jscott991

The pictures of the default candidates are NOT .png files. Kind of strange.

Harding should be Hoover in the above example. I always get those two confused.

How weird that you should say this. How many Presidents have been defeated seeking a second term v. how many have won. Let's take a look. Defeated: 1. John Adams, John Q. Adams, Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, B. Harrison, William Taft, Warren Harding, Ford, Carter, George Bush Sr. Won A Second Term: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, McKinley, Rooselvelt, Wilson, Coolidge, FDR, Truman, Eise

You should make suggestions. I just didn't agree that early bad results spurred turnout for the trailing candidate. I think it depresses his turnout and I think that's been shown to be true in past elections.

Yes, you're right. We should go back to the old system of restricted franchises. What should the qualification be? A yearly income level? Perhaps it should be just landowners. Perhaps just landlords. Perhaps just descendants of titled aristocrats from pre-independence days. What's the best franchise? Who should our limited franchise exclude? Maybe we should look into gender. I mean, did it really do the country a ser

Does anyone else think there should be a an incumbency advantage that you could toggle on and off for one candidate during the game setup? Incumbents usually have a fairly strong advantage, even at the presidential level (though, admittedly, that advantage usually is that the top-tier challenger candidates usually don't challenge an incumbent president, ala Cuomo and Bush Sr.) and the game should probably model that. If I had to make a recome

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Gephardt's shrewd pick of Hillary as his VP and excellent late game ads nearly completely disrupted my New York Republican strategy (I love playing a candidate from a key opposing state and robbing the enemy of electoral votes). I won only because of an overwhelming victory in California. Look how

I'd like to see the VP be able to do a mini-turn. You should be able to set him to fundraise for the week (at reduced power of course), give a speech on a particular issue (again, not as effective as the candidate in shifting issue scores) or boosting awareness. The AI picks their VP very shrewdly sometimes, but at some point it might be to their benefit to move him. I recently was nearly beaten because the AI picked Hillary as a VP, complet

In the short run, I would simply like to see the election results slow down and give me a popular vote count state by state, perhaps delaying reporting results in close states for a while and moving on through the map. For instance, if New York were 51-49, but Ohio was 65-35, Ohio's results should be reported ahead of New York's rather than simply moving the map East to West. I see no reason why the results have to come in East to West anyway, since

Response to #3: It has been proven that when one candidate does well early, it depresses the turnout of his opponent in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific States. This is the strongest argument for not allowing the networks to "project" winners. I don't want to sound too controversial, but many people believe that George Bush only lost the popular vote in 2000 because of the early projections that had him losing Pennsylvania, Florid

Is the AI VP bugged? I've never seen him/her move.

1. In my recent campaign game against Gephardt, a bug occurred for a period that caused advertisements to not spawn correctly. They would spawn in the wrong state, and sometimes of the wrong type and for the wrong party. Its hard to explain, but when I attempted to create TV ads in New York, it was creating Democratic newspaper ads in Mass. or even a Republican radio ad in Wisconsin. I reloaded the game several times, but the bug occured for a while

That's the only serious thing wrong with the current game. Election night just speeds by without state by state popular vote totals and without tension. That's the one tweak I'd like to see (though I think other improvements would really help too).

I think that the PM team and Brad handled this bug in completely the right way. They were skeptical at first, as they should be since most errors of this kind will be just player neglect, but they stayed with us all day, answering all our posts and emails.

Thank you for resolving the problem! Great service and responses from everyone. I'm very glad I gave you guys the money for this game directly.

Where does Political Machine save your screenshots Dearmad? I can't find them, though it looks like the game is making them (there's a brief pause).

Its not about the VP.

How are you taking those screen shots out of curiosity?

Is that the common theme? Created personalities can't win? I suspect that's it. I also am having this same issue come up with a created personality. I appreciate the explanations people are trying to provide to Dearmad (and, thus, indirectly to myself, the founder of the Carter creams me thread), but they aren't right. The AI doesn't use political operatives at normal difficulty or in the second campaign mode much, if at al

Can I send a save game in for a diagnostic of this?

I notice that too. That happens a lot when I'm viewing the newspaper summary.

I'm not an expert on this game, but if its not interviews, political operatives, advertising, issue ratings, and the state's breakdown between GOP and Democrats, what could it be? I'm with Dearmad. I can't see how this isn't a bug. I guess it could be some really hidden thing in the game, but in my games, I'm winning on most every top 5 issue in the states in question and still getting creamed.

I didn't mean to sound rude, Frogboy. I meant to say I think that's not it, rather than I think not. Sorry for seeming rude.

This has to be a bug of some kind. Are you guys playing campaign mode too?

I think not, Frogboy. I am experiencing the same problem as Dearmad playing as a Republican v. Carter and have only done one interview, after which the paper applauded my performance as boosting my status among independents (the interview took place in Conn). There is something else at work here. The AI in the Campaign or on certain difficulty levels seems to have some kind of an ability to "steal" states in the last quarter of the c