Comments for Clout: The Game

The problem is that what everyone thinks good and evil are is dependent on their political affiliation. That's why there's the party system where certain bills are good for you, and certain ones are bad. This effectively creates a situation like you described without being heavy-handed and biased towards certain policies.

I think you should be able to reload the page or right-click and choose "reload frame" to achieve the desired effect there.

hm? Well, I suppose that's one definition. Not really the one I was going for. Clout effectively means power/influence, usually relating to politics or social status.

I might do that for one box, though the logistics of doing it kind of suck considering how the microtransactions work. Dyes will never be purchasable with in-game money. I like that they give a neat way for people to display their support of the game in a way that other players can see. Allowing them to be purchased with cash would cheapen that. I've also had the idea to have the press randomly investigate folks... but it seems like a lot of people are having issues staying afloat as-is. Once I get scandals and investigations all balanced to my liking I might implement something like that. Other countries will have an effect on the game when I'm done with foreign relations.

Filibuster stops anyone from playing any abilities on the bill as long as you have enough energy to keep filibustering. Poison pill heavily sets back a bill and puts it into a state where you lose constituent support if you act in its favor (regardless of party affiliation).

Hard to say. Various bills affect that stat, so it's likely that a large number of non-conferenced bills simply added up.

Not sure what you think the typo is. The 1s are intentional. It's a joke relating to stupid people on the internet who post things with too many exclamation points.

yeah... It seems like that's getting a bit out of hand. Looks like your next problem to solve.

I'm not sure how this could be. I guess there are minute variations in it due to how computerized clocks work, but it's not going to be majorly noticeable. The discrepancy would be within seconds at most.

There's nothing wrong with energy regen. You just happened to do this when you gained energy. It regenerates using a cron job for all players, so nothing you do by logging in or out could affect it.

The way fonts work in HTML is not equivalent to how they work in an image manipulation program. Aside from Impact, obviously, I doubt you'll find exactly equivalent fonts elsewhere, and sometimes the fonts will look different for different users due to variations in fonts in browsers/OSes.

You're basically asking for me to remove filibuster from the game, because its only real purpose is on binary bills. Win bills work like regular bills. There is also an energy cap that stops it from being particularly unfair (at most, you can only filibuster for about 2.5 hours in a stretch by yourself).

The game uses many fonts, of course!

I'll look into it. How high of a priority this will be depends a lot on how much of a bitch it is to implement.

indeed. Though, I dislike how it looks for socialists playing against bills a bit.

I'm sure it's totally legit. You should go for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7R7q1lSZfs

I'll be adding a view where you can see the detailed stats of other nations as part of the foreign relations update.

I wouldn't know. I set the nation to the IRL stats of the US originally, and again when I moved the game from alpha->beta. It originally came in very high on the list, ranging between the top and top 3 depending on how I did the ranking formula.

I considered adding this but figured nobody would use it. Realistically, the game is half-dead on facebook because their advertising is borked so I can't really grow the game on that side unless I run reddit ads for it (which is expensive and much more effective when I point them at Kong. Everyone hates facebook!)

It's hard to say. Honestly I haven't completely gotten what I want to do with it worked out. I have a lot of ideas, but I'm not sure which ones are workable until I think some more about how to implement them and incorporate them into gameplay in an interesting and fun way. Some of the ideas I'm working on: defense rating for nations, plays into wars. Wars, obviously. Removal of the generic "tariffs" bills and addition of tariff bills and other foreign relation bills that have a generic base and target a nation (this will make an actual bill as a normal bill introduction would). I have more, but these comments are quite limited in length. Suffice it to say that it'll probably be about a week minimum before I actually open up the foreign relations tab, but you'll likely see new things on the world page and such before that.

I'm sure everyone would like that! But it would also make this a completely different (and much more boring and unfair) game.

Addiction isn't that complicated. It's just a random roll every time you use something. I guess I could make it more in-depth, but I'm not sure it would really add to gameplay much.

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 effects of bills mirror their effects in reality. This is all I will ever explicitly say.

You need to be CT3+, and you use the sticky buitton next to the post button. If you don't see a button and you're using firefox: use a different browser.

I imagine it would take hundreds upon hundreds of years to achieve such abilities, and it's not even clear if doing such things is really possible. In reality, cloning isn't really all that exciting, and it can't really create a duplicate like you're thinking. Even if your base genetic code is the same, it can't copy your experiences and such.

Posting what each bill did would be quite unrealistic and trivialize the game somewhat. Just as a real congressperson: you can only really estimate the effects of your bills.

That's their relative clout tier. Technically you "change" it by advancing in clout tier, but that's not really what's going on.

Thanks for the feedback and support!

CT3+, but there should be a sticky button next to the post button. It will be disabled if you aren't CT3+. If you don't see it at all, your browser isn't displaying something right. The last person with this issue was using Windows 7 with firefox and switched to chrome which fixed it. I'm not quite sure why firefox is displaying that wrong in some instances, and it may be a bug with the rendering engine since firefox on XP, chrome on XP, IE on XP and Safari on XP have no problems.

Let's just say that some bills aren't exactly a good tradeoff in nation stats.

i have fixed the bug in question

In US law, unless there's a law against what you're doing, you're allowed to do it. Therefore child labor laws would necessarily be created to put restrictions on child labor.

connect the gems political games? Now that's a first for me.

[R] is for LRC, actually, but otherwise this is correct.

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.

I don't make that decision. Kongregate chooses which games to put badges on, and they only do so for games with either a 3.65+ or a 3.85+ (can't remember which)

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.

nope. The sender is "unknown" for blackmail.

G Jenk has none as far as I know, though Q has some.

It's random. Sometimes this will happen. Also, nicotine is one of the more addictive drugs in the game (as in real life).

Thanks for the feedback and support! Within the next couple times you come back, I should have moved Clout to V1.0 and have The Lobby in a playable state.

There is no way to see the exact value anymore, which was always the intent. Your status screen will give you a message that gives you a general idea, and the main subterfuge info screen will tell you your chance of reelection.

Dyes aren't used up... so this would be no different than getting 7 of each. You only have 7 equipment slots.

I think if people ask Kongregate to add a forum for a multiplayer game that they do. Many games that are pretty small have one. Also, I've found it's less effective to advertise to political non-gamers than it is to advertise to gamers who are non-political. The gamers don't really care about the political theme as the gameplay is semi-familiar enough, whereas the political folks often just can't figure out how to do anything because they aren't used to video games... and this one doesn't exactly have a shallow learning curve.

Yes. Your health improves by a set amount each day. This amount is doubled if you're hospitalized.

I'll look into making an offsite forum, but won't be adding one in-game. I can probably just set one up on my hosting, though I'm not sure I want it eating the extra bandwidth.

SO YOU SAY

Don't worry too much til you get 2 or 3.