I’ve just been playing Democracy 2, was doing very successfully, opinion polls showing that I would get near 100% of the vote. My party membership was about 10%. I minimised the game to write a message on this forum, and when I maximised it again to go to the next turn, it said that my party membership was 0! Not sure why this has happened - my party membership has been stable for ages, and this is a sudden drop from around 10% to literally zero! Any ideas?
was it actually set to zero or just a display glitch? in other words, the next turn did it jump back to where it should be?
Either way it sounds like a bug, but knowing which is the case will help me to track it down. Do you know any guaranteed way to reproduce that problem?
cheers
No, it seems to have been set to zero and I have played it on for quite a few turns and it has just stuck at zero. I do not know how it occurred - I have only played one game of Democracy 2 and as I said the only thing I did that seemed any different from what I did on the other turns was minimised it for about 20 minutes while I wrote a message on this forum, although I cannot see how that could have caused the problem.
I now have another problem also - I was just trying to load my saved game from last night to have another look at the problem, and it has come up with an error: “Warning - > Manifesto option not found [&s]:. \SourceCode\SIM_Manifesto.cpp” (with 218 at the end of the message, but for some bizaare reason I cannot write it in this message otherwise it crashes the forum with a 406 error) and then crashes. This happens on both my saved games so far (one I saved just after the party membership bug, and another I saved later in that game) plus the autosave. Any ideas?
Hmmm. I shall investigate. Can you email me the save games to cliff AT positech.co.uk They are in your mydocuments/democracy2 / savegames folder.
Thanks.
got something like the same bug:
i choosed the freedom party to beginn. For about 3 turns my amount of PartyMembers was constant about 450’000. Then some turns later i take a look again it was on zero. This never changed again until i was assigned 2 turns before Election.
Is that possible, having no Partymembers even if i have an approval of about 30%?
It is very possibkle, althought he suddenness seems strange.
Basically people need to be very strongly in favour of your party, and remain so for a set period before they join up. You can even have 100% approval in terms of voting intention and zero party members.
think of it like this:
You can have an extremist party, like the British national party. Their share of he vote is low, because most people dislike their policies. But the people who do like them tend to REALLY like them, so they are more likely to be members.
Then you have the ‘moderate’ party, People are generally in favour of them, but can’t get that excited about them, so nobody bothers joining.
This is all modelled in the game.
So to some extent, if your party is small and the opposition party is big, and you are worried about voter turnout, you might want to pander slightly to your hardcore supporters, to tip them over the edge from being passive supporters to active members, that way you have activists able to encourage higher turnout at the election.
I will check the code for any bugs, but it might be that all the party members were just on the verge of disenchantment with the party, and they were all the same cross-section of voters. A subtler system, where each voter had a variable level of ‘stickiness’ to party affiliation may be a better model for a future version.
Have just E-mailed my saved games to you now. Hope they help you to find the problem.
I read your post about all the members leaving at once - it doesn’t seem very likely that 10% of the population would suddenly all decide to leave the party at once, especially as I had a huge amount of support at the time, although I suppose it is possible. It does seem rather incredible though that not a single citizen would want to be a member of my party, despite the fact that we won the election virtually unanimously and had solved all the problems that we had been set.
The other party’s membership had also diminished over time to practically zero, although I don’t think that was anything to do with the bug. However, it seems like the public must have become hugely turned off by politics - I suppose living in a virtual utopia, may be they turned their mind to other issues rather than politics!
Just fixed the manifesto bug. Cheers for that. I’ll investigate the membership code now. Hopefully there will be a patch tomorrow with lots of fixes 
.
Hahahahahahaha
I think I’ve found it.
You have reached a point where the level of cynicism amongst your voters is so high that it prevents ANYONE from being pleased enough to join the party
It looks like pretty much everyone in your country is ecstatically happy with the policies, but you will note that they all have the same approval, which comes out as the max happiness (100%) minus the maximum cynicism. And this value happens to be below the threshold at which they join a party.
So in fact, the game is working as intended. The reason everyone quit the party the same day must have been a policy decision that kicked them over the edge cynicism wise. Did you mention anything about weapons of mass destruction maybe?
I will investigate the possibility of some more fuzziness, so that this isnt such a sudden issue, but that may have to wait till a later expansion.
Hi,
Thanks for looking into the problem for me and solving the manifesto problem. Is it really realistic that not a single person would want to be a member of my party, though? Surely no matter how bad things get, there is always going to be that hardcore of people who will be members of the party no matter what? Surely there is always going to be a small amount of (perhaps idealistic) people who are not entirely affected by the cynicism?
Also, can you tell me what it is that led to such a high level of cynicism - ie. what type of actions will cause this? Is it things like increasing taxes then cutting them again later? Obviously I am aware that not keeping to manifesto promises can cause cynicism, but I kept to all the promises I made. What else is liable to cause it?
Isn’t it possible for cynicism to drop? I’ve had a problem with that but one tax change before the election should be forgotten once you’ve gone on and won another handful of elections…
Does it mean that every voter has the same amount of cynicism?
At the moment every voter is as cynical as the next, but I will definitely change this in the future to make things more interesting. Basically raisding taxes too soon after an election win, or cutting them too soon before an election will cause a jump in cynicism. you can see it at the bottom of the polls screen. It does decay over time, but slowly.
As I recall, broken manifesto promises are handled differently.
Should a tax drop just before the election really raise cynicism if it isn’t followed by a tax rise afterwards? I don’t really see the real-life equivalent for this…
Really? I’d be very cynical if my government lowered income tax 6 months before an election. How many governments cut taxes shortly after coming to power?
I don’t know - it’d be an interesting statistic. How often and when in their terms do governments cut taxes?
Let me put the question like that: What percentage of voters (say, in the US or UK) would become suspicious or disillusioned beyond the next election if the government dropped the taxes half a year before the elections, with all kinds of explanations as to why they do it?
I just had the all-party-member-disappearing-bug again, all the millions leaving in one turn. And I checked: cynicism is at 10-25 percent…
Sent you an email with the save game.
In front of this matter,
, is a very relevant question 
I’d say that any policy that has been set and not changed on the long term (especially about taxes) should reduce the cynisism. As a matter of fact, if the government drops tobacco taxes 6 months before elections to raise them again 2 months after, cynisism should rise (especially among smokers). But if by the side the income taxes have been stable for ten years, it should balance the effect in a way or another. And if the taxes are raised before and decreased after, it should make people angry, but less cynical (in a way, the governement leaving is preparing the way for the government coming by allowing it to have money to do things with from the start… ain’t it great?)…
All in all, if the current situation means that past 25% of cynisism parties get deserted (do other parties also get hit, or only yours? In the second case, I’d say that increased cynisism should make former members go to other parties and leave all parties, but that a fraction of the members of other parties should also just get disgusted with politics in general, so that if 100% cynisism is reached, no party at all has got any member and… voting better become mandatory), which is a pretty hard balance to keep… especially if you cannot make the level drop down.
Thats a very interesting suggestion -> that cynicism should affect the likelihood of joining a party. Right now it doesn’t do so, but adding this in could be quite easy. As with all things, changing the code is easy, its checking it doesn’t introduce bugs, or unbalance the game that takes the time.