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[KingDirp]

Title says everything, and I recently started a new game and this is what I see



He's everywhere....

[SlatersQuest]

Trump is something that can't exist in LCS at the moment: he's a member of the Conservative party that the regular conservatives in the legislature won't want to cooperate with.

I'd love to incorporate things like that into the Terra Vitae mod, but have so many other things I want to do first...

[Skynet]

If Trump (and his successors) is to be represented in LCS, there's really two ways to do it...

1) You have a new alignment (Populist Celebrity) that is only available for Presidential candidates. Examples of such candidates would be Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paris Hilton, and, of course, Donald Trump. For each issue, the candidate randomly chooses whether it supports an extremist L+ or extremist C+ policy. The people will vote for or against the celebrity on the basis of whether they agree with that celebrity issue (so, if someone likes Trump's policy on immigration, they will vote for him). If the celebrity gains office, the celebrity will obviously promote his agenda, signing bills that promotes the President's views and vetoing bills that go against his views). He will also attempt to nominate Supreme Court justices that shares his extremist opinions (though this requires a bunch of code to keep track of that Justice's current biases that will be separate from the code used to keep track of the "normal" judges).

And every new election, you have a new Populist Celebrity, with newly-randomly generated issue positions (while keeping track of the previous judges appointed by the old Populist Celebrity).

Problem: While it is the purest way of implementing somebody like Donald Trump, it would be very hard to code and not very fun to play with. The end result would seem to just be more randomness to the simulation...and it's randomness the player cannot influence.

2) What if, instead, we have a hardcoded Populist Celebrity faction, with hardcoded issue positions? Every 4 years, a Populist Celebrity runs for office, and if he gets elected, sign laws that adhere to Populism and veto laws that oppose Populism, and always appoint Supreme Court judges that adhere to Populism? This way, you only have to keep track of one new alignment, instead of every possible alignment that a celebrity might hold under Proposal 1.

Problem: We already have that...the Stalinist Comrade Squad. It's actually not a bad idea to help bring the Stalinists back and rehabilitate them as a right-wing populist faction that cloaks its beliefs with left-wing rhetoric. Some of the policies that the Stalinists support (C+ Immigration, economic populism) seems very similar to Donald Trump's rhetoric, but it's obviously not a perfect fit.

[SlatersQuest]

Actually, that's not true: Ronald Reagan of all people was a populist celebrity (he made his name as a movie star). 

Also, the Stalinist Comrade Squad isn't exactly populist. Populist is like Teddy Roosevelt, which is pro-freedom, among other things.

[Skynet]

To me, populism is really about demagoguery, appealing to the people's base instincts rather than attempting to adhere to ideological consistency. The goal is to get votes by doing what is popular, not doing what is "right". Thus the Stalinists aren't pro-freedom, but they do adopt policies that can appeal to the masses ("Ban immigration! Tax the wealthy! Power to the proletariat!") and doesn't fit neatly into the liberal/conservative dynamic. Roosevelt is probably pretty populist (with his desire for trust-busting), but populism is a vague label that can apply to a bunch of various politicians, many of whom would probably disagree with each other.

I'd consider Reagan a traditional conservative, even though I admit that he is a celebrity.

[IsaacG]

Actually, that's not true: Ronald Reagan of all people was a populist celebrity (he made his name as a movie star). 

Also, the Stalinist Comrade Squad isn't exactly populist. Populist is like Teddy Roosevelt, which is pro-freedom, among other things.

To me, populism is really about demagoguery, appealing to the people's base instincts rather than attempting to adhere to ideological consistency. The goal is to get votes by doing what is popular, not doing what is "right". Thus the Stalinists aren't pro-freedom, but they do adopt policies that can appeal to the masses ("Ban immigration! Tax the wealthy! Power to the proletariat!") and doesn't fit neatly into the liberal/conservative dynamic. Roosevelt is probably pretty populist (with his desire for trust-busting), but populism is a vague label that can apply to a bunch of various politicians, many of whom would probably disagree with each other.

I'd consider Reagan a traditional conservative, even though I admit that he is a celebrity.

Here we run into issues of changing language and changing ideology.  Hell, the two parties in the U.S. are the Democrats (derived from 'democracy') and the Republicans (derived, obviously, from republic).  This is what happens when we allow movements to name themselves, and where one's successors can change the basis of the organization.  Lincoln, famous for being a Republican, was strongly in favor of strong government compared with his contemporaries, (thus, the civil war), and he was anti-corporation (i.e. slaveholders, pretty much the corporations of the 19th century).
Or, hell, listen to anyone commenting on communism in the context of Karl Marx.
Then there's the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea"...
I'm pretending to know more about this than I actually do.  I'm an engineer, not a political scientist.

[Skynet]

After the events of November 8th, it seems that politics has changed drastically. Should LCS change drastically too? LCS must make a choice...either:
1) Find a way to represent Trump-style politics, or...
2) Let LCS stay as it is, satirizing the polarized state of pre-2016 US politics, and acknowledging that this satire is inapplicable for this post-2016 era.

I can see good arguments in favor of either of those two choices. I'll let SlatersQuest decide which path to take on this crossroads.

[SlatersQuest]

Heh, lol.

Perhaps I'm missing something (in which case, perhaps you can clarify). How are Trump-style politics different from what LCS already models and parodies?

From what I can see, Trump ran on a conservative platform in the primaries that enabled him to win the party nomination, then switched his tune to be more moderate in order to swing the general election. LCS already has mechanics to handle this. Granted, Trump originated out of business unlike most of the more recent Republican party nominees, but he's not the first U.S. president to do so (again, Ronald Reagan was a movie star before he became governor of California). As for the rash of racist violence that has followed the election, those are Conservative Crime Squad wannabes - again something that LCS has implemented for a long time.

Now, admittedly, I would like to have more detailed modeling of many of the factions in the game, including the major political parties. Still I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here. Can you be a little bit more specific about what LCS is lacking?

[Skynet]

Can you be a little bit more specific about what LCS is lacking?

Donald Trump is a person who takes extreme positions on both the Left and the Right, making traditional ideological labels of "liberal" and "conservative" ill-suited for him. And calling him a "moderate" seems to be a bit...er...odd, considering the fact that his "moderation" is due to the fact that he favor extreme positions on both ends of the American political spectrum. Here's two articles about why he technically qualifies as a "moderate" despite his extremism:

* Donald Trump is a textbook example of an ideological moderate (The Monkey Cage)
* Donald Trump is a moderate. That doesn't mean what you think. (Christian Science Monitor)

The Monkey Cage article itself specifies directly the problem that Trump poses to the LCS' worldview:

Indeed, when we have investigated ideologically moderate voters’ views on particular issues, we often found these views far from moderate. The very same people who support extremely conservative immigration policies also often favor extremely liberal policies on taxes and social spending, yet these people are called “moderates” because their extreme positions aren’t consistently on one ideological side.

In a recent working paper, we show that these ostensibly moderate American voters don’t care much about whether candidates are ideologically moderate per se. What they do want is politicians to represent the contents of their own mixed bags of views. As others have noted, our research has long made the case that many voters want a candidate with eclectic but extreme positions on key issues, especially the very ones where Trump has staked out extreme stances.

[SlatersQuest]

Ah, I see what you mean now.

LCS does actually have something qualitatively like that in the game already: the Stalinist Comrade Squad and its associated political alignment, which is L+ a some of the issues but C+ on the rest. For a while, there was a plan to incorporate many different alternative alignments akin to that of the SCS, but so far that hasn't been implemented. Eventually, I plan on revamping the electoral system in LCS, specifically to accommodate things like this.

As for Trump himself, personally I'd rather wait to see his politics in practice before trying to make up a new political alignment specifically to describe him. He has said or focused on different things at different stages of his campaign. I really don't feel like I have a good enough impression of him to parody yet (and am inclined to doubt that many other people do either).

However, it is inevitable that politics in America will change, e.g. liberalism in LCS is very obviously post-Vietnam war in sensibilities; before the war, it was the liberal Democrats who were the party of war while the conservative Republicans were the party of peace. Ergo we should consider restructuring LCS' political system to incorporate some amount of new flexibility.

***

So, with that, the plan that I had for restructuring politics was to have an array of probabilities for each elected office (president, house, or senate) seat in any election that will reflect public opinion on all views. The L+ alignment, for example, be at its maximum probability if all views are 100% liberal, while other alignments will want some views to not be liberal, etc. Non-elected offices (supreme court) will work in a similar fashion, but instead of checking public opinion directly will create a surrogate public opinion based on the alignments of the offices responsible for appointing said offices.

This idea has the following problems:

1. Right now, the different political alignments are defined by color. There are only eight colors allowed by the Curses engine that LCS runs on: green, red, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, white, and black. Of these, blue and white are the only two unused colors with regard to political alignment (black is used for the background), and even red doubles-up for Stalinist and C+ alignments. If we are going to add many more alignments, we will need to think about what alternative ways there are to identify different alignments.

2. The composition of the house and senate on the Liberal Agenda screen will need a massive reformat if we add more than maybe one or two more alignments, because there isn't enough space on the screen. There also isn't that much room for more tabs with laws, etc. either.

[KingDirp]

In regards to the political alignment, I believe it would be best to alter the alignment bar into a Triangle.
To elaborate:

- The top most point of the triangle will be Stalinist;
- The far right point of the triangle will be Conservative;
- The far left point of the triangle will be Liberal.

Within the triangle will be a dot or something of the like that will move towards the points according to the alignment of the policy. In regards to the movement of the dot, I guess if is not possible to move it dynamically/smoothly, I guess use a grid - Where the dot moves from one grid box to another according to alignment.

And yes more space is required but I do not believe that would be a major problem, this would supplement (I believe) a bigger map during missions.

P.S This was supposed for people to explain and say what happened in their own games but apparently it changed into a topic about ideologies. Not saying its bad but it was way off what I was aiming at lol.

[Orlanth]

IMO, an interesting and realistic twist could be to enable some modifiers like Populist and Libertarian that can adjust attitudes on several of the issues. For example a Populist Conservative could have attitudes tending to be further right than a generic Conservative (C+) on certain social issues (immigration, flag burning, etc) and attitudes tending to be further left than a generic Conservative (M) on certain economic issues (Labor Laws, Election Reform, etc). A Libertarian Moderate would tend to have C attitudes on economic issues and L attitudes on social issues.

This would work well for Presidential and Cabinet candidates and Supreme Court justices, enabling some slight individual variation from the Liberal and Conservative mold. Could also consider adding a few other issue-specific alignment modifiers like Religious, Paternalist, or Environmentalist to help mix things up a little.

What do you guys think? 

[SlatersQuest]

You guys are missing the point.

Every law in the game has five possible states: L+, L, m, C, C+. In the TV mod, there are 23 laws in the game (19 in vanilla LCS). This means that there are 5²³ = about 12 quadrillion possible alignments ("only" 5¹⁹ = 19 trillion in vanilla). Right now we have only six alignments, but once I have the streamlined political system in play, it will be trivial to add more.

There are only eight color options. There is only so much room on the Liberal Agenda screen. It's these gameplay-display issues that are the problem.

Edit: there is one other problem (also gameplay-caused): the Liberal Crime Squad (i.e. the player) is Elite Liberal. This means that shuffling politicians around on axes other than the liberal-conservative axis will be counterproductive to the player, which means that having sliders that can move along axes other than the liberal-conservative axis break the game unless they can be forced to move onto a liberal-conservative axis.

[Orlanth]

Yeah, it is just not feasible to display more different alignments using only colors. If more alignment types for political figures are added these would have to be displayed in a different way, probably by showing the name of their alignment using text. If these are relatively minor modifiers like Libertarian Conservative the easiest way would be to just mention this alignment once (using text) when that politician is being elected or appointed, and continue to use the base Conservative red for name color.

If you want the screen to always display everyone's exact alignment, this would require reformatting the screen to make room to list text descriptions of their alignments (perhaps splitting into more than one screen); I'm not sure this would be worth it but i suppose it could be an option.

[omada]

I just begun my pursuit for liberalizing the country some weeks ago and i have poor no notion about coding and engines

But trying to help wont hur't (Unless you are a conservative being enlightened in my squad's basement)

The color could instead show how far the person is from the liberal agenda (or whatever is the player's utopia),light green is someone cool that you wan't to recruit and/or invite to your dinning room, red is someone you wan't dead or kidnapped.

If the players want to know which is the political views of the president/supreme court/whatever you could just press i dunno "P" and open a new page with an overview of the Presidents life, "V" for Vice-president, S for secretary of state G for general and C for supreme court (or something like that)

Up/down (left/right?) arrows will then change pages and any other button goes back to the "liberal agenda" page

That would (i think) make things a bit less confusing and would help with the plans of the Stalinist/moderate/technocrat/whatever people wants Crime Squad.