The Political Machine 2024 News

Thanks to everyone who’s checked out the new update - we hope the additions to the roster are to your liking! While we are developing new features for updates through the summer, I’d like to use this dev log as an opportunity to check out some of community’s custom candidates and clash 2 of them in a presidential match!



So far at the making of this dev log there are a total of 142 candidates running for the presidency from the workshop. It’s fun to see the variety that it generates - some are real life equivalents to candidates and celebrities while others are references to internet memes, games, shows, and movies.

What we wanted to do with this iteration of The Political Machine is improving on 2020’s workshop support for candidates. The image generation for the candidate’s faces referenced a very bright scene which didn’t help the lighting and cut off part of the body. We ensured that for this version that with the visual upgrade made sure that your custom candidates would look official to the established candidates put out!

Part of the wonder for the Political Machine is imagining any matchup for the election. Browsing through, I stumbled upon what would be an interesting matchup for AI vs AI mode. Cheeseburger FreedomMan vs Winnie the Pooh!





As a bit of fun facts for both of these candidates - Cheeseburger FreedomMan was originally created in The Political Machine 2016 by Joel from the famous Youtube channel Vinesauce. Winnie the Pooh entered public domain in 2022.

The starting board looks even against these two candidates. Cheeseburger leads the polls by 1 percent against Pooh! Toward the first quarter of the game, it looks like special attention is being put toward the Midwest, still looking even!



Oh bother, toward the latter half Pooh is running away with it on all margins. Pooh chose Doug Burgum as his VP. Cheeseburger chose Obama. Cheeseburger has a slight hold over in the northeast but it won’t be enough.



With the game ending, it looks like Pooh beat Cheeseburger by a landslide, but why?



Winnie Pooh has max stats - you can max up every stat if you enable “Infinite Points” in custom candidate creation. Are you worried that a honey craving bear will wreak havoc on your multiplayer games with other people? Worry not - to ensure multiplayer integrity, we do a check on the candidate list so infinite point candidates are not playable so you can have fun as fairly as possible! That being said, we encourage you to see what uber-powered candidates can do against each other in your single player games.

Credits to Cthulhutahn for Winnie the Pooh and njckenyon for Cheeseburger FreedomMan! We can’t wait to see what else the community comes up with for whacky matchups!

We’d like to thank everyone again for your support on The Political Machine 2024 post-release!

The Presidential Pioneers v1.01 Update brings New Candidates, Mac Support, and Game Quality Improvements

Today we released a significant update for their strategy game, The Political Machine 2024. This update introduces an array of past presidential candidates, extends compatibility to macOS, and implements various bug fixes and balance adjustments.

[h3]View the full changelog here[/h3]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2512090/The_Political_Machine_2024/

[h2]New Faces in the Political Arena[/h2]
The latest update enriches the game's roster with notable figures from American political history:

Democrats: Players can now lead campaigns for Democrats like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, or Martin O’Malley, each offering unique strategic opportunities.

Independents: The game broadens its appeal with independents such as Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, and Jill Stein, providing alternative strategies for reaching the White House.

Republicans: The Republican lineup is enhanced with Ronald Reagan, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, George Bush Sr., Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon, adding depth and variety to the gameplay.

[h2]Mac Version Launch[/h2]
With this update, The Political Machine 2024 is now available on macOS, allowing Mac users to engage in the electoral challenge. This update aims to bring the game to a wider audience, ensuring that Mac users can enjoy the same detailed and immersive gameplay experience as PC users.

[h2]Bug Fixes and Balance Changes[/h2]
The update addresses several bugs and makes balance changes to improve gameplay fluidity and fairness. These adjustments were made in response to community feedback and are designed to enhance player experience by providing a more stable and equitable game environment.


This update significantly enhances The Political Machine 2024 by broadening the playable character pool and extending platform availability to Mac users. The inclusion of a diverse range of historical political figures allows players to explore various campaign strategies and adds educational value by highlighting key personalities and their political ideologies.

Thank you for everyone who’s supported us since we released on May 2nd! Just because we released doesn’t mean the updates are over though! We have been seeing your feedback and are addressing points from it as we speak.

[h3]We’d like to use this space again to show what’s coming up on our update on May 16th![/h3]

First off we want to say we have heard the requests to add more candidates. In response, we have been working hard to return a handful of candidates from previous iterations back into the fray in this update! As a teaser, some of the Democrats out of the set of returners this update are Jimmy Carter and John Kerry!





And that’s just a small tease - look forward to additional Republicans, Democrats, and Independents that are to return as well. There will also be a couple of new candidates that are being introduced for the first time!

In this update we have also added the ability to edit and save your custom candidate’s titles and descriptions! Seeing what people have been able to do with our customizer on the Workshop has been amazing and we wanted to give players a tool to further personalize their candidates.

These titles and descriptions are also saved when you upload a candidate on the workshop! For example, take this candidate made - Macy Appler.



Macy is no longer is confined to just being a Presidential Hopeful and can express herself as a Mac and Cheese Enthusiast. As silly as this candidate sounds, the theming was specific because I needed a transition point for the next feature to announce:

Speaking of Mac, we have heard discussion posts wondering about support for the platform. I’m proud to say from this this update on May 16th onward The Political Machine 2024 will also be able to be playable on Mac!

Our candidate work won’t be done with just this update alone, we’d like to hear your thoughts on what candidates you would like to see in a future update! Post it in replies, discussion forums and chat channels for who you would like to see.

We’d like to thank everyone again for your support on The Political Machine 2024 release and post-release!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The Political Machine 2024, the newest edition of its popular political strategy game series, released today. The game allows players to step into the shoes of presidential candidates, including Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Bill Clinton and countless other candidates from history, or create their own.

"The Political Machine 2024 presents itself as a game but has proven to be an accurate representation of players’ political leanings," said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock Entertainment. "Previous versions of the game have accurately predicted the outcome of past elections, such as the fact that Ohio would be the key state in 2004 and Trump’s victory in 2016.”

New to The Political Machine 2024 is the inclusion of the primaries in which several candidates compete for their party’s nomination. Presidential debates have also been added to allow players to test their knowledge of current events and how to gain favor with their political base.

While the game’s singleplayer AI plays with great savvy, Stardock has made sure that the game also remains a strong multiplayer game as well.

“In previous editions, players could play against each other one-on-one to win the White House,” said Wardell. “With the inclusion of primaries, several players of the same party can go at it. It’s a touch of mayhem.”

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2512090/The_Political_Machine_2024















(Pre-order customers of The Political Machine 2024 get this DLC free)
With this DLC, your candidate can stand out on the campaign trail like never before. Don a Drengin Battle Armor to show strength, or charm voters with a touch of historical finesse in a Napoleonic hat. Take your image to new heights with an Astronaut outfit, or let your free spirit fly with an array of Crazy hair options.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2679510/The_Political_Machine_2024__Cabinet_of_Curiosities/

With the full release of The Political Machine 2024 on May 2nd, we’d like to use this space as an opportunity to tease what’s coming up on release!

We understand we’ve been missing a key player in this presidential election cycle and we wanted to be sure he was in for release. We’ll be introducing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the fray!


His introduction also comes with a new deck that we’re introducing - the Independent deck! Without revealing too much, some of the new cards introduced into this deck focuses on boosting independent issue score and spoiling by decreasing Democrat and Republican issue score in states.

From a development point of view it was interesting to have to adapt to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s situation. We originally had him in the game as a Democratic candidate since the design was made prior to him dropping out of the Democratic bid for the presidency in October 2023.

Because of the change and observing current events, we wanted to be sure that we portrayed his independent status as best as possible before introducing him to the game. Classified as an Independent candidate, he will be able to be played as either major party in our game for both Presidential and Primaries game modes. We hope you enjoy playing him!

In the same vain, we wanted to be sure that you the players can select to identify your custom candidates as independent too! Doing so will also grant the created candidate access to play as either party.


Want to share your candidate to the world or play against other people’s candidates? The release will also have support to uploading and downloading candidates via the Steam Workshop! We are excited to see what kind of whacky things you and the community can come up with in terms of designs!


Aside from being able to achieve the presidential nomination and the presidency itself, the release will also add 21 achievements for you to attain ranging in difficulty! I had a good time figuring out the puns for some of the titles.




And speaking of difficulty - we took the time to look at improving computer AI for release! We wanted to listen to player feedback in regards to AI difficulty, and so we took it as an opportunity to improve our AI’s capacity to win states. Some improvements in our AI update make it so that way they pick more enthusiasm buildings, make ads in high contention areas, and fight harder in key states.


We the development team want to say thanks again to everyone who participated in the playtest! Your feedback has been crucial to shaping and prioritizing the improvements in our game for full release. We encourage further suggestions within our forums and our discord community for ideas and priorities for future updates!