The Political Operative's Kit for The Political Machine provides, amongst other things, two editors. It doesn't come with the retail version of The Political Machine but can be purchased for $10 from Stardock (if you bought The Political Machine from Stardock at $29.95 it includes this kit).

The first editor is the issue editor. The second is the interview question editor.

The Issue Editor

In the game, candidates compete on the issues. There are essentially two types of issues in the game: Personal traits and Political issues.  In our editor, we use an underscore (_) to denote a personal issue.  For game play reasons, we decided to make it so that ads and speeches could not target these personal issues.  That's because they are powerful.

The first part of the issue editor is loading up the issues themselves. They are in the polmachine\data directory.

Let's start with the personal issues:

When you load up the personal traits file, you are provided with a list of issues.  Every issue has its display name (how it will look in the game) along with its unique ID.  If there's an underscore at the start, it is treated like a personal trait.  On each issue there are values for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.  A positive value means that they favor this issue. A negative value means they are against it.  And the higher the value, either way, determines how much they care.

In the example above, Credibility, you see that we gave it a value of 20 for Republicans and Democrats but 50 for Independents. This was our judgment call -- we felt that independents are more concerned with credibility whereas partisans will tend to look the other way a bit for their guy.

We used this table to decide issues:

Now on many of these issues, we just educated guesses on. You may not agree with our choices but with this, you can edit it.  However, changing these issues will likely mean you won't be able to play in multiplayer games since you can imagine how this could be abused (you could make all the issues not make any sense except to you).

But all is not lost -- You can create your own issue files.  The game will load any .issue file. So if you create your own new issue files, the game will use them and you can probably use those in multiplayer. Just go to file-> new and start creating.  Just be sure to always hit file->new when switching betwee .issue files since by default the issue editor will try to merge your issues together.

Let's start modifying some traits for single player play:

In this example, we have drilling in ANWR.  Based on polling research, we concluded that Democrats were against it, Republicans for it and independents basically neutral on it.  You're free to disagree.  We also discovered that people in Alaska strongly favored it (no matter which party you belonged to).  But you can go further, you can add other states and decide for yourself on how they feel. In this example, we're making California, which is more strongly against drilling in ANWR having its position created.

You can create your own kinds of issues as much as you'd like.

The Interview Question Editor

The interview question editor is quite a bit more complex. It is actually this editor that we have great hopes of the community putting together interesting questions and other content to extend the single player experience.  The .questions files are in the polmachine\data directory.

In the game, there are several venues that you can appear on.  JoeUser, The O'Maley Scenario, Barry King, 50/50, etc.  You can bring up the questions available for each venue and add your own or edit them.

Questions are treated like trees. They can be as simple or complex as you'd like based on the answers. Let's take a look at this complex one (we want to show off how much work we put into these questions. )

If you're ever on the JoeUser show and get the nuclear terrorist question. Try answering "Well we had it coming" and you will get a lot of follow-up question. This is where a lot of the game's research really paid off. The answers you get to choose from have a lot of depth. They're not just "Yea, I support". They are nuanced and based on real world answers.

The first thing you'll want to do is load up the issue pool. You can hold down the Ctrl key when you get the file dialog to select multiple sets of issues. You'll want these so that the player's answers can affect their positions on the issue.

Adding a question is fairly straight forward. Go to the question item and choose "Add".

You then get this unintuitive dialog:

This is your question pool. It lets you put together questions and answers as "objects" that can then be put together later if you so choose. Click the "add" button to get started.

When you hit the add button, you get this dialog. Just type in the interview question and a summary. A tag will be auto generated. Then choose the forum (such as JoeUser).  And pick a general issue on it.  Sometimes you may want to go back to the issue editor and create new issues for your question to affect. On the respones, click Add:

You can then create your potential responses. And there can be many. On each answer you can put qualifiers. For instance, you can say that only a candidate with an intelligence greater than 4 will have the option for this question. Many questions in The Political Machine have qualifiers on them. So the player who decides that military service is useless may find that certain useful answers are denied them, for example.

The mood item is something we did not implement, we were going to have answers that would affect the mood of the commentator.

Once you have done that, you will want to add issue modifiers. This will determine what issues this response will affect and by how much.

In this example, it changes the player's position on that issue by 3 if they're a Democrat and 2 if they're a Republican.  In the game, if you try to play as a Democrat when you're a Republican or vice versa we use this to penalize the player to a certain degree. A Republican, no matter what, is not going to score as many points as a Democrat on say the environment just as a Democrat will never score quite as many points on a strong military as a Republican. But you can change all that if you disagree with this editor.

The second part you see is how it affects the voters themselves. This is powerful and you should be cautious about it. You can make some issues take on greater importance based on what you answer.

Let's give a different example to show this off:

Let's say we want to have an answer that persaudes people. What we can do is if the player has a very high charisma value then an answer like this comes up:

Then on the issue modifiers:

You can have the importance go way up on all of them.

But there's more you can do:

Have it also affect another issue. Negative values mean you are moving against that issue. So your high charisma convinces TV viewers that you are against campaign finance reform and that THEY should be against it as well.

Once you hit the okay button a couple of times you'll be back to that weird dialog. You'll have the beginnings of a tree.

Let's get really crazy and have a follow-up question:

You can then add additional follow-up answers. When done you'll have this:

Now go back to the question and find the answer you want to follow up and click on it:

And then have its counter question be that question's ID.

You've just made your first compound question.  And you can do that over and over.

Conclusions

Hopefully you will be able to greatly expand on the depth of the game and tweak it to your heart's desire.  With these two editors, you can truly mold the game to reflect your own ideal.

Political Operatives Kit [standalone order for use with retail CD] Order: $10.00 (Electronic Distribution).  Political Operative Kit includes editors to create your own issues, your own interview questions, and more!   * If you have already purchased a retail CD from a store and would like to create your own issues and events, use this order item. The $29.95 version above (for new orders direct from Stardock) includes the kit as part of your order.