Loving it so far!
I’ve got a bunch of feedback, but this particular one is a reproducible bug in v1.04:
Members & activists will suddenly drop to 0, will have some effect on popularity, but I can rescue popularity, win an election, but the the membership and activists will remain at 0 even after an election win.
interesting. do they return to normal after a few turns? It does take time for voters to respond to changes in their happiness and have it reflected in party membership, or activism, but it might be that these delays are too fixed and need to be variable… Do you have a save game available from just after the drop by any chance? I would like to take a look at the causes.
I’ve emailed you a saved game Cliff. Same subject as this thread.
I think I may have had this bug in Democracy 3, not 100% confident though
Actually the democracy 3 bug was different, this one is more subtle (not a bug as such…anyway…)
I looked at the save game, and everything is working as the code intends, however…it needs improving because of how harshly it works. Here is a rough explanation:
Each party has an approval level they center around. In 2 parties that 100% and 0% (you and the opposition) for 3 parties its 100%, 50%, 0%. When voters approval of the government gets close to those points, they get sympathy for that party. When their sympathy goes over a certain level, they join the party, when it goes even higher, they become activists.
We define ‘close’ in this sense as around 10% variance, plus 10% based on the activism of the individual voter. Note that young people have higher activism than average. So for an example:
If voter A has 86% approval of the government, and 60% activism, then he needs to be with 10% + 6% = 16% of the party base line (100%) to gain sympathy for it. He is only 14% away from this, so he gains sympathy. If nothing changes, eventually he will join, if their approval goes higher they will become an activist (leaving works in reverse as you expect).
So whats the problem?
Its too harsh. There is not (yet) fuzziness enough. The 10% variance for activism is too narrow, and the sympathy leads to immediate party membership change, rather than gradual (which is how D3 did it).
What I need is to have a variable rate at which an individual joins or leaves a party, rather than being immediately based on sympathy (In other words it takes time for them to realize that yes…they REALLY do identify with these people a lot!), and I likely need to fuzz that 10% a bit higher, and check we have a smooth distribution of activism.
So when I do all this, in the save game given, what should happen is the party membership WILL have dropped really low due to your actions, but it would have taken more turns, and there would still be a few desperate stragglers who have stayed with the party out of misplaced loyalty 
I’m wondering if this helps (new UI for tooltips with the new code as described)
The voter I have hovered over there is interesting because they are green (in your party) but not very happy (approval 70%). Their party sympathy is higher than their approval, which suggests its going to drop over time (at a rate determined by their loyalty). So to recap:
Innate Activism shows how likely someone is to join any party (they are the politically active types, willing to join a party even if they don’t agree 100%).
Innate Loyalty shows how ‘sticky’ their party membership is. People with high loyalty are slow to join, but slow to leave.
Is this helpful/interesting or confusing as hell?
…i also took the opportunity to add some more data to the focus group screen so you can see it there too, to make it clear this is individually simulated for each voter.
I think this helps Cliff. And kind of mirrors real-life - e.g. The Brexiters in May’s party Tory at the time.
