It's been a crazy week for Exia with the Early Access launch of Mr. President. We’ve been delighted at the response to the game so far and really appreciate everyone who’s joined us for the first week of Early Access.
This week we’ve been focusing on gathering lots of fantastic bug reports from the community both through the Steam Forums and our Discord. We’ve tried to prioritize and fix most of the reported bugs in this first patch to give everyone a more stable and less buggy build to play going into the weekend. We greatly appreciate everyone who reported an issue - you’re helping make the game better for everyone.
Lastly, with the number of changes here, there’s a chance that save files from the initial launch version may no longer work - particularly if you saved the game during one of your Action Segments. We’re very sorry about this and will be working on making save files more durable between versions.
Major Bug Fixes
From saboteur Secretaries of State to some quite “unconventional” war setups, there were several high-impact bugs. We prioritized fixing them as fast as we could:
- [Gameplay] Secretary of State no longer sabotages Cabinet Improvement rolls and properly assists with improving the effectiveness of the cabinet.
- [Gameplay] Wars should no longer carry over combatants from previous wars (no more countries fighting themselves, civil wars are tracked with their own tokens).
- [Gameplay] Turn Sequence Phase 3: Any 4 Diplomatic or Military Actions segments are no longer skipped. This one was causing the game to be much harder than we intended. Now you'll have an additional 4 (or 5 if spending 2 APs) actions each year.
- [Gameplay] Regional Major Crises are now correctly triggered in Central America.
- [Gameplay] Opponent’s passed Bills no longer remain as opponent bills if you re-introduce them in a later Legislative Segment.
- [Gameplay] Congress is no longer incorrectly antagonistic against your attempts to rally for bills; using the Bully Pulpit now applies the correct DRMs.
- [Gameplay] Use Military Professionals action had numerous issues. This action has been completely re-worked and should no longer have these problems.
- [Gameplay] Gather Intel/Drone Strike/Air Strike/Raid Terror Group also had several issues, especially with the DRMs, these actions have been re-worked and these problems should now be fixed.
- [Gameplay] The Joint Maneuvers and Training action could sometimes decrease your Ally’s relative strength. This has been fixed to correctly increase it instead.
- [Gameplay] The De-Escalate action now properly reduces the conflict between RoK and DPRK and removes Tensions counters from both nations involved in the conflict.
- [Crisis Cards] Added more event cards to Year 1 crisis card deck to reduce the chance of running out of cards. Due to us having fewer Cascade cards than event cards, this deck was smaller than it should be. We’ve added more Event cards than the paper game calls for temporarily to account for this until we have more Cascade cards implemented.
- [SFX] Sound effects now correctly play if you Load Game or start a New Game.
- [UI] Loading games during certain in-progress choice selections should no longer lead to a hard-lock due to selections not showing in the UI.
Minor Bug Fixes
- [Gameplay] Left-most and Right-most can be confusing. The initial Bipartisan Cooperation value is now set to the correct box based on the number of Radicals and Moderates.
- [Gameplay] How the Sausage is Made should no longer force you to be for/against a bill when rolling the best result.
- [Gameplay] When Cyber-attacking, if China and Russia accuse the US of Warmongering, you no longer lose all of your UN Goodwill counters and a decrease in World Opinion of US.
- [Gameplay] When Cyber-attacking Rogue states, they now correctly lose strength in their active war.
- [Gameplay] The Attempt to Remove Chinese or Russian Influence action is no longer selectable if there is not a valid influence token to target.
- [Gameplay] Tensions tokens should no longer be drawn with their number side up.
- [Gameplay] Min/Max DRM range added to Corralling the Cabinet as well as fixed incorrect procedure description.
- [Crisis Cards] Card #120 correctly removes Russian Influence from the Eurozone instead of a random region.
- [Crisis Cards] Card #159 now correctly removes a Russia Influence counter.
- [Crisis Cards] Card #164 correctly adds strength to DPRK and not RoK.
- [Crisis Cards] Card #174 text no longer spills outside of the card face.
- [SFX/VFX] Certain token changes (trends going from Increasing/Decreasing to none or DARPA Rapid counters being added/removed) should now correctly make sound effects and flash.
- [UI] Corralling the Cabinet action showed a D10 in the Take Action box instead of a D6.
- [UI] Terror/Chaos table roll now mentions the correct D10 roll range for Chaos.
- [UI] Tooltips should no longer get stuck on the screen, especially in the top left corner.
- [UI] Fixed a few occurrences of widgets staying on screen when they shouldn’t such as the left side shadow or certain choice selection widgets.
- [UI] 1 Action for POTUS and each Cabinet Member segment now properly greyed out in the Special Activations Phase to show that it is not currently in the game. (We’re working on it! See Upcoming Features/Changes below)
- [UI] Tensions on POTUS/Cabinet Focus now correctly display in loaded games.
User Interface/User Experience Updates
For this first patch, we mostly focused on bug fixes, but there were a few things we wanted to tweak to better help players understand certain aspects of the game.
- [UI] War Status tracker added to the Board Walkthrough.
- [UI] Better Tooltip descriptions of how certain tracks (State of Economy, Regional Alignment, Cabinet Effectiveness, etc) work and what the Trends mean for these tracks.
- [UI] Tweaked the crosshair indicator when targeting Terror Groups to improve readability of their levels.
- [UI] Added clarifying text that Israel cannot use the Joint Action: Stabilize Region.
- [UI] Added a new widget to the Begin Turn: Set Starting Action Points segment to better explain where the Action Points were coming from.
- [UX] War Status tracker added to the WASD mappings.
- [UX] Arrow Keys for panning map added to the Controls section of the Walkthrough (this one was in the build on launch, we just forgot to call it out in the Walkthrough).
- [UX] Increased the maximum zoom level so you can now get a closer look at the board.
- [UX] Removed a few places with empty pauses where the Continue button needed to be pressed but nothing happened.
Known Bugs not fixed in this Patch
There were quite a few bugs reported across the channels and despite our desire to fix them all, we just haven’t had enough time yet since launch to do so. Below are a few of the larger bugs that we’re aware of that are not yet fixed in this patch. Not all of the bugs that have been reported are listed here, just some of the bigger ones, though we are tracking all of the issues you report.
- [UI] Quickly spamming the Continue button can lead to UI widgets not appearing on screen and this can lead to a locked state (usually fixable with the Get Unstuck button).
- [Gameplay] Loading a saved game does not always correctly apply the restrictions on certain player actions leading to the ability to take some actions more than once an Activation Segment or Phase.
- [Gameplay] China/Russia Acts Espionage table roll 4-7 result not correctly adding strength to US opponent in war.
Upcoming Features/Changes
Our highest immediate new feature priority is the POTUS + Cabinet Member Action segment at the start of each year. This just barely missed Early Access launch, but it’s the player’s only action window before a Peer Rival activation, which in the event of really bad rolls can lead to a pretty nasty situation for the player without much they can do about it. We’ve also heard your consistent requests for an autosave feature, so we’re looking to get that in ASAP as well.
Right now, the missing pieces in the Early Access version are:
- The POTUS + Cabinet Member Action segment, as noted above
- The Summit, Trade Agreement, and Sanctions player actions
- The lower-end actions for China and Russia
- Unilateral Ally actions
- Adversary actions (Iran and North Korea), and their Missile Tracks
- Part of the Missile Tracks feature is adding the two auto-loss conditions if either Iran or North Korea reaches full nuclear capability and becomes involved in any war
- Several of the Cyber Attack variations (particularly relating to Adversaries - once we add e.g. North Korea’s ability to advance its nuclear program, players need the Cyberattack option to disrupt it in that way)
- UN Actions
- Great Society legislation
- These are large-scale, transformative legislative packages that are harder to pass (they have to go through the process twice) but have larger impact, and aren’t repeatable
- The remaining Crisis Cards, Crisis Chits (particularly NSA and Good Times)
- The Chaos portion of Terror/Chaos in Activation Phases 2 and 3
- The State of the Union Segment
- Re-election for a second term as well as the Mid-Term elections
- Difficulties other than Normal (Harder, Easier)
- Exceptional White House Resource cards
- Scandals track and update procedure during the Legislative Segment
- New Year’s Surprise during the Begin Turn Segment (omitted due to low number of Cascade Cards at the moment)
- Focused National Intel placement and effects segments