Election
10 November 2016So the election was a thing that happened.
And that means... Election Manager 2016 got updated. I actually pushed the update early his morning[1] and Apple was particularly quick on the approvals, so it's already out there. Last I checked, it didn't show the 1.2.0 version on the iOS App Store (it already did on the Mac App Store), but it will almost certainly be there by the time I finish writing this or especially by the time anyone reads this, and people should be getting version 1.2.0 soon.
The balance isn't quite perfect for the 2016 scenario[2], the popular vote skews a bit republican to make the electoral college accurate, so it's now slightly more likely to result in a democrat electoral vote win with a republican popular vote win than the reverse — the opposite of what actually happened). But the EV totals are more important (since that's actually what determines who actually wins, after all). I'm planning to approach things a little differently (and increase the ability to accurate calibrate things) whenever I write EM20; I never expected things to shift so radically from last election to this when I was writing EM16 two years ago (considering how stable things had been for the previous several elections). But there were a lot of things that were different about this election that were impossible to capture with the existing model.[3]
Anyway, the upgrade is up now, or go grab the latest for iOS on the App Store or for Mac on the Mac App Store.
[1] well, yesterday morning now, i.e., once the returns had reached the point that I could make proper recalibration of the changes in partisan balance, plus some time to make updated screenshots.
[2] the 2016 scenario is now "special" in that it's not balanced quite the same way as the 2012 or generic scenarios. I justify this mainly because the candidates were not at all typical of historical norms, but also because really changing the balance is hard to do with the current engine without making major changes and potentially breaking things and requiring a whole lot of testing. So, it's a bit of a band-aid. I do plan to make this sort of thing easier to do if and when I write EM20 in which case I'd build a new engine for it (which would additionally have other properties that would improve the game as a game).
[3] Trump broke my game, too.
These are Doug's bloggish thoughts on game development, specifically on the games he's writing for Lensflare, or on Lensflare-related topics more generally. Or whatever he wants to write here, really, but those are the sorts of things to expect. Doug has strong opinions (loosely held) about many things — he could claim that he doesn't speak for Lensflare Games, but that'd be silly considering that (for all practical purposes) he is Lensflare Games. Still (for what little it matters) he's not always wearing that hat here. And yes, this is an actual picture of Doug (okay, not really, but the story behind it is too long to go into right now).
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