News

The Political Machine 2020: v1.1 Now Available

v1.1 is Now Available Featuring Steam Workshop Support and New Candidates Steam Workshop support and new candidates have been added in this major update for the Political Machine 2020. Bernie may be out of the race, but he is still available as a candidate in The Political Machine 2020 to play with or against. If you're looking to recapture the glory of former elections, grab Ronald Reagan or Al Gore and try to win in 2020. Top Updates Steam Workshop:  Upload ... [read more]

Dev Journal

The Political Machine 2020 #5: One for the Gipper

This week’s update to the Political Machine adds Ronald Reagan.  He’s the first candidate that includes a scoring handicap which means that your score is modified slightly because he’s a bit easier to win with than other candidates.  We’ll show you here. The update also includes AOC, Al Gore, and Barry Goldwater.  The Reagan Era Ronald Reagan was one of the last Presidents we had before the hyper politicization of American life really took... [read more]

Dev Journal

Political Machine 2020 #4

The next update to The Political Machine will be including mod support to Steam Workshop.  Specifically, we are going to let people make their own ideologies and share them with others.  We include quite a few in the game.    We will be uploading a few ideology mods to get things started and to help others learn how to make them. What is an ideology? An ideology is a set of issues your candidate wants to run on.   Unlike norm... [read more]

Dev Journal

Political Machine 2020 #3: A Walk-through

Today let's do a quick walk-through of The Political Machine 2020.  This will include what's new from previous editions as well as a discussion of the underlying simulation. Creating a candidate When creating a candidate you have a finite # of points to use to figure out what your candidate's strengths are. Stamina: How many moves you get per turn Intelligence: Enhances how well you do on interviews Charisma: Affects how well your speeches and ads do Media bias: Affec... [read more]

News

The Political Machine 2020 is Now Available - Let the Campaign Begin!

The Political Machine 2020 is Here It's time to enter the race! Buy on Steam    |    Buy at Stardock Win the hearts and minds of America’s voters and take the 2020 presidential election by storm in Stardock’s popular political strategy game. Choose a candidate and run against a computer opponent or a candidate controlled by another person over the Internet. Candidates include current Democratic front-runners like Joe Biden,... [read more]

News

Political Machine election roll-out schedule

For this election cycle we have a ton of updates in store between now and election day. Below is a tentative schedule: ## Spring 2020 ## Steam Workshop support for creating and sharing your own political ideologies. This year is a total, 100% rewrite of the game and while doing so we revisited everything about the game. The feature we like the most so far are the ideologies which will bring immense replayability to the game. Most of the candidates have their own ideology with ... [read more]

Dev Journal

The Political Machine 2020 #2: Evil ideologies

The biggest, most game changing feature of The Political Machine 2020 are the ideology trees.  Each candidate can have their own ideology tree which makes Bernie Sanders play quite a bit differently than say Joe Biden. For today's entry, I am going to try out making a custom candidate and choose the Fascism ideology.  I'm going to loosely base him off of one of my favorite villains of Stephen King's book, The Dead Zone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEE141IC4Q8 We ... [read more]

Dev Journal

Simulating the 2020 Election in Political Machine 2020

One of the options in the game is to simulate the election cycle.  The player just chooses two candidates and sees how they do.  Now, you won’t get the exact result every time, but it’s fun to see how a given candidate will do if run by the AI. This mode helps us test against any unintentional biases in the issues. Since no one knows how the election will go, it can be difficult to draw the line between when candidate A is simply more viable than candidate B.  In th... [read more]

Dev Journal

Political Machine 2020 #1: Being Pete Buttigieg

The Political Machine is a strategy/simulation game.  What has made it so popular over the years is that while it is a game, it has a pretty serious and robust simulation running behind it.  Most of the data is collected from a wide array census results, surveys and demographic research.  Every four years when we update the data, we are constantly surprised on the changes we see in different states.  The opioid epidemic is one example.  This issue wasn’t ... [read more]

News

COMING SOON: The Political Machine 2020!

Let the Campaign Begin! Stardock announced its new political strategy/simulation game today, The Political Machine 2020 .  The PC strategy game allows players to choose a candidate and run for President against either a computer opponent or a candidate controlled by another person over the Internet. Candidates include the current Democratic front-runners including Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, as well as Internet favorites such as And... [read more]