I’ve been trying to improve voter behavior with a bunch of goals. Firstly to maker the political compass Overton window not look so ‘forced’, and more importantly, to allow for more realistic modeling of the variety of opinion. As some players have pointed out, there is always SOMEONE in the electorate who will not ever vote for you, always some communists, always some capitalists, and so on. How to fix this?
Here is the political compass for a new game as Australia:
And here it is with my new changes I am considering:
The voters are less confined to the Overton window, and yet are still influenced it. We clearly have people far to the left of the political consensus zone, but not quite as far left as Stalin and Lenin. I think this makes sense. Even people who are claiming to be outsiders and not swayed by the mainstream media or mainstream politics are still vaguely influenced away from the extremes.
The (debug-mode-only) tooltip data for impressionability illustrates this. The game has always modelled the ‘impressionability’ of voters, but with recent changes, I’ve improved how this calculation is used to determine a final opinion. Here is the final calculation:
Final Socialism = (CurrentGlobalSocialism * Impressionability) + (InnateSocialism * (1-Impressionability))
(This is a new equation for this version, it was different before)
So every voter is born with an innate predisposition to socialism (also liberalism) or not, and this is their ‘starting’ position. They then get swayed towards the ‘consensus’ position (Global Socialism) by how impressionable they are.
Impressionability is calculated as a normal distribution but then squeezed in so its between 15% and 85%. (Its then multiplied by 0.95 which is an internal value and not important…)
Note that if the ‘Polarization’ situation is active, the value of InnateSocialism gets pushed out to the extremes by the strength of the situation.
I need to do a lot of play testing, but I think this change will make the game feel more realistic.