With the full release of The Political Machine 2024 on May 2nd, we’d like to use this space as an opportunity to tease what’s coming up on release! We understand we’ve been missing a key player in this presidential election cycle and we wanted to be sure he was in for release. We’ll be introducing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the fray! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/c362051b6b6c6dca9e93b64d7f99d8543387bf97.png[/img] His introduction also comes with a new deck that we’re introducing - the Independent deck! Without revealing too much, some of the new cards introduced into this deck focuses on boosting independent issue score and spoiling by decreasing Democrat and Republican issue score in states. From a development point of view it was interesting to have to adapt to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s situation. We originally had him in the game as a Democratic candidate since the design was made prior to him dropping out of the Democratic bid for the presidency in October 2023. Because of the change and observing current events, we wanted to be sure that we portrayed his independent status as best as possible before introducing him to the game. Classified as an Independent candidate, he will be able to be played as either major party in our game for both Presidential and Primaries game modes. We hope you enjoy playing him! In the same vain, we wanted to be sure that you the players can select to identify your custom candidates as independent too! Doing so will also grant the created candidate access to play as either party. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/a66e4a1c0856ab7ebac47b4380d4b4f2abe26ed3.png[/img] Want to share your candidate to the world or play against other people’s candidates? The release will also have support to uploading and downloading candidates via the Steam Workshop! We are excited to see what kind of whacky things you and the community can come up with in terms of designs! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/df703443b526c3520f9275165b33778e0facea00.png[/img] Aside from being able to achieve the presidential nomination and the presidency itself, the release will also add 21 achievements for you to attain ranging in difficulty! I had a good time figuring out the puns for some of the titles. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/56b020b8eb68a24e3fc8b4f0cf165b37ac6ce126.png[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/186d43c3f7f9f19721a121642f13c0536f549e8c.png[/img] And speaking of difficulty - we took the time to look at improving computer AI for release! We wanted to listen to player feedback in regards to AI difficulty, and so we took it as an opportunity to improve our AI’s capacity to win states. Some improvements in our AI update make it so that way they pick more enthusiasm buildings, make ads in high contention areas, and fight harder in key states. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/8a04844c281e4456e2ebcaae401db62d02ced16b.png[/img] We the development team want to say thanks again to everyone who participated in the playtest! Your feedback has been crucial to shaping and prioritizing the improvements in our game for full release. We encourage further suggestions within our forums and our discord community for ideas and priorities for future updates!