The Political Machine 2016 Part #23 - - Extra - The 1.03 Update and Hillary's Worst Nightmare

Part 23: - Extra - The 1.03 Update and Hillary's Worst Nightmare

Extra - The 1.03 Update and Hillary's Worst Nightmare

Alright, the game just updated again, so I guess I might as well do a little side-update to show what's new. We might as well just look at the changelog, and I'll go into a bit more detail. Also, before we do that, I've now learned that there's no real problem with updates as far as keeping save games goes. Everything just stays the same way as it was before, so our Hindenburg of a campaign is going to proceed soon.

Alright, so, what do we have?

code:

- Clinton and Trump now have "Presidential Candidate" titles to indicate their post-convention status in the race.
- Added Mike Pence's "Vice-Presidential Candidate 2016" title

First off, we have some minor text changes turned into patch notes in order to pad the thing.

code:

- Added Presidential Candidate Jill Stein.
- Added new Vice-Presidential Candidates as playable characters:
    - Jill Stein (Green Party)
    - Bill Weld (Libertarian Party)
    - Ajamu Baraka (Green Party)
    - Tim Kaine (Democratic Party)

Then, we have Jill Stein being added, which is so great that they had to mention it twice, also putting her into the vice presidential candidates' list. How rude. At least Kaine has an actual statistical chance of becoming President, you know, he doesn't deserve to be put in with those other three. And yes, that means you can now run the actual Green Party ticket in this game, meaning that my go-to ticket of Monaca Towa and Donald Trump is now the #2 ticket with the least actual governing experience, as being a fictional dictator of a single city who maintains power by virtue of having killer robots roam the streets has to at least count for something.

...I'm not just going to shit on the Greens in this update, don't worry. It's this game, not the Greens, really. It just makes me want to take entirely unwarranted snipes at people. Like a politician would! Not that it matters. Who's going to read this, anyway?

code:

- Reduced Donald Trump's "Fund Raising" statistic to better the actual amounts of money he has brought in during the summer.
- Reduced Hillary Clinton's "Stamina" statistic

Anyway, we have some slight changes to character attributes, which is fucking hilarious for reasons I'll go into later. We get Trump with less Fund Raising Ability (they don't even bother to keep their attribute names straight) because his campaign has jack shit for money, and we have Hillary with less Stamina because she's sick. I've stopped paying attention to the presidential campaign entirely out of existential despair, and even I've picked up on those things due to osmosis. And I live in Germany.

code:

- New issues:
    - Dakota Access Pipeline
    - National Anthem Protest
    - Zika Funding

We have three new issues! The Dakota Access Pipeline, the National Anthem Protest, and Zika Funding. All of these are actually quite up-to-date, all things considered, so props to them on that, I suppose. It'll be interesting to come back to this game in two years or so and having to remember just what the fuck the "national anthem protest" was about. As for how people stand on the issues:

Dakota Access Pipeline: Democrats are against, Independents are for, Republicans are for.
National Anthem Protest: Democrats are for, Independents are for, Republicans are against.
Zika Funding: Everybody is for, Republicans less than others.

Oh, also, I have a question that I'm sure nobody will be able to answer: Why is National Anthem Protest not a top five issue in California, but is one in states like Indiana and Pennsylvania? You'd think the state that has the team that Colin Kaepernick gets paid real well to sit on the bench while a fucking Jaguars QB takes his job for would have that issue be fairly important. It's like how "Fixing Flint Water Crisis" isn't as important an issue in Michigan as "Fixing Infrastructure". If the specialized version isn't going to be more important than the generalized version in the fucking state it's about, then why even have it?

code:

- Slightly decreased the importance of Keystone pipeline in some states as interest has shifted away from this issue.
- Renamed "Hillary's Emails" to "Probing Hillary's Emails" to better indicate what supporting this issue means.
- Increase importance of the "Probing Hillary's Emails" issue as this has become a major campaign issue.
- Decreased importance of the "Fighting ISIS" issue slightly as other issues have become more important.
- Increased the importance of the "Securing the Border" issue to reflect the hardening line against immigration.
- Increased the importance "Reducing wealth gap increase" to reflect increasing economic anxiety of the middle class.

Finally, we have some issue importance fiddling. I suppose this is all OK. Fighting ISIS really was a dominating issue before, and I'm pretty sure it's not dominating the news the way it would have to have in this game. Though note that the decreased importance of Fighting ISIS and increased importance of Reducing Wealth Gap would have made our Cruz vs. Obama campaign even tougher, as the former is our bread and butter issue while Obama loves talking about the wealth gap.

Now, let's take a closer look at those new candidates.

Ajamu Baraka:

Stamina: 9
Money: 4
Fund Raising Ability: 4
Charisma: 7
Appearance: 5
Credibility: 4
Experience: 5
Intelligence: 7
Minority Appeal: 8
Religious: 4

Bill Weld:

Stamina: 8
Money: 5
Fund Raising Ability: 6
Charisma: 5
Appearance: 5
Credibility: 5
Experience: 7
Intelligence:
Minority Appeal: 4
Religious: 5

Jill Stein:

Stamina: 9
Money: 4
Fund Raising Ability: 4
Charisma: 7
Appearance: 5
Credibility: 4
Experience: 4
Intelligence: 7
Minority Appeal: 6
Religious: 3

Tim Kaine:

Stamina: 6
Money: 6
Fund Raising Ability: 6
Charisma: 6
Appearance: 4
Credibility: 6
Experience: 7
Intelligence: 5
Minority Appeal: 4
Religious: 5

The funny thing that I was talking about is Baraka's and Stein's stats. They're basically identical, except Baraka has more experience (based on what I don't know), has more Minority Appeal (because he's a human rights worker with a history of fighting for minorities, or because he's black? You decide which the developers picked) and has more Religious appeal (based on what I don't know). Disregarding that two of those three seem entirely arbitrary, the funny thing is that this makes Baraka an inherently better candidate than Stein. So basically, if you wanted to win with those two, you'd be running Baraka/Stein, not the other way around.

And really, Weld and Kaine's stats are pretty funny too, if just for how generic they are. This is an inherent problem with statting political candidates - beyond a few particular cases, people like Weld, Caine, Pence, Kasich, etc. are basically all the same. So you just get some arbitrary swaps and that's it.

Now, I promised "Hillary's Worst Nightmare", and this is what I mean with that: If you've been reading the thread (you don't, I know, but just go with it), you might have noticed that I ran a game where I took my custom candidate, Monaca, and ran a campaign with her where I used only a single issue: Funding NASA. I won fairly handily. Now, I decided to try something else that might be fun - run a campaign against Hillary using nothing but Probing Hillary's Emails as an issue. So basically, I'd be running speeches screaming EMAILS EMAILS EMAILS and running ads all over the country screaming EMAILS EMAILS EMAILS, meaning that not only will this scandal remain in the headlines the entire time, but people will actually give a shit about it.

This is the latest version of Monaca. I decided on dropping a few points in Charisma, Credibility and Experience in favor of jacking up Stamina. The benefit to this is more fundraisers and more building, primarily. Essentially, I can fly into a state and build a level 3 HQ in that state in one turn, money permitting. That's pretty cool. But of course, the real question is, how did the campaign go?