A message from the team...

Hi everyone, I hope you’ve been having a good week so far.

We’re rather disappointed to hear about the troubles people have been experiencing playing Cornwall Council and the IoW since we test-launched earlier this week. It would be very easy to dig our heels and pretend there isn’t an issue, but there clearly has been. We can only apologise that it hasn’t lived up to expectation, and we will be working on addressing those concerns over the next week.

Our plan always was to offer these as examples of local councils, with an eye to use them as a base for our standard frequent and rapid development and refinement, similar to what we offered for London and the devolved nations. We should have made it clearer that this was a proof of concept, and made it clearer that this was a work in progress that would grow as people play it.

To reiterate, no new polity legislatures are entering the game until we’re happy with these ones, and you’re happy with these ones. There’s nothing stopping you of course from adding your own to the Workshop - but we won’t be doing it ourselves until there’s more to complete in-game.

Getting it right with fixes to local council gameplay

Today’s patch includes immediate improvements to council gameplay.

Parties always chose a ‘leader’ for their legislature, but it wasn’t always clear who the leader in Cornwall Council is. This has now been amended and updated. In some parties, this leader can be overturned by the central party leader.

This was always the intention but we found a few compounding bugs when it came to checks

We investigated the reported polling issues rather thoroughly and found some of the root causes of issues, we constantly believe that they have largely been fixed. By design, polling in-game is an approximation of polling trends that by design captures a polity’s mood and party popularity over per constituency voting behaviour. It is designed to be a bit inaccurate - exit poll drama always being entertaining -but not completely unpredictable.

There is a good reason for polling to not be a match for voter behaviour, and we’re happy to talk about that now. Our plan eventually is for media organisations to organise polls with varying degrees of quality and accuracy. Similarly to the Information System, this will be expanded and improved in future updates.

The search bar

As we get ready for some large architectural changes to the UI, we wanted to highlight one large improvement to the Panels: a search bar. Quickly find people, constituencies, organisations, laws and more all from one section!

Fixed builds

For those not aware, we now offer fixed builds for versions if you’re looking to play a specific version of the game. This will go back to 0.7.7.

3DX improvements & other bug fixes

We’ve fixed a few bugs in testing we’ve found with extrusion layers, along with some further speed improvements. 3DX will be fully replacing old 3D by 0.7.13, and 3DX will be the default mode and will labelled as ‘3D’ mode from the next release.

Other bugs caught this week thanks to the amazing reports from the community:

• Improvements to delegating roles in Cabinet Selection

• Fixes to leadership election logic and UI

• Fixed bugs with backbenchers becoming party leader on start

• Fixed zero scores on economic impact

• Fixed issues with cabinet seat allocation

• Fixed council polls and seat forecasts moving further from reality each time a save was loaded

• Fixed parties' appeal to particular groups of voters, such as homeowners or skilled trades, jumping each time a save was loaded.

• Fixed parties that only sit on a council, such as Mebyon Kernow, starting without a whip, which reshuffled their council front bench the first time a save was loaded

• Drafting a bill for a council now marks national taxes such as income tax and VAT as needing consent from the government above it, instead of offering them as the council's own

• Council bills are now costed at the council's own size, so a road building bill no longer costs more than the council raises

• A party's leader on a council now runs its candidate selection there, instead of the national leader

• Starting as a council's Party Leader now makes you the party's leader on that council, not nationally

• The vote popup now says when a house can only block a bill by a set share, or cannot vote down a budget

• Improvements to no confidence vote behaviour

Later this week…

And we have even more refinements and improvements coming later this week. There is going to be an additional patch to Isle of Wight tuning data later today too. Stay tuned for more!