Greetings fellow Armchair Politicians! Well...isn't this the craziest election year we've ever seen? I've been on every single version of TPM, and between Coronavirus, Protests, Economic uncertainty, and Biden's "turtle" strategy, I've never seen an election cycle like this! But that just means it's time to get out an update for The Political Machine! Currently being tested by QA, the 1.3 update will be out soon. In the meantime, here are some of the goodies you'll get wh...
Hey Everyone! We've been hard at work on The Political Machine - some cool v1.2 stuff that I can show you now, but also some super secret stuff that I've sworn an oath to keep under wraps! Our next update is v1.2, where we'll be updating the game with new issue tweaks, candidates, ideologies, and fixes. Our two big additions are Barack Obama and John McCain, the stars of the 2008 Presidential Election, each with their own Ideology Trees.
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This week’s update to the Political Machine adds Ronald Reagan. He’s the first candidate that includes a scoring handicap which means that your score is modified slightly because he’s a bit easier to win with than other candidates. We’ll show you here. The update also includes AOC, Al Gore, and Barry Goldwater. The Reagan Era Ronald Reagan was one of the last Presidents we had before the hyper politicization of American life really took...
The next update to The Political Machine will be including mod support to Steam Workshop. Specifically, we are going to let people make their own ideologies and share them with others. We include quite a few in the game. We will be uploading a few ideology mods to get things started and to help others learn how to make them. What is an ideology? An ideology is a set of issues your candidate wants to run on. Unlike norm...
Today let's do a quick walk-through of The Political Machine 2020. This will include what's new from previous editions as well as a discussion of the underlying simulation. Creating a candidate When creating a candidate you have a finite # of points to use to figure out what your candidate's strengths are. Stamina: How many moves you get per turn Intelligence: Enhances how well you do on interviews Charisma: Affects how well your speeches and ads do Media bias: Affec...
One of the options in the game is to simulate the election cycle. The player just chooses two candidates and sees how they do. Now, you won’t get the exact result every time, but it’s fun to see how a given candidate will do if run by the AI. This mode helps us test against any unintentional biases in the issues. Since no one knows how the election will go, it can be difficult to draw the line between when candidate A is simply more viable than candidate B. In th...
The biggest, most game changing feature of The Political Machine 2020 are the ideology trees. Each candidate can have their own ideology tree which makes Bernie Sanders play quite a bit differently than say Joe Biden. For today's entry, I am going to try out making a custom candidate and choose the Fascism ideology. I'm going to loosely base him off of one of my favorite villains of Stephen King's book, The Dead Zone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEE141IC4Q8 We ...
The Political Machine is a strategy/simulation game. What has made it so popular over the years is that while it is a game, it has a pretty serious and robust simulation running behind it. Most of the data is collected from a wide array census results, surveys and demographic research. Every four years when we update the data, we are constantly surprised on the changes we see in different states. The opioid epidemic is one example. This issue wasn’t ...