Hello Everyone!
We just pushed a new update which adds our 3rd agent, the Hacker!
Hacker
The Hacker is our newest addition to the Agent roster! He's meant to be a very powerful utility agent and a way to engage with the candidates directly. Due to the power of the Hacker, he comes with a limitation of one action per turn. Right now, he only has 1 thing he can do, steal information from the Candidates, but there'll be more actions coming shortly! Hopefully, with this new ability, you can have a bit more information informing which states you want to focus on. As we flesh out more around Candidate Fundraising and present that (coming soon!), the Hacker will become even more powerful.
A quick note, the hacker, will not show up in your saved games. Only new ones, we can look into patching this, but we felt it was more important to get this Agent into the game.
Core Improvement
1. Improved Candidate AI. We made some substantial changes to how the Candidates rank their state priorities. This was important since you can actually steal those priorities now with the hacker! Right now you just see their state focus, but we'll be working on adding information on what Ads they're running.
2. State Results screen. We made some changes to the End Turn screen, specifically the portion where you see the State Results. We're hoping this will have a tighter and more integrating than the previous two-panel screen. This screen is still a bit difficult because it really shows two things. First, it shows you change between turns on a state you have information on. In this case, you can expect smaller changes, +1, +2, in a direction. However, there's also the case of your first poll in a state, in which case you see the entirety of the lean so that it may look stunning, like a +17. Since this was confusing, for this second case we're now just showing the leaning of the state. So if you see a lonely caret and wonder, hopefully, this helps! We'll keep working on ways to make this screen more intuitive
UI Improvement
We increased the size of the Cancel button on the state details panel. It was too small and hard to target. Hopefully, it's easier now.
We have many more changes coming up. Here's a peek at our short term roadmap. We're hoping to have these up in a series of updates by 11/11.
- New Music. We have some more tracks we're going to be getting in the next 1 or 2 updates.
- End Game Screen. We've got a more comprehensive End Game screen that hopefully will feel more rewarding and help build more anticipation!
- Candidate Fundraising. We're going to be tying Candidate Fundraising in with how a candidate performs on the Issues in a state. States have relative wealth now, but the fundraising feels static. Once a substantial lead or loss on the Issues impacts the candidate, it'll require more strategy from you to make sure your candidate is competitive in their fundraising! We'll be using the Hacker to help you understand how much money Candidates are raising in a state.
- Dynamic Income. Right now, income is feeling very static. Well, it is very static, so it's high on our list to address that. We're going to be leveraging the Hacker again to help you achieve a more dynamic income, at the candidates' expense!
- UI Cleanup. We've got some general cleanup of the UI to do, we'll be prioritizing that in the next rounds of updates.
After that, we have some more coming up a week or so after.
- New more intuitive/informative button styles coming up that'll help us give you more information on what you're doing without just making giant green blocks.
- We'll be introducing more variation in the Media agent ads. We'd like you to be able to run Small/Medium/Large ad buys. We could do this now, but pairing it with the new button styles will help us give you the information to make more informed choices.
This is by no means meant to be comprehensive, we've got lots and lots of plans for more actions with the Agents and more engagements with the candidates, as well as mechanical updates.