Approval Voting - Development Log #529

In this week's devlog the team talks about perk fulfillment and a change to the voting system.

Martin

Hello, it's me, Martin! Whenever I show up in the devlog these days, it's usually about matters unrelated to the development of the game. And this time is no different: I am just popping in to let you know that there's some progress on perk fulfilment:

Firstly, Julian has wrapped up the "Secret Soundtrack" that's a perk of the Galaxy tier and above. Supporters will get download access to the original high-quality audio files. Everyone else will be able to listen to the ten tracks on pretty much all the usual streaming platforms. For now, the public release is pencilled in for the 1st of September. Exclusive download access will be available as soon as I have implemented...well...exclusive download access. Hopefully over the course of the coming weeks.

And secondly, the final batch of physical perks has been sitting in my office for a few weeks now and is waiting to get packaged and shipped. I dread the latter part, as it's become a serious pain to ship things to the US where most of our supporters are located. I am still in the process of figuring out how to do this in a way that causes as little friction as possible. As soon as I got a plan, Michi and I will likely meet up at simulogics HQ to finally wrap up this chapter, tentatively scheduled for "before the end of Q2".

Michi (molp)

After the previous two weeks' election turmoil (see #527 and #528), we decided to change the voting system to approval voting. In an election with this system, every voter can vote for as many candidates as they approve of. In the end, the candidates with the most votes will get into parliament.

Why the change? In the previous system with only one vote per voter, players needed to cooperate and plan a lot to get as many of their favorite candidates as possible into parliament. If everyone voted for last term's governor because they did a good job, that would allow other parties to enter parliament with a relatively low vote count. That is exactly the opposite of the desired behavior of many voters. With approval voting, the voter can vote for a set of candidates instead. Of course, given that we now hide the vote count during elections, this system also has its downsides: It is rather difficult to know who is going to be governor after the election. So far we have received more positive than negative feedback about the change.

I also added a new alert that reminds inhabitants of the upcoming election end 24 hours in advance. It seems to help quite a bit with voter turnout, but that might also be an effect of the whole Promitor election debacle and might fade.

Here is the latest economic report:

Click the image for the full report

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Happy trading!