Hi all! Today’s topic is Campaign Staff. Before we get into that, I have a couple of announcements and shameless plugs. First, our Discord and Steam Community have grown significantly over the past week. We can all thank Reddit for that. Feel free to join and engage in the conversations happening in those communities.
Two, If you haven’t already, share the game with your friends who might be interested in a game like this, because that seems to be a big source of discovery.
Three, I have some UI screenshots in this dev log. These are a work-in-progress and still not finalized. With that said, let’s get into it.
When I started planning the campaign staff system, I wanted to build something that felt interactive. It would have been easy to just make it so that you simply hire a few advisors who give bonuses to your activities and call it a day, but that would have been boring.
Instead, I wanted to make a system where your staff takes on a personality of its own, and it starts with your senior staff.
Senior Staff
Campaign staff is split into two parts. Senior staff and junior staff.
Senior staff are director-level operators who run the campaign. There’s a total of six senior staff members, with the campaign manager as the highest level official and the only one who comes with a personality. The six roles are:
Campaign Manager
Operations Director
Finance Director
Communications Director
Analytics Director
General Counsel
Each senior staffer comes with their own experience, salaries, modifiers, and risks. Additionally, each staff member has an approval rating of you.
Experience ratings are on a scale of 1-5, and determine salary costs. Staff with higher experience will naturally cost more to employ. They also tend to have higher base modifiers.
Each staff member comes with risks, too, such as a chance of “gaffing” on any given turn, which will trigger an event that could damage your campaign. For example, your campaign manager could say something demeaning about a certain group of people, and now you’re having to do damage control.
Approval ratings are on a 1-5 scale, and will always start at 5. Approval can drop in two ways: Through firing a director’s junior staffers (more on that later) or by not taking their advice.
“Advice” in The Electorate, are essentially missions that a director gives you. These are time-based missions like “Rally in Los Angeles County” or “Hold a fundraiser in Manhattan.” If you take this advice and don’t fulfill your promise, or simply refuse the advice, then you will lose approval. If you follow it, then you gain approval. Sometimes, your campaign manager may even suggest firing a certain staff member, leading to tough decisions.
If approval falls low enough, your staff member has a high chance of resigning, and may potentially “whistleblow” on your campaign. These can have a devastating impact on your media coverage and momentum, possibly turning the campaign on its head. This can also happen if you fire a director and they haven’t been involved in a scandal or gaffe. They’ll consider it an unfair firing and potentially whistleblow out of spite.
Overall, it’s critical to keep your senior staff happy.
Junior Staff
Each senior staff member, with campaign managers as the exception, will automatically hire their junior staffers. The roles are:
Operations
State Coordinator
Volunteer Coordinator
Field Coordinator
Communications
Press Secretary
Advertising Manager
Speechwriter
Finance
Budget Manager
Fundraising Manager
Analytics
Pollster
Data Analyst
General Counsel
Compliance Officer
Each junior staffer comes with a salary, a modifier bonus, and a skill level. Skills levels vary between five different levels:
Excellent
Good
Average
Poor
Terrible
These skill levels impact their modifier. Each modifier is then rolled up to impact their manager’s overall modifier. Staffers who are Good to Excellent will supercharge a senior director, while Poor-to-Terrible can potentially make that director’s modifier negative.
The decision to fire a junior staffer and “reroll” for a better one will anger their director, lowering their approval of you. Luckily, junior staffers don’t have the ability to whistleblow or gaffe. However, while you could “clean house” and fire everyone with low skills, all it takes is for one angered and resentful senior staff member to blow your whole campaign up.
Staff Priorities
Staff can focus on any of three priorities:
Enthusiasm (or Name Recognition during primaries)
+0.03 State Enthusiasm per turn
-1 Rally cooldown
Media Coverage
+1 Media Spin
+1 Charisma
Fundraising
+1 Fundraising
-1 Fundraiser cooldown
Staff priorities can only be changed every eight turns, so pick wisely.
What’s Next
Not sure what the next dev log will be. There’s a few things I’m working on that still need to be fleshed out. Either way, expect another dev log on something two weeks from now.
As always, thanks for the support around this project. If you haven’t already feel free to join our growing Discord server, and if you’re excited about the game, wishlist it on Steam and follow for more updates like this!