Primary/General Election Divider

[Taft 0]

Alright. In brief, I would like to be able to slide the "general election" phase up to about the date of Iowa for several reasons, most notably that during the primary phase candidates are often hamstrung on spinning their wins and/or their opponents' losses. Especially this season (with the extremely accelerated calendar), the week-by-week turns just doesn't quite seem to fill in well. Another problem is that one can have a devastating scandal break on them all week and be hamstrung to deal with it until some serious damage is done, or give a speech and not be able to spin it while the AI can. Also, footsoldier recruitment becomes a bit tied down, since one's opponents can recruit footsoldiers every day, while I'm tied down to one batch per week, regardless of whether my momentum in state X would save me a good share of the cost and hassle there.

Unfortunately, when the game shifts from "primary" to "general election" mode, the in-party polls go away (ie McCain v Bush v Forbes); I experimented with that. Is there some way to disable the polling change and specifically tie it to the convention?

[ElectricMonk 3]

This is a better question to hit the Dev Team up directly on, I imagine.

Theoretically it should be possible to specify one day turns for the primary election (though it may not be exposed in any fashion to us), which gets you what you want in a much simpler fashion.

[Taft 0]

*nods*

I need to look into that; the thing with those one week turns is that they work great in the "blanks" both before the primaries get fired up and once they close, but they don't go so well when you're dealing with five states per week and they're not all on the same day.

[Taft 0]

And a thought just came to mind: Does altering the date of the general election in the scenario file for a given state have any effect? As in can one break the general election up over several days?

[ElectricMonk 3]

Hmmm. I'd lean towards the game engine ignoring you (as my bet would that the scenario general election date triggers the counting screen) but perhaps it would let you have states hold their elections in advance of the general election.

[Taft 0]

I tried this and I also tried switching a state from FPP to PR and it had no effect on the scenario.