Thanks to everyone who’s checked out the new update - we hope the additions to the roster are to your liking! While we are developing new features for updates through the summer, I’d like to use this dev log as an opportunity to check out some of community’s custom candidates and clash 2 of them in a presidential match! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/06cefdb077c6efc39a7c1ed886caf8d1ba74d756.png[/img] So far at the making of this dev log there are a total of 142 candidates running for the presidency from the workshop. It’s fun to see the variety that it generates - some are real life equivalents to candidates and celebrities while others are references to internet memes, games, shows, and movies. What we wanted to do with this iteration of The Political Machine is improving on 2020’s workshop support for candidates. The image generation for the candidate’s faces referenced a very bright scene which didn’t help the lighting and cut off part of the body. We ensured that for this version that with the visual upgrade made sure that your custom candidates would look official to the established candidates put out! Part of the wonder for the Political Machine is imagining any matchup for the election. Browsing through, I stumbled upon what would be an interesting matchup for AI vs AI mode. Cheeseburger FreedomMan vs Winnie the Pooh! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/bc203f0913aaa2729c5cdd98ad891e0e1226f9f6.png[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/00f200ef547540d4d66392b7751eca4f23d0a440.png[/img] As a bit of fun facts for both of these candidates - Cheeseburger FreedomMan was originally created in The Political Machine 2016 by Joel from the famous Youtube channel Vinesauce. Winnie the Pooh entered public domain in 2022. The starting board looks even against these two candidates. Cheeseburger leads the polls by 1 percent against Pooh! Toward the first quarter of the game, it looks like special attention is being put toward the Midwest, still looking even! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/1d6922de0824296bcc3d2cdbaa57b33537c0f3b6.png[/img] Oh bother, toward the latter half Pooh is running away with it on all margins. Pooh chose Doug Burgum as his VP. Cheeseburger chose Obama. Cheeseburger has a slight hold over in the northeast but it won’t be enough. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/21c239dd8c8e7ccfe312ab96ca50fcc5fbf71506.png[/img] With the game ending, it looks like Pooh beat Cheeseburger by a landslide, but why? [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44740336/4c23729c7b368650f56db682c29d7321d280f4d0.png[/img] Winnie Pooh has max stats - you can max up every stat if you enable “Infinite Points” in custom candidate creation. Are you worried that a honey craving bear will wreak havoc on your multiplayer games with other people? Worry not - to ensure multiplayer integrity, we do a check on the candidate list so infinite point candidates are not playable so you can have fun as fairly as possible! That being said, we encourage you to see what uber-powered candidates can do against each other in your single player games. Credits to Cthulhutahn for Winnie the Pooh and njckenyon for Cheeseburger FreedomMan! We can’t wait to see what else the community comes up with for whacky matchups! We’d like to thank everyone again for your support on The Political Machine 2024 post-release!