Finally beat Reagan! Posted on Monday, September 6, 2004 Well, it took about six tries, but I finally beat Reagan with Kerry/Clinton. (I had also tried other running mates.) Everytime I played him, he took most or all of the endorsements and just pounded me to near-zero EC votes with television campaigns. It took me a couple games to figure out that he was controlling what the people were thinking about...so I thought I would counter that by making the people think about issues that hurt Reagan like Abortion Rights, Affirmative Action, and Gay Marriage....so I made sure I got the Womens and Minorities endorsements and then made a bunch of tv ads about those issues...the best I managed was to get abortion rights up to number 5 on the list of important topics by the end of the game. So he still beat me badly. (I actually lost one game taking only my home state of Mass with 12 electoral votes!) I tried numerous tactics including trying to keep up with his spending. I built Level 3 headquarters everywhere...and was able to keep up with his spending, but it didn't help the outcome. Finally, I found the right balance that worked for me, so I wanted to share it with others. I started out with Level 3 headquarters in NY, FL, TX to build money to advertise with. I had realized that each time we played, The War on Terror was a hot topic (available in most states even w/o a headquarters) so I picked that as my #1 topic. I then started creating web masters in multiple states (ended up with 6 of them I think) and made only tv ads (no newspaper or radio). I split the ads evenly between positive and negative, but all about The War on Terror. I then watched the Zagby as the game progressed. In the first few weeks, the topic was important to about 12% of the people. By the end of the game (see screenshot below), it was up to 35%!!! This made all the difference. Of course, it didn't take Reagan long to figure out what I was doing and start producing his own counter ads. In fact, I was favored by 99% of the voters on this topic in the early going...but then had to struggle to hold on to 79% by the end of the game. The other tactic I used was I let Reagan have a very small lead in a couple of key states (CA, TX, FL) and watched them closely each turn. Then starting in about the 35th week, I started countering his operatives with my own. I took some of his out with fixes and I just nullified the others by adding my own (i.e. his spin doctor and my spin doctor cancel each other out). I ended up with 297/241 EC votes...but lost the popular vote by almost 7 million. He spent over twice as much money as I did but I spent over three times as much political capital. (Mostly on operatives rather than endorsements.) Hope that helps anyone else who is stuck on him.