I found a magic planet.

It’s not that it is a class 20 planet – it only started as a class 14 and I’ve upgraded it since.  It is that it had 6 fertile tiles with 5 of them ready to have something amazing placed in the middle.  In this case, Kimberly’s Refuge.  Combined with the planet being a fertile world the result is that this one planet produces 34 food. 

Of course, having the time to build this up required relative peace to be the norm which is the subject of this dev journal.

Leave me alone

One of the most common questions we get is how do you keep everyone from going to war with you? Can you play the game without having to build up a huge military.  The answer is, yes and…maybe. 

I’m playing as a benevolent civilization.  This means my polar opposite civilizations (malevolent) will be inclined to go to war with me.  If I were playing as pragmatic, they would also not like me but they are somewhat less likely to pull the trigger on going to war with a pragmatic civilization versus one that is their opposite.

So what’s the key to getting them to leave me alone?

Relationship factors

Here is the Drengin.  The biggest two things helping me with them are the fact we’re trading with them and they are relatively far away.

Tip #1: Trade with them  

When I play as a peaceful civ, I am careful to trade as much as I can.  You do take a hit due to trading with their enemies but it’s still a big benefit.

Trade helps in so many other areas too.  For example, the more you trade, the less easy of a target you are since they really want your money.

Tip #2: Treaties

Make sure you are setting up treaties with them.

Tip #3: Financial Aid / Tribute

You can give tribute to civilizations (give them money) which will make them happy. 

Tip #4: Don’t be an easy target

If a bear is chasing after you and your friends, you only need to be faster than the slowest friend.   You don’t need a big military to keep from being attacked.  But if you are absolutely defenseless then you are inviting conquest.

Tip #5: Use Diplomats

If you have trained any diplomats, you can use them on the powerful civilizations that you want to leave you alone.  You don’t need them to love you, you just need them to hate someone else more.

Tip #6: Build up your diplomatic skills

There are certain planetary improvements and technologies that give your civilization more diplomatic points.  Your increased skills will cause other civilizations to like you more.

Tip #7: Spy with Freighters

A lot of players will try to keep an eye on what other civilizations are doing by building starbases and sensor ships.  But these can sometimes cause other civilizations to consider them trespassers.  But freighters don’t have that issue.

Instead, design freighters that have great sensor ranges.  Make sure you get an open borders treaty with them.

Hopefully these tips will help you maintain a galactic peace…or at least long enough to either ascend or get a diplomatic victory!

Stardock Magazine

March 2020

by Brad Wardell

## Contents ##

• How Stardock is working from home
• CursorFX added to Object Desktop
• Star Control Roadmap
• Guided tour of Stardock

## How Stardock is working from home ##

This is a crazy situation we find ourselves in. 

I hope this newsletter finds you healthy and safe. 

So last week the governor of Michigan, which is the state in the US that we have our main office in, ordered all businesses closed with a handful of exceptions. 

We happen to be fortunate enough that we’ve had external artists and developers for years.  So we have a pretty good idea of how to get things done from remote.  But we’ve never had to do it at this scale. Below, I’m going to outline what we’re doing.  I hope you find this information helpful.

Jira

Crucial in making this all work is a web tool called Jira. It’s all cloud based and super easy to set up.  Once you create your “project,” you can invite others over via their email address. You can create as many projects as you want with it.

First, I start with a road map.  What are the things I want to get done?

Then, I break that down into tasks (issues). 

Now, I won’t get into Sprints and such. How you want to set up your deadlines requires a bit more discussion than this article is intended to get into.  What I will say is that you want to be able to hand out issues to people. 

What we do is create a backlog of tasks.  Each task has a story point associated with it. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, or 13 points, depending on the complexity.  The story points aren’t intended to be specific time required, but we tend to aim for everyone to finish between 8 to 10 story points per week.  The key is to be consistent with your assigning of story points.

From there, it’s a matter of spending a little time to make sure everyone has enough tasks (issues) assigned to them and making sure that they are finishing enough tasks in a week (or whatever your time frame is). This way, you don’t end up with people stressing out at home not knowing what they should be doing and everyone knows what the expectations are.

There is a lot of communication stuff in there as well, where pictures, video, and such can be inserted.

So here you see me and Skittles (our marketing manager) talking about a virtual tour of the company offices (that is included later in this newsletter).  This task is 1 story point.  This week (as I type this), I have finished 12 story points total.  I’ll probably get to 14.  The key is to let people know how many story points you expect them to finish a week (8 to 10) and to try to be as specific as possible.

MS Teams

The other major tool we’re using is Microsoft Teams.  A lot of people use Slack.  We’re a Microsoft shop already, so Teams was a bit easier for us to set up. 

Now, on my setup, I live with Stardock’s Groupy app.  If you don’t have Groupy, do yourself a favor and go get it.  It lets you treat all windows the same as you do web pages (group them together as tabs).

What is handy about Teams versus say, Skype, is that a given team has channels and those channels can have different pages navigated to with tabs.  You can add new pages and give them their own purpose.

It even hooks in with Jira.

It makes secure file management a breeze, as you can share documents with just your team without any additional setup.

Best of all, the video calling is absolutely rock solid.

Between Jira and Teams, we have a pretty good remote setup going. There are lots of other things we have set up, including VPN, Perforce, GitHub, etc.  But those are a bit more specific for software companies.

I hope this helps!

## CursorFX added to Object Desktop ##

I’m happy to announce that CursorFX is not only getting a major new version (v4.0), but that it is now also part of Object Desktop.

The rewrite of CursorFX required some doing given how much Windows has changed since it was first developed.

We have managed to keep the existing cursors compatible in this age of high-DPI displays by using all kinds of evil to handle scaling (including for multiple monitors with different DPIs). But we are working on and releasing new cursors that are natively high-DPI friendly.  We include a few with the beta.

If you don’t have Object Desktop, get it now!  It includes Groupy, Fences, Start10 and more.  Plus, you get everything we release on it for the following year for free.

->Visit www.objectdesktop.com

## Star Control Roadmap ##

Back in 2018, we released the reboot of the Star Control franchise called Star Control: Origins.  We also re-released the classic DOS games onto Steam.

We then developed an expansion pack for it that we broke up into 4-parts called Earth Rising.  This turned out to be a dumb idea, because while the expansion is pretty meaty, it’s not meaty enough to be broken into 4 parts.  So, we won’t be doing that ever again.  But the good news is that Earth Rising is out now and like I said, it is quite meaty.

Now that Earth Rising is finished, we’re working on porting it to consoles.  We have the XBOX One version pretty far along (they got us the dev kit first).  Our hope is to release that later this year.

After the console version is completed, we plan to move onto the sequel title.  For the sequel, we’re collaborating with the original developers of the DOS game on design and creatives.  We’ve already talked at length about ideas on how to make sure Star Control evolves with the changing way people play games.  We have no ETA for the sequel yet other than to say it’s still years away.

In the meantime, if you don’t already have Star Control: Origins, you can get it via Steam, GOG, or direct.

->Visit www.starcontrol.com

## A Guided Tour of Stardock ##

With everyone working from home, we had a rare opportunity to take some pictures of our offices to share with you what our lives at work are like.

>>A Guided Tour of Stardock

As I write this, we’re starting to find a lot of friction due to the way some communications apps work when it comes to multiple servers.  I’m looking at you, Microsoft Teams.

While connecting multiple Teams servers (not teams) isn’t hard, it is a bit tedious. 

I end up having to click on the drop down and then select the server I want.

Now, ideally, I would like Teams to let me have a truly integrated experience (where I can move teams from various servers onto a single master page) but in the meantime, there is a solution for the user who wants to have multiple Team hosts available in a single click (or keyboard hotkey): Groupy.

Stardock Groupy lets users combine multiple windows together as if they are web pages.

Once installed I move my communication windows together:

Now I can either click between tabs to get right to the other server or use Windows key-~ to tab between them.

If you’re someone who’s using multiple communication apps or servers, I highly, highly recommend you download Groupy.

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 normal campaign issues, ideology issues, when run on, increase the importance of those issues nationally.  This results in making different candidates play quite differently.

Players can either have their ideology work with existing issues or create their own from scratch (which is a new feature in v1.1).

New Features

We are also adding an election night speed so players can savor (or zip through) the results:

We also are implementing a scoring system.  In this test, we made a case where the ideology had a slight penalty because it was easier to play with (in the release, fascism will not be considered easier, we just wanted to test it).

This feature is important because it unlocks the door to having “easier to win” candidates added to the game without it debalancing everything.

This new version should be available next week.

Read the other journals here.

This is my work from home office. 

My desk.  This is for doing calls and such.  I don’t really spend much time here.

Workbench.  This is where I spend most of my time when working from home.

Desk from a different angle. 

Design and QA area.  This is for testing and sketching up.  My sons also use these desks frequently (one is an engineer and the other a 3D artist).

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: Affects how many ideology points you get from town halls
• Minority appeal: Gives you enthusiasm points in states based on their minority population
• Experience: Determines how expensive operatives are
• Starting Money: Self explanatory.

The most obvious new feature in The Political Machine 2020 are the ideology trees.  Each candidate can truly play differently from another based on what their ideology. 

For this game, I'm going to choose Joe Biden's ideology.

There are 21 weeks (turns) to build your campaign.  This means every single move you make matters.   At the start, the candidates tend to be pretty close to tied.

But a few things to note:

1. The cost of political operatives is based on supply and demand. They cost more early on in the game and slowly decrease in cost but will go up in cost as they are hired.
2. Campaign HQs build enthusiasm in states. I recommend building them in friendly states to help nail them down. They also generate money for your campaign.
3. Advertisements multiply your perceived position on a given issue. It is better to use an ad to magnify an issue you are already strong on than to use it on an issue you’ve barely spoken on.

When you see a town hall show up, you should absolutely go to it as soon as you can to maximize the ideology points you get.  The # of points you get is based on how tired your candidate is and the media bias.

Once you have collected some points, you can buy an ideology.  There is a lot of subtle strategy involved in the choice.  Enthusiasm is great as it will get people out to vote.  But they won't necessarily vote for you if they like the other candidate's position on the issues.

Some issues are bland. Others are controversial.

"Social justice" is a great issue if you're running as a Democrat but doesn't really get people that enthused due to it being so vague.   By contrast, an Assault Weapons ban will fire up voters on both sides and is specific enough to make it a major issue in the campaign.

My strategy tends to revolve around Reducing Wealth Inequality.  That is because it polls pretty well across party lines (relative to other partisan issues).  However, be careful, there is a reason why most politicians don't get too specific.  Unlocking fighting Wealth Inequality unlocks Taxing the Rich and Universal Healthcare.  Look carefully at polling on different issues in battleground states before picking an issue you feel passionate about.  It's not about winning California (or Texas if you're a Republican).  It's about winning those battleground states.

Advertising

As Mayor Bloomberg is learning, ads on their own aren't enough.  Ads magnify your existing support. They can't create it.

In The Political Machine, an ad will affect the state it's in plus adjacent states. However, they multiply your perceived position on an issue.  In this case, I've made Reducing Wealth Inequality a big focus of my campaign.  So taking an ad out on this will greatly increase my perceived position on that issue because I already have a lot of points into that issue.

By contrast, it would be dumb to spend it on stopping Coronavirus (which is spelled correctly in the final version) because I haven't spent time on it.

So here I already have a strong position on this issue. So taking an ad out on it will help cement my ownership on this issue.

Beware of pandering

Pander all you want but remember, your speech to make people happy in one state might hurt you elsewhere.

That said. I support farm subsidies..

Your VP choice

In The Political Machine 2020, the AI will take care of your running mate for you.  They will go around and campaign on the issues they have in common with you.  It also means you should probably take a little care on who you pick.

Hit them in their own back yard

The data shows that there are hidden toss-up states.  Or more to the point, there are states that become toss-up states if you put effort into them and your opponent ignores them (see Wisconsin 2016).  Because every turn matters, you can force your opponent to spend precious time late game having to win over states that they should have captured early on.

Operatives

Operatives do the dirty work in the campaign.   They are very expensive but get cheaper over time.  The difficulty level affects how many operatives the AI will be able to afford (so don't get too frustrated if you're losing on higher difficulties -- start on the easy levels).

Now in this game, as we are on the last turn you can see a lot of operative son the map.  I messed with Trump and forced him to invest in Alaska. He's doing the same in New Jersey.  Luckily, my running mate, Catherine Cortez Masto, is there to help.

Election Day

It was a narrow victory and I lost the popular vote but Joe Candidate was victorious.  Now I can look at the exit polls.

Focusing on good jobs and addressing climate change were major parts of my campaign.  But I probably would have won with a wider margin if I had focused on addressing wealth inequality as an issue.

Trump made some mistakes that cost him here.  In this particular game, he went for deporting illegal aliens which, despite what many online argue, doesn't seem to have as much support as many people believe (at least as of March 2020, we update the polling data a few times during an election cycle).

Another issue that polls well but isn't likely to be used in this cycle is returning civility to politics (though here, because it's a game, 100% of those voters who care about that went for Joe Candidate).  

The random event that occurred in my game (the stock market crashed) also was a big help.

Now, this map isn't intended to be accurate to how the actual election would turn out.  We walk a fine line between pure simulator and strategy game.  For example, the AI tried (and failed) to troll me in New York, New Jersey and Illinois.  That was foolish but I've seen cases where it forces the player to spend precious time in the states it targets.

By contrast, my counter of Oklahoma and Iowa paid off.  Alaska, being my home state in this game, went my way as well (just barely).

Every game is different

Re-designing the game around the new ideology tree mechanic ensures every game plays differently.  Pick your issues carefully and pay attention to the winning the battleground states and you should find great success in your political campaigns.

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 them. We also include a few alternative ones like Fascism, Lunacy and Giant Meteorism.

But we suspect other players will want to try making their own and the Steam Workshop support will make it easy to do so.

Scoring Handicap.
Some candidates are easier to to win with than others. To this end, different candidates will get score bonuses based on how hard they are to win with. This will make adding lots of historical Presidents to the game without it totally breaking things.

Spring Issue Update
Every few weeks we'll be updating the campaign issues. Even during our internal beta we've had to make a lot of changes such with "Escalation with Iran" and now with "Coronavirus". We are constantly getting new issues as well as tweaking existing issues to try to keep things as current as possible.

Really Loud Crowder & Rachael Maddox
New podcasts and TV shows are going to be added as we go through this election cycle. The game includes several already but we are looking to add more during the cycle. Two we plan to add this Spring include one based on Louder with Crowder and one inspired by Rachel Maddow.


## Summer 2020 ##

Candidate Architect
We already allow players to create custom candidates. But we also would like to expand on this feature to allow serious political wonks to architect candidates to extreme detail and share them.

State Emergencies
Not national emergencies. Instead, these would be events that affect only a single state. Maybe your campaign can ignore giving support to a tree fungus in Idaho but can you ignore a water contamination issue in Ohio? This will be a feature that players can turn off but will ensure that various states will require special attention.

Throughout this election cycle, we'll be hanging out on www.politicalmachine.com and the Steam forums to listen to ideas and suggestions and see what we can get in before the November election!

## It's a new game ##

We're incredibly excited to get this to you guys. This is the first time we've done a full rewrite since the original 2004 edition.

We added a bunch of new features. Some features in the old game we didn't include. For example, we don't have a "randomize the issues" feature or playing on an alien planet.

We also didn't bring the variable length campaigns and instead focused on 21 so that we could nail down the pacing. Players of previous versions will, we hope, really appreciate how well paced the new version is.

The biggest change you can't really see. It's the underlying simulation. It is so much better. Your actions mean so much more in the game and the game just "feels" better as your actions just make a lot more sense.

Stay tuned!

We’ve had some great discussions on Hard drive speeds over the years.

One of my favorites was the one about whether SSDs was worth it.

I’ve also been benchmarking my PC’s for a very, very long time:

https://forums.wincustomize.com/168111

Here is a brief recap:

Most of the CPU speed improvements comes from adding more CPU cores.  My 2019 machine has 18 cores, 32 logical threads.  My 2008 box was the last machine with only a single core in it.  That isn’t to say that the CPU experience isn’t much better these days.  I’m just saying that unless your app is using all those cores, you could argue that you could divide these scores by the number of cores to get a better approximation of what a single threaded app would perform like.

Anyway, here are the results from my box today:

Samsung 970 Pro NVME:

Sabrent Rocket  NVME 2280:

As a practical matter, they’re both incredibly fast. 

In real world practice, an NVME (like these) will have roughly the same load times as a SATA SSD despite scoring a lot lower on the benchmarks.

Feel free to use this thread to post your Hard drive specs and scores to share with others.

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 include a bunch of ideologies with the game.  They're pretty easy to make your own.  In short, an ideology is a list of key issues that candidate can get behind during the campaign.  I'll show you here how they work and how they can affect the game.

I'm going to have him go up against Bernie Sanders.  Let's see how he does...

He has early support from his home state of Maine.

By attending a town hall, he picks up some ideology points which he can now spend to begin developing his platform.

Ideologies tend to have multiple heads to them.  Trying to go down a new path gets very expensive while, by contrast, the more extreme you get on an existing ideological branch the cheaper it gets.  It is very tempting to pick "crazy" stuff.

Here, we have Nationalism, a Stronger Federal Government and Socialized capitalism.  None of these seem too crazy...

Let's pick nationalism.  This unlocks two new ideology issues: A strong military and stronger law enforcement.  See, nothing evil so far...

I've even been invited onto Good Day America!

So far, Stilson is doing pretty well.

He has also looking at supporting the concept of preemptive war..

Which lets him unveil his next platform:

A united North America!

This is where things start to go badly for Stilson.

That's because the idea of conquering north america is, as you can imagine, not a widely supported position.

This is a phenomenon that exists in the real world.  Most savvy politicians don't advertise some of their more controversial positions.  The challenge is to see if you can still win even if you have a horrible, horrible paltform.

But it's a very delicate balance because you can't win the game simply because most people agree with you on the issues.  One only has to look at the primaries to see that many candidates have perfectly fine platforms and positions.  What they lack is enthusiasm.

The ideology tree has the effect of getting people enthusiastic and setting your position on a given issue.  Ideally, it's an issue that won't increase the enthusiasm of your opponent's supporters too.

So our evil candidate blandly supports protecting social security and hopefully, the whole "let's conquer Canada" thing will be treated as a joke or a gaffe...

Same for advertising:

The North America crazy position got people talking about your candidacy (not in a good way). But now you can take out ads talking about something generic like "Good jobs".  Everyone supports that.  But mind you, people are still talking about the crazy positions you took.

Having fallen behind in the polls (due to the continued "he wants to invade Canada thing") we attend enough town halls to get another ideology.  

The fascist platform hinges on disarming the population.  The problem here is that we have Stilson running as a Reepublican so this will really hurt him with them.  Let's see what happens.

It unlocks a new ideology:

OOnce you disarm the population, it's now time to start getting rid of the wrong people... But it probably would not be a good idea to publicly promote that position if you want to win.

Unfortunately, the mandatory gun buy back position just put Kentucky and North Carolina into play as few RRepublicans will come out and vote for someone promising to disarm them.

As we head into election day, Stilson is now 6 points behind.

Now I'm playing dirty.

I'm bringing in political operatives to misrepresent my positions and those of my opponents.  

Despite our slimiest efforts, as we approach election day, Stilson is 7 points behind.  It is not looking promising.

Let's see what happens.

We lose. Badly.

These polls are an exaggeration of real world polls.   On the issue of United North America, everyone who answered our survey said those who thought this was an important issue voted for Bernie.

Same for Mandatory gun buy back.  Those who believed this was an important issue voted for Bernie as well.

Interesting result:

Stillson did get Wisconsin. This was more of a voter turn out issue.  Even the AI running the Democratic candidate fails to visit enough thus, even though they like Sanders, the enthusiasm wasn't sufficient to get people to go out and vote.

Lessons learned

So what is the lesson?  If you're going to run as a fascist, keep your crazier plans to yourself. Just like real politicians.

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 the 2016 version, we had to issue a patch. You see, Trump kept winning and that was impossible.  Goes to show what we know.

So let’s take a look a Sanders vs. Trump using the current data set we have (and we will be continually updating the data set between now and release).

Run #1: Sanders vs. Trump (AI vs. AI)

vs.

The stats we give to each candidate are subjective.  But since our goal is to make the game as accurate as possible, we do our best to be fair to each.

Early campaign

Mid Campaign

Late Game

From here we can see what mistakes the AI made.  For one thing, Bernie not even visiting New Hampshire is a glaring error.    Most of the time, the errors the AI makes are ones of taking certain states for granted.  Also, in this game, the AI did not focus on Medicare for All.

Run #2: Sanders vs. Trump (AI vs. AI)

Fundamentally, the AI players will make different choices each game.  They are the choices they think, at that very moment, will help them win but because each game is a little different (town halls and such come up in different places and we have a margin of error on the various issue data that we use to adjust the issues from game to game slightly.

Let’s see what happens game 2.

Mid-campaign in game 2.  One thing that the game concludes is that “Medicare for all” is a losing issue in Florida.  When he picks that issue, Florida goes red. 

We dug into this and (and again, this is a game) but seniors in Florida tend to have higher than average incomes and don’t tend to favor Medicare for all.  We will have to get more information on this.

Late game

Final map.

Anyone into politics knows that these results are impossible.  There’s no scenario where Trump is going to get Massachusetts or New Hamphire.  So what’s the deal?  It is a simulation issue or an AI issue or both?

In both cases, it’s an issue with AI.  Bernie just isn’t visiting these states.  Same with Wisconsin.  So then the question is, why isn’t he visiting those states?

Run #3: Sanders vs. Trump (HUMAN vs. AI)

So this time, I’m playing as Sanders. 

I also pick Amy Klobuchar as my running mate.

Mid Campaign

Playing as Sanders, I’m beating Trump pretty effectively.  However, I’m also not running my campaign as Sanders probably would.  I focus on Wealth Inequality, the Environment and Diversity.  I stay away from talking about medical insurance or college loans or guns.

End of game: Sanders victory

So what did I do differently than the AI?

For one thing, I didn’t ignore my core states.  I took advantage of AI Trump ignoring Oklahoma and edged Trump out there.  But the big thing was focusing on the wealth gap issue and addressing climate change and not so much on Medicare for all.

In the real world, Sanders won’t get Oklahoma.  But he didn’t actually need that to win.  He didn’t even need Florida.   I did manage to sneak Tennessee and Kentucky away from AI trump because, again, he didn’t start to visit there until it was way too late.

What we are learning

Trump is a difficult candidate to beat.  This is mostly because he puts certain states in play that most Republicans would not.  While I won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, I had to put quite a bit of effort to do so.  I had to give up Florida to ensure victory in those states.

From a game point of view, it all means there’s lot of replay value.  All the game’s key stats are in text files so players can play around with the numbers all they want and share them with others.

In the meantime, we continue to get more and more data and the team continues to improve the AI.