To be honest I hadn't heard of the game before. But after looking into it some more, it doesn't really seem to be what I would call politically-themed. There's a political element to the game, but this seems to be one of many, and the others seem to have a much greater focus. It's also not really based in real-world politics at all... which is more what I was talking about than just a general political system of some sort (which I believe has been featured in more than a couple MMORPGs).
Thanks for the feedback and support! Weaponry and other frightening/intimidating things tend to raise your speaking ability, and may also raise/lower other stats.
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You seem to respond to every comment made, even this one. You also make a more than realistic game about politics (although you make it so that the people actually stay relatively on topic, while in real life tax decrease would wander off into NASA funding and so). You even don't make it a pay-to-play or pay-to-win game. I was honestly considering that you are an isolated rouge AI set out on emotionally controlling the world. Mainly due to the comment responses. Honest.
Adding more parties to the game at this point would be near-impossible. However, I've added "Jackboots" to the game, so you can now play a jackbooted fascist (I recommend the Socialist or Conservative parties for this as well).
Yes. This will incur penalties to what the stats normally benefit. This will only happen if you're stacking certain types of gear or withdrawing from drugs, though.
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I would also like to know what stats, help you get clout from making bills fail. Is it Charisma and Intelligence? Or is it other stats?
The amount of clout you gain for acting on bills which are not your own is tied to how much you affect the bill. Thus, Intelligence and Speaking Ability have the highest impact on Clout gain from acting on the bills of others (either for or against).
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As an active player I'm having some stress issues. I understand the drugs are in place to be able to help out with it but I'd rather not have a whole lot of scandals on my record. Something like say some stress relief if a bill I introduced is passed, and an increase if one of my bills fails... if it were 3-5% +/- it'd help out the people on here that are more active.
Thanks for the feedback! But it's completely intentional that more active players accrue scandals to remain effective. You get tools to manage consituent support and scandals more effectively once you reach CT2. If people weren't incentivized to create scandals, investigations, constituent support and most of campaign management would have little to no purpose and the game would be significantly less interesting.
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Maybe even campaign contributions for making sure a bill doesn't go through, etc. Just seems like there'd be a bit more competitive nature if you saw more bills failing and getting voted against by someone.
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.
lol... yeah, I think cloutville needs a wee bit more coordination on their goals with the nation stats. On the plus side, since the US starts so strong you've got a looooong way to fall while you figure it out.
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I like the game a lot and am a very casual player so don't know much but one thing it seems like is that there isn't enough motivation to vote against bills. It's far easier/more lucrative to just support your own. Possibly there should be less bonus for starting a bill and/or more bonus for killing a bill. Another possibility would be capping the # of bills of a certain type that can be passed in a week. Say you capped tax increase/decrease at 100 bills a week. If a party wanted to effect income tax they'd pass all of theirs and then have to try to shut down all of the opposite ones. As it is it's usually just a "if they pass 100 we'll pass 200" thing. I think it'd be more exciting to see more bills fail and have that be a bigger part of the game. JMO and I'm a very casual and new player plus like the game very, very much as is obviously!
Thanks for the feedback and support! I read your other message first and responded to the opposition thing in a comment on that comment. There are bonuses for opposing, but I think a lot of people are unaware of this. I should probably make it more clear somehow. Oh, and there are also bills which have no direct opposite and you must oppose to stop (most of these are green party bills).
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Would you be willing to put into the help section the different Political Party synopsis shown at the start up of the game? I cant remember what I stand for and accidentally voted for a bill my party does not support.
thank you.
Playing abilities for bills your party doesn't support is an intended feature of the game for various reasons. Unless you repeatedly do this without paying any attention at all, you won't have any problems. It doesn't hurt your support very much unless you do it a bunch.
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if I may make a suggestion stress should decrease at a faster rate. I'm trying to play this game without taking drugs lol
CT2 gives more options for energy use with less stress generation. Though, remember there's always interns and hookers if you're just trying to stay away from drugs!
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i mean i just spent kreds on them they should at least add a small boast of some sort, evan if it is really small boast.
The kreds purchase items on the pawn shop screen are not intended to give any gameplay advantage. They are merely intended to customize your character's appearance. The items available in the offshore accounts section do affect gameplay somewhat, but their effect is intentionally greatly limited. If you would like a refund for the dyes, let me know and I will look into whatever provisions Kongregate has for refunds on kreds purchases.
The game does not claim dyes improve your stats or equipment in any way, though it appears it also doesn't explicitly state that they're merely cosmetic on the pawn shop screen. I will update the game to make this more clear.
The store interfaces return you to the main screen due to outdated considerations about how the game used to display user info. Eventually buying things/using drugs will keep you on the score screen and simply give a message.
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I feel the game needs some new formulas for country info calculation. Tax is extremely high, yet happiness is above 100%!
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Congressional salaries have gone up by 10000 from since I started playing, taxes are at a flat rate of 43.3%. Speaking of which, there should be a binary bill for a progressive tax. There should be a way for us conservatives to get them lazy 47%ers to pay higher rates than the rich.
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There are some ways to reduce/minimize stress that are legal (replying to gerq174, i don't know how to reply here if that's an option). Once you hit level 2 you can do things like speaking engagements which use a lot of energy but cause very little stress as one example.
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The 5 five year plan is immpossible to get by yourself, i suggest that anyone can add clout to the bill and at some point it will fill up to the top. Other groups can see your progress, so they are when it passes.
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I kinda think the Black market items to reduce stress could be a bit more effective, when buying the highest cost only reduces 7 percent of my stress it is a little frustrating. Also as a side thought what about some highly expensive but legal ways to reduce stress for those that want to try the annoying and frankly futile route of staying above board? Love the game keep up with the awesome work.
Thanks for the feedback! More cost does not equate to more total effect, but rather to a better conversion rate from stress->energy. If you just want a really big stress reduction in one go, try some heroin!
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I think the time should be clearer. The clock should run 24 hour time. As it is you get time statements but you don't know if it's pm or am time.
Thanks for the feedback! It appears the clock in the status log is 12 hour... but all other clocks in the game are 24 hour on Mountain time. I'll change the status logger once I get a spare minute for development.
Ask to be reset in Cronies & Associates->Global Post. I'll get to it in a bit once you do. There are various exploit-related reasons I don't let people delete themselves at will.
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third like the idea of a president whether npc or playable. would be cool to have a prez send war proposals to congress. also having the prez elected every so many months and be from a random party if npc therefore more likely to vetoe the opposing parties high impact bills. fourth think you should put more countries into the world. fifth health problems caused by drug addiction and worse health problems with long term drug addiction and perhaps some sort of rehab. overall good game with a lot of potential and given your commitment to your game and players I think it is likely to reach most if not all its potential
President/VP, presidential assassinations and speaker of the house are next on my implementation list. It should be a pretty quick one. And yeah, the president's affiliation will affect how he vetoes. It won't be totally random. Drugs are already really bad to use frequently due to scandals, though that's probably not a part of the game you've encountered heavily yet if you're CT1/2. Thanks for all the feedback!
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I don't normally comment but seeing as how you can take the time to read and respond to everyone who comments I can take the time to comment. first when it comes to pay to win, I think everyone is overlooking the fact that as an individual you cant pay to win. As I understand it the only way to win is by passing a bill that causes your party to win. second if you want to put graphics in you could include them even though you cant draw, due to how unique your game is and how much effort you put into improving it and how you respond to your players, if you asked someone or more likely a whole lot of people would help in designing graphics
You are correct that there's really no way for someone to individually win, and it's pretty rare that it's ever even possible to win individually on a bill due to the multiplayer nature of the game. It's unlikely that I'll include graphics in THIS game, but the general success of this game on Kongregate and the Kongregate advertising offer related to kred-enabled game has renewed my interest in creating the "companion games" to Clout. They're called The Lobby and Campaign Trail, and will directly interact with the game world of Clout while actually being completely separate games.
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You could include information about +0, +1, +2, +3 marks in the help page or in the bills page, or in both pages. It took me quite a while to figure out it's abilities effectivness multiplayer based on players clout tier. Thou I didn't figured out yet how exactly it works. I'm under impression that most of the newbies have simillar problems with understanding those marks.
Thanks for the feedback! It does mention this when you first create your character, but it should probably be stated in the help. It's not really important for newbies to know as you can go up in tier without suffering any penalties. Penalties only occur once you reach CT2 or higher. If you're higher than CT1 and play on a CT1 player's bill, you will suffer a penalty (50% if you're 3+). If you're CT4 and act on a CT2 player's bill, you operate at 80% strength. All of the autobalance percentages are carefully designed to balance higher and lower tier players in a fair fashion to discourage griefing and ganking, but still allow multiplayer interaction.
Thanks for saying so! I'm not sure why other developers wouldn't... I certainly don't think I know what everyone wants off the top of my head, and player feedback just helps me make the game better.
You should support anything you can introduce. If you stick to that, you won't ever get unhappy constituents. I can't really list out every last one because it would be a huge mess. Each bill is individually-designed. Aside from that, your best guide is google. I tend to establish the party's positions on each bill based on the actual positions of that party in real life (with some satirical fudging towards kill all humans and soviet russia for green/socialist respectively). As a final note: it's not expected that you always play on party lines. You can very easily maintain your office while occasionally supporting things not within your party for reasons of personal preference or the current state of the nation. This is an intended feature of the game.
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There should really be a penalty for running your character to exhaustion. My guy literally ends up faceplanting at *least* daily.
Thanks for the feedback! Though, it does have a minor penalty. You can't use half the headers, some of which allow you to do stuff that doesn't cost energy. Other than that, I don't really want to add more of a penalty as I think it'd piss people off. Even having everything but help locked out pissed a lot of people off.
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Loved it.
I thought it would be one of THOSE games...you know what kind of shitty game i'm talking about. But it is in fact an interactive world where we can make political decisions and compete. And that rocks. Good job. Never wished for a game like this, but a love for this type of game is sparking in me now for some reason.
Nope. New feature. Helps out casual players, and also makes drugs make more sense for newbies. Sometimes people would come in, buy a stress reducing item, lose energy and not really get the point/think there was a bug. Now your stress can go negative so it's more obvious what happened.
It's always your allies investigating you. They just can't handle your success and are trying to tear you down. The voices under the podium told me so.
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Its a great game
For things like stress release (always remember, your enemy irl will probably be the drug dealing greeny who has no money on this) :D
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You know what really should be changed:
You pass out if your Energy count is 0
You have excactly 100 points
Actions cost 5 points
What happens is I do all of my actions and have to wait an entire minute for that one point to charge up,so I can do another single action...
Could you maybe like tweak it so,that you faint at a number s really unnerving to see those 5 points sitting around doing nothing :|
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.
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You should add a presidential election where the candidate is nominated by his party, and if he wins he gets an extra set of abilities to use on bills.
Thanks for the feedback! The speaker of the house elections will work somewhat like this. I also plan to have a president at some point, but it will be an NPC and have veto powers.
It also costs nothing in terms of cash. It's only useful if you have no cash and a high stress level. I added it for newer players who run out of cash and end up with a super high stress level, which essentially prevents them from playing for a day or two if they want to do something useful. This new option lets them recover from that in a less crappy way.
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Could use a bit of advertising and teamplay encouragement, I dunno maybe rebuild cronies section so it would show you all active players, and you could choose from list ones that you already met/cooperated with in game. Cause social aspect of this game is it's greatest advantage, and it is trully masterworked. Also seein' that developer is really there commited into ongoing improvement of the game is really something to be seen, it's trully commendable. Keep up the great work.
Thanks for the feedback and support! I'll look into adding a way to friend someone in-game so they show up as an associate. I was just considering allowing sending kong friend requests in-game, but then realized that it wouldn't really cover facebook->kong interactions. Can't really give an ETA right now on that feature, though.
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Wow. I want to be the ultimate green politician, literally killing of humanity to let animals live. And you give me a goal. Saving up to legalize homicide.
I love this. I swear, for animals in uh, wherever we are, I will help us help ourselves... in the end
or something
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I'd really like it if I could see the stats on items in the store so I could make intelligent decisions about what to buy.
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.