Voter Group Size Query

Hello,

I’ve been playing with the modding bits and pieces to see what can be done and to drum up some ideas for myself and (for the moment anyway) I’m wondering if someone could enlighten me about group size changes.

For example policy effect liberal_freq,0+(0.05*x) would obviously lead to an increase in Liberal when the policy is set at higher settings. If the policy was introduced at 100% would the Liberal voter group increase by 5% total - if it was 23% of the population would it rise to 28%?
If the group was at 0% would is still grow?
If the policy is then cancelled would the group size revert back to it’s original level?

The area I am more interested it is to do with influences, those above are really just to fix some of the basics.
Now, I believe Liberals cannot be Conservatives and vise-versa, at least this is the impression I get from VoterTypes.csv and comments elsewhere on the forum. Based on that if I have 50% Liberals and 50% Conversatives in my population and the same size modifier above is applied what happens?
55% Liberal & 45% Conversative?
Or some sort of calculated average?
And what about if Conversatives_freq was then increased? Would this “push back” the liberal numbers again - and by the same amount?

I do like to start off with lots of questions! :open_mouth: :laughing:
Sorry about that.

In answer to the first question, it does not grow by 5% of the current amount of liberals or whatever. As far as I am aware, the amount of liberals is represented on a scale of 0 - 1, with 0 being no liberals, and 1 being everyone a liberal.

Let’s say that you have 50% liberals, that is represented as 0.5. run the line liberal_freq,0+(0.05*x), that number is increased to 0.55 (should x be 1, x being the value of the slider on the policy in question, or whatever). This is not 5% of the original number of liberals - it is 5% of the population.

Should you cancel the policy, then I the number of liberals would revert back to the original level.

As for the second question, if a voter is torn between two groups, he will join the one he feels most affinity with - the one he is most influenced towards joining.

Hope this helps.

Yep, that does help straighten a few things out for me.

Thanks.

When voters are first generated with a new game, they have a ‘percentage’ chance of being in each group, skewed by the modifiers in the csv. If they are over a certain threshold, they become official members of that group. In the focus group screen, you only see the membership bars for the groups they are actually in, their other ‘potential’ memberships are hidden.
Their membership is adjusted by the current level of the _freq, either up or down, but their base ‘genetic affinity’ for that group can never change.
In other words, some people are hardcore religious people, who would need a severe attack on _freq to convert them away from it. Others are more wishy-washy and easily changed.
So the 5% may convert a few people, or lots of people, depending on the population distribution in that group and their affinity. generally this isn’t an issue, because the game models 2,000 AI Voters, so there are enough in each group to ensure a fairly smooth distribution.

Ah, slightly less straight forward - but I suppose it makes things slightly less predictable which keeps it interesting!