Comments for Clout: The Game

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.

Once a month (real-time month). I plan to add a timer to the Subterfuge main info page, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

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.

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.

Thanks for the glowing feedback and support!

Rick James? Is that you?

Clout: the only game where you can do meth AND learn things about debate and politics!

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.

Thanks for the feedback and support!

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! 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.

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.

Glad I could give your politician a righteous purpose!

Just another average day in the world of Clout.

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.

Thanks for the feedback and support!

Title font? Are you using IE? It displays the fonts with bizarre amounts of AA, and it also does other non-standard display things that make the game look a bit odd. IE is non-standards-compliant, so there's not a whole lot I can do about this.

Maximum Wage, not minimum. It was established in-game a while back by the socialist party. And yes, you will lose constituent support for acting outside of party lines. For doing it occasionally, the loss is meaningless... but it effectively makes it so that it's in your best interest to usually debate in alignment with your party.

I hear all the cool congresspersons are doing heroin. But all my friends tell me to resist peer pressure.

haha... The game would be near impossible if you picked that many negative traits. Your stats would be super low to start and you'd have a hard time doing anything or gaining any clout. I tried to make it so all character creation options give you a viable character. Please don't let that stop you from playing the worst politician ever, though! Remember: stats aren't everything :P

lol... well, if you hold them both in front of your face at the same time I think it'd work...? Can't say I've ever tried :P

Thanks for the feedback and support!

Actually you're using multiple accounts to downrate all helpful comments and downrate the game, which is pretty obvious as the game's rating goes up quite steadily until you trolls come back around. I've reported you to Kongregate support for this with IP information and screenshots of your admission of guilt. Thanks!

Well, it's actually impossible to spend $100 on the game... and you definitely didn't make 30 accounts. You made 2, and I just banned them both, as multiboxing is against the rules. Enjoy! :)

Thanks for the feedback and support! Hitting back in your browser should send you back a page in the game. I've made sure that the game is capable of handling this properly. Some browsers won't really do this by default with how the game is framed within Kongregate, but you should be able to right click on the game and find some sort of "this frame->back" option. Let me know if you have any problems with this feature!

Thanks for the feedback! Looks like i'll have to step up the timetable for the mobile version. I'm getting a ton of requests for it lately. Also, it's kind of a roundabout and crappy solution, but if you go to the kong main site on mobile and scroll all the way to the bottom you can get the normal Kong site and play the game via your phone. Of course the interface isn't exactly optimized for that screen size, so it's not the easiest way to play. As I said, mobile version in the works. Sorry for the delay.

Thanks for the feedback and support! But I can't draw. That's why the game is text-based. Sorry.

Purpleish. I had to use that because both Socailists and Conservatives are "red".

Ask to be reset in Cronies & Associates->General Chat. Allowing characters the ability to delete themselves could open the door for a lot of exploits, and this is an infrequent request. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Haha... on top of that, people have been pointing out that the in-game debt is significantly better than the real-world debt. I originally pulled all nation stats from the CIA world factbook a couple years back... so we're obviously nowhere near corrupt enough yet!

Thanks for the feedback and support!

Thanks for the feedback and support! You definitely aren't the only one that thinks so, and I previously increased the energy regen rate by 20% based on player feedback like yours on Kongregate. However, it would significantly alter the game if I sped it up even more. If you want to read the long-winded explanation as to why, check the FAQ in-game (under Help). Ideally you just only pass out once when you're a newbie, and that's designed to hopefully get people to read the help files as the game is pretty complex and you'll be at a disadvantage if you don't :)

I think you're probably right, so long as it's available. You have to pick a certain background trait to make it show up.

All the meth head congresspersons say there's purple spiders under the podium on the floor.

Stress reduces at the end of the day by 25%-1% for every active bill you have going at the time (to discourage spamming bills). You can also use various drugs to reduce it at the cost of energy.

Aren't you glad they keep a special room in the back for all the people who pass out?

In order to pay down the national debt, the government has to free up actual money. This means cutting spending. In game terms, this means the bill slightly reduces all other positive aspects of the nation (GDP Growth, Public Health, etc) in order to also reduce the debt by a sizable amount. Why these people might be opposing your bill in particular I'm not sure, but the GDP growth and population growth rates are currently pretty low, so that may have something to do with it. Some players also revel in being corrupt and trying to "break" the nation.

Thanks for the feedback! Debating against bills that are not aligned with your party is an intended feature of the game and will not cause CSP loss. You can gain clout from both supporting allied bills and opposing enemy bills (as long as the bill passes/fails, respectively). Keep in mind that anything you can introduce you should support, not just bills from your own party.

You're right that I need to add a detailed explanation for each stat in the help. I keep forgetting that one. I figured the drugs would be intuitive based on their real-life counterpart. You can wikipedia anything on that list and read more about it. Stimulants give energy, depressants take it. Depressants also remove stress, and stimulants usually cause some. Most abilities can't be explained concisely as you're just supposed to use them when they make sense for your position on a bill. If I were to simply list out what ability was good against what bill, not only would it be a massive mess of text that would be hard to glean anything useful from, but I think it would trivialize the game as each bill tends to have a couple obvious strong abilities and a couple less obvious ones that require knowing something about history/politics/etc.