With the 1897 election rapidly approaching, I was pondering the concept of voter groups, and it occurred to me there was an enormous number of choices a single voter could have made between 1894 and 1896. So I’ve decided to make a poll of every possible combination of choices and see if any large groups, patterns, and tendencies emerge from the forum data.
If you have multiple characters, choose for your main or your oldest character.
This is interesting, although this late after the election I imagine the results won’t be quite representative (and I wonder if enough people will take the poll for the data to be of any use)
Still, this should help answer the age old question that all of us wonder at the end of every election - what sort of people vote for the wrong candidates, and what is wrong with them that makes them do so?
Of course, the mechanics changed considerably, so the none option may reflect distaste for what emerged. I suspect nobody in this household (3 players total) will be taking part in any future elections.
Why do you dislike the new mechanics? I’m honestly curious.
I think holding off on choosing your candidate until the second week made the platforms more important, eliminated the "blink" factor, toned down the intensity, and allowed the writers to tell more of a story. edited by Anne Auclair on 2/24/2019
I also prefer choosing during the second week. What I missed though was the opportunity to actually play a bit more. I would also have loved some scalable rewards.
[quote=Jermaine Vendredi]Of course, the mechanics changed considerably, so the none option may reflect distaste for what emerged. I suspect nobody in this household (3 players total) will be taking part in any future elections.[/quote]The last election had great candidates but was otherwise a bit dull, mechanically speaking. There wasn’t that much to do. I hope that the next election brings back the social actions for electoral professions, which I enjoyed immensely in the first couple of years but were inexplicably absent last year. The debates from the second election were also fun; mechanically there were some rough edges, but with a bit of work they could be fun addition to the next election.
The original social actions were really unbalanced though. There were just too many Fixers and Agitating was so combative that a lot of players avoided that career. It might be best to make all election careers mechanically function like the Campaigners - that way people from each class could pull together to increase the vote and balancing between the classes therefore becomes a non-issue. I can say from personal experience that working with other Campaigners to raise our election scores was really fun and I liked the story content it unlocked.
The debates though…I don’t miss those at all. They clogged my inbox, were often a pain to deal with, generally slowed the game down, and the mechanics could be exploited by bad actors. Good riddance.
What I most missed was newspapers being good for something. In 1895 newspapers were super profitable to use! In 1896 they changed the election career system and newspapers went back to being useless. sob Which doesn’t make sense as it’s an election!
The 1896 election wasn’t totally bereft of interesting mechanics though! It had the poll cards, which were were rather fun social actions. We’d get regular, whimsical questions from Mr. Huffam about the various candidates, FB would post them, and then we’d read/chat about them. That was cool.
Personally the most telling difference between the elections for me was parties - in the previous election (feducci vs campaigner vs detective) you could gain election resources at the end of parties by cashing in talk of the town. This election the contrarian, one of the people attending the party, was running for mayor, but not only was the ability to get campaign resources from the party not included this time, his running for mayor wasn’t even acknowledged.
[quote=Anne Auclair]
What I most missed was newspapers being good for something. In 1895 newspapers were super profitable to use! In 1896 they changed the election career system and newspapers went back to being useless. sob Which doesn’t make sense as it’s an election! [/quote]
Oh yes! It is long past due that press returns to electoral prominence! I sorely miss muckraking, crusading, spreading scurrilities, opining, satirizing, and scandalizing.
A variety of actions would be the most welcome design. Some players are not social creatures, but for those there are newspapers, heists and flash lays (hopefully of varying diffculty) for them. For those who are, social actions are funas long as they are not combative (and no multi-step proccess please, I cannot even play chess anymore without getting stuck with an absent opponent). As long as we have things to do during an election, all is well.