I’m in the process of adding a new ‘political honeymoon’ option, which I may enable by default. Basically, this makes political capital higher at the start of the game, and it tails off over time. The idea is to represent the way that fresh new governments are given a bit of a media and voter honeymoon, where they get the benefit of the doubt. Remember Bush’s early years or the early year for Blair?
After a long time, especially past 2 terms, people become more entrenched and angry, and getting policy changes made will be harder. I’m hoping that the political capital changes will reflect this.
I have a version of the game that does it, and can get a patch to anyone interested in giving feedback on it before I make it part of the main game. You need the full version, not the demo. Post here or email me at cliff AT positech…
I played a few times with the new option on now. (using an un-modded version of the game)
As for my first thoughts on it - i feel the difference in gameplay is rather small, i still use the same strategy to win, at least playing on the average difficulty.
I will try now how it affects the game on lower and higher difficulties.
I am not completely sure of it, but maybe the effect should be a little bit stronger (maybe the “honeymoon” should wear out more quickly), or better yet - you can make the option a slider instead of a checkbox, to allow player control of the effects strenght, like with cynicism - this way you could simulate a lot more of possible real-world scenarios (in some cases the introductory bonus can be a lot bigger or rather small) I think you could name such a slider something like initial support,thus giving the possibility of initial setting of the amount of support and votes your party had when the initial victory ocurred.
Interesting. I’m a bit wary of adding too many sliders, because people tend to fiddle with all of them, and then have an unbalanced game and not be sure why. It would be ideal to get a good compromise setting, and still allow it to be toggled off.
Maybe it does need to be more severe, as you actually need less capital towards later terms anyway, because most of your ‘big changes’ are made by then.
If anyone else wants to try it, let me know. I’m still thinking about how to make it work better.
Cliff, i’ll test this, i’m at hardy24 [at] gmail [dot] com
On the sliders Cliff, I think perhaps people would better able to set up a balanced game if sliders had some “sticky” points with some descriptive indicators, like they are on certain policies in the game.