Prepare for Government - Wave 2 is here!
The culmination of months of playtesting, beta testers, and work is finally here! Wave 2 transforms Governance into an even deeper political simulation game, adding hundre
ds of new features and improvements to the game. Here's some of our favourites!
The Highlights
And here's a few more up close!
All-new avatar system!
Governance now has hand-drawn avatar artwork!
Every character in game now has a hand-drawn avatar, with a unique face and a unique name. With over 70 million combinations, there's an avatar for quite literally everyone in the UK! We're planning on adding more and more avatar assets over time - and, of course, you can always make your own and put it on the Workshop*!
We've also added hundreds of additional cultures to aid with realism and developing your own custom scenarios!
Polities, Devolved Governments and You
The game now simulates 'polity' areas down to cities and counties. This new dynamic and modular approach allows us to simulates a much deeper style of gameplay, and opens up incredible possibilities. Any polity can have a government attached, from city councils to devolved governments. Polities have their own metrics and economic systems, along with their own laws. Polities can declare independence too.
This new modular system opens players up to our incredible new devolution system. You can now play in Holyrood (for Scotland), the Senedd (for Wales) and Stormont (for Northern Ireland), with their own rules, laws and policies.
Other Polity features include:
A visual Polity and Constitution Editor in-game that allows you to propose major political map changes, such as devolving a region, adding metro mayors, abolishing the Lords and more!
Full support for STV and Additional Member System (AMS) based electoral systems in use within the UK, and mod support for council style multi-seat block voting and Proportional Representation
Play as the Mayor of London and the London Assembly!
Independence creates interim presidents, a separate economic system which can include a new central bank and currency, and new political parties!
Opinion Polling, Map Projections and voter intention are simulated down to the ward level, which filters into Polities. Filter extensively by polity to see fine-tuned information
Were you up for Election Night?
Election Nights now play out live in Governance. Watch the results live as they pour in across the country! Celebrate, commiserate, and find out whether your party has taken the lead in a tense finish!
You can also share your best Election Night results on the Steam Workshop for other users to see too!
Performance Improvements
You asked and we listened. We want Governance to the best it can be, and open to as many people as possible. We've listened to a lot of suggestions from the community and we're happy to say that we've added a lot of performance choices by popular demand:
2D map mode for improved performance
All popups are grouped together and it's possible to review them all in a carousel system
Low-priority events are filtered out
Performance scaling options for lower level councils and non-active areas
Less event spam and scaled quantity of events for NPCs based on connection to the player and importance to the world
Economic system and census system speed improvements
The map now also visually includes the full British Isles, and the Isle of Man!
Modding Gets Better
We've added so many new features to modding including:
A streamlined visual editor for building scenarios, taking you from your initial GeoJSON/TopoJSON files and taking you to the very end of the process!
Brush editor tools for painting demographic data, editing polities and legislatures, and drawing your own seats!
An all-new Mod Editor for non-Scenario, allowing you to add custom assets, events, translations and more!
An all-new Lua API (documentation following soon!)
Support for custom campaigns using existing scenarios, allowing you to use our UK data to build your own custom campaigns!
And there's more...
Wave 2 will be continually updated, and with several total conversion mods in the pipeline, we're really excited to see what people use the engine for. We are into Governance for the long haul. We want to get this right, and we want people to get the best experience from Governance that's possible.
We've been shipping nearly daily updates and patches to Wave 2's beta, and that won't stop now that we've left it. We're very excited to keep supporting the community and Governance. We're looking forward to seeing how our players find the new update and what we can do to keep building and iterating until we build the best game we can. It's exciting times, and I can't wait to share more as we keep building new things!
Wave 3's beta will start soon, and will focus on the finishing touches and improvements to gameplay needed before final release.
Minor notes
Saves from Wave 1 will likely not work due to the large changes. We reccomend you start a new game, or use the Wave 1 fixed in time build available.
Any Workshop content created with the Wave 2 beta should still work
Steam Achievement support should be coming over the weekend. If you are having troubles, let us know!
And as always, please send us your saves and mods if things aren't working as they're meant to!
Finally, thank you to everyone that has supported us as we get close to the end of Early Access, thank you so much to Emily for her incredible artwork, and thank you to everyone in the community that has been keeping the game going! We can't wait to share with you even more stuff we've been working on!