Comments for Clout: The Game

It's mostly to prevent powerlevelling, which I feel significantly cheapens MMOs after they've been operating for a while.

Passing a bill only gains you lifetime clout equal to the difference between the cost of the bill and the gain. If this didn't occur, passing your own bills would be significantly better for gaining lifetime clout, which is a situation I didn't want to create.

Unfortunately with how the DB is structured I can't pull your total combined character lifetime in a dynamic way. There are leaderboards for clout in-game on the world page. Seeing your lifetime past CT4 is kind of intended as a "perk" of dying.

You both hit the page while I was changing some stuff. It works fine now.

This would make money too good. Nobody is supposed to be perpetually invincible. The only way I would add an option for this is if it were somehow scandalous as well.

It's not really required that you change equipment like that. Besides that, Congresspersons have no real way to suspend debate on a bill (aside from filibustering I suppose).

Do you actually have any scandals?

The speaker election happens just before the general election, so if he is no longer speaker then he's subject to normal elections immediately as he loses that position.

special event surrounding a couple people asking to be killed off

this is correct

Conference committee can remove poison pill, though your fellow congresspersons have to vote to help you out. If you don't have CC, try asking for one on your bill in team/party chat.

Thanks for letting me know! Some of these display problems are super weird.

The constitution of the united states is set up such that the federal government doing much of anything is potentially unconstitutional. Obviously lifting bans of things and removing taxes can't be subject to a challenge. As such, the challenge system favors the libertarian party somewhat... but that's kind of how the constitution is written.

Public Debt and the National Deficit are two different (but related) things... so I think that would cause even more confusion. Debt is generally notated with a negative sign on financial statements, so I'll leave it how it is. It's mostly just people's confusion at it not being red but being negative. Which is what I wanted people to see... but they didn't exactly interpret it how I wanted them to.

Yeah, this happens under certain conditions. I already fixed the bill to be passed and will fix the other thing in a bit.

pass chance = pass chance

This is a common request, but any non-scandalous option for stress reduction or energy gain would make cash way too powerful and destroy game balance.

Unlike kongregate friends, in-game associate requests must be approved before they activate.

You can click people's names in most places you see them in white and get to the look screen. It's missing in a couple places that will eventually be added.

Send me a screenshot with your OS/browser version.

I'll add a way to remove associates. Been meaning to do that for a while.

They might not both fit, but I do need to add 1 or two more to make it fit evenly on the page.

Haha... this is because committees and poison pill cost clout. I believe I lock it out once you're negative, and was going to lock it out if you didn't have enough... but then I was faced with the problem where someone might spend most/all of their clout to buy one of those abilities, and then be disappointed that they couldn't use it since they wouldn't intuitively know that it cost clout to play. So I left it able to go negative. I'm not really sure which would be a better solution that players would prefer.

The help pages need some serious updates. Apologies for that. I'm going to be doing a major overhaul of the help files in the coming week or so after I get some more features in. V1.0 and the beginnings of the lobby will follow.

The mission roll happens when you enact the mission, but police protection is computed when the mission actually goes off based on the current game state.

41? Why not 47?

That is a good point. I hadn't figured anyone would ever get hit that hard. I'll give you your weekly salary manually, and will implement something that checks for high stress/low health or something like that. You are definitely correct that this shouldn't happen.

I'd prefer not to add a per-user filter as you can already see your cronies' bills, meaning you'd only ever really be searching for a specific person to attack their bills. Not really something I want to encourage. The game doesn't actually track how old a bill is, but the main bill list is effectively sorted by age (actually sorted by order of introduction). Since that isn't tracked, I unfortunately can't add that second suggestion.

That achievement is for passing a binary bill, not taking drugs. I've simply been handing out the achievements to people retroactively since I just implemented them.

Hookers and Blow: the official sport of the United States Congress.

There seems to have been some kind of major server error unrelated to the game. I'm looking into it now. Unfortunately it's unlikely I'll be able to recover anything significant from that day as I do not have the server backing up every hour or something. But frankly I'm starting to wonder if I should with all the issues I've been having lately.

Every scandalous action you take is logged by the game and can later be uncovered by player-run investigations. Other than that, there is no drawback aside from the monetary cost.

VIP assassinations have no special conditions like a normal assassination, as they target an NPC. Success = death of the target.

Not exactly. There's a Facebook page that points to the Facebook interface for the game. There's a wikia page somebody made, and there's this page on Kongregate. That's about it. You're probably best off directing them here, as the game loads with a little ad for the game if you're not registered on Kongregate.

Nope. Since the game isn't coded like shit (most games are), all character data is referential and is therefore "updated" automatically as anything changes with your character.

It seems this happens to people that have really high charisma and attractiveness sometimes. I think it may be awarding too much bonus clout, which doesn't get recorded right in your lifetime stat. I'll have to look into this as it could seriously affect gameplay. Luckily not that many people seem to be seriously affected.

Thanks for the feedback! Bills fail and see competition routinely. You earn more clout and constituent support for opposing bills than you do for helping them pass, and potentially even more than you get from introducting them yourself (really that part depends on your stats). You also gain a chance at a relic for opposing a binary bill that fails, though the recent binary bill that was up saw no real opposition probably due to its content.

Does any party actually support this, though? I'm not sure any of them do.

Thanks for the feedback! Passing out has no actual penalty. If you just want to play all your energy for the day quickly, don't worry about it going negative. The whole point of negative energy is to allow more casual players to play "to the future" in a way by frontloading effects so they don't have to be repeatedly playing to get the maximal effect from stuff.

Thanks for the feedback! I get the occasional request for this, but the opacity of item stats is by design to encourage people to dress in actual outfits instead of a powergamed mishmash of unrelated items. All items that cost any real amount of money are viable and comparable to other items at a similar cost in total stat boosts. Therefore, it is effectively impossible to make an unintelligent decision when purchasing items. Also note that while not explicit, there are consistent themes as to what kind of items boost what stats.

any pizza is a personal pizza if you try hard and believe in yourself

works every time

I'd really prefer not to have to move the game again, and the stalkers will follow us anyway. It needs to stop here. The hosting company seems to actually be doing something now, so we'll see.

There are significant discounts for buying larger amounts at one time.

It's increasing by less every day as people get a better handle on the game. It's very possible to fix things.

That's not a typo. Looks like somebody never played Metal Gear Solid.

plot twist: the rabbit is Fred

This has been mentioned before. The problem is that there are 3 main types of colorblindness and there isn't a color palette with 5 readily-distinguishable colors that fits the 3 types (some types don't even have 5 readily-distinguishable colors within themselves). It's a difficult problem to solve.