.
- I believe if you lobby the major bill, the game tells you that it comes from the PAC account, but it’s actually taken out of your personal account (again, last I checked). This is where the criticisms start to get nitpicky.
- In chapter 3, the UK monarch, if you try to negotiate with them about Irish reunification, likens it to a US state seceding. This argument is stupid: there’s no ‘Republic of Texas’ that currently exists with which the US state could hypothetically reunify. The problem isn’t simply that the justification is stupid, though, it’s that the US President themselves doesn’t push back on it at all. I appreciate that your negotiation with them about the issue is supposed to fail, but I felt like I had to point this out.
- On the prologue, I’m just not sure how viable it is to go straight from state Attorney General or Mayor to President. This is another matter where rectifying it isn’t so simple (it’s pretty lame to have only two paths to the nomination - adding in a ‘cabinet secretary’ path opens up various other issues), but again, it’s worth pointing out.
- There’s a lot of small, simple proofreading stuff that writers necessarily just have to deal with - I trust you’ll handle that, and it’s not the end of the world if some oversights slip through. Moments like ‘eight months since election night’ right after the Inauguration in January (Ch1); referring to the (female) MC with ‘Does the President really have no issue blowing off his loved ones’ (Ch4); the mythical ‘cool glass of tea’ that has replaced the water I chose at the start (Ch4); right now I’m not going to replay the whole book yet again just for the sake of nitpicking typos/bugs (esp. since some of them might have been fixed), you get the picture.
- Finally, the greatest nitpick of all time: there have not been ‘49 other people’ to serve as President, because Grover Cleveland served twice. Yeah, this is me being pedantic, sorry.