ANNOUNCING: General Pants' Political Party Proliferation

This mod includes 32 additional political parties, for a total of 40... try building a consensus now! These parties have been carefully balanced using a detailed comparison of abilities costs and AI preference. Many have asymmetric "penalties" to balance out their bonuses; you lose more if you lose power than you got for being in power. Among the parties you will find some "singleton" (one-bonus), and some "dilettante" (three- or four-bonus) parties, as well as more conventional ones. All have original logos and almost-clever flavor text. A bonus table comparing all parties, and the bonuses for all races, is included!

Mod includes the following parties:

Agrarians
Anarchists
Artificial Socialists
Authoritarian Party
Bayesians
Big Party
Collectivists
Conservationists
Expansionists
Foundationists
Frequentists
Fundamentalists
Intellectuals
Isolationists
Labor Party
Law and Order Party
Legitimate Businessmen
Libertine Party
Longshoremen's Union
Moralists
Nationalists
Pragmatists
Psychohistorians
Radical Centrists
Rogues Alliance
Royalist Party
Security Party
Separatists
Skeptics
Social Darwinists
Traditionalists
Unity Party

For anyone who is wondering, all 40 parties appear in the game, and participate in elections! A slider appears in the relevant dialogues, so you can scroll through them.


NOTES:
- I do not recommend mixing these parties with parties by other authors. These parties have been carefully balanced to work together, and with the original 8 parties. Further, they partly overlap with parties released by other authors. Mix at your own risk;

- none of these parties use the "lost" abilities (Interest Rates, Home Planet Quality, Miniaturization, Logistics, or the Colonize Exotic Worlds abilities). I don't like mixing different "modding vectors" or making mods interdependent, and I'm sure some players would like to keep these abilities "lost." The "Implement All Racial Abilities" mod will give you access to these as racial bonuses, although not as political party bonuses. SCPX has a mod with some parties that do, but I haven't tried it (and see previous warning);

- this mod resolves two longstanding annoyances by changing the "Mercantile" to the "Mercantilists," and the "Industrialist" to the "Industrialists."


DESIGN NOTES:
These parties were generated according to the following "rules." I think I violated all but the first two at least once:

- new parties should not provide benefits greater than those provided by the original eight parties;

- as a corollary to the above, new parties should be balanced, so that no one party provides too great an advantage over any other;

- opposition parties were chosen both on the basis of party name/ flavor text context, and for the penalties they provide;

- opposition parties were not constrained to come in pairs (e.g., Capitalists vs. Communists, Losers vs. Winners, etc.), although some do;

- new parties should, whenever possible, provide new options that cannot currently be achieved with customization points (even if that new option is simply to have a lot higher ability value than you can get with just points);

- "lost" abilities would not be used as bonuses (see above);

- party bonuses should make sense with respect to the name (or flavor text) of the party, even if only in an oblique manner;

- flavor text should be tasteful, and should not make overt value judgments with respect to any particular political ideology;

- ideologies should be taken (as much as possible) at face value (i.e., uncynically) when associating bonuses with parties;

- parties should (as much as is possible) not make direct or indirect reference to humans or Earth history/ culture;

- flavor text should explain the bonuses of the party only when they don't make sense from context, and then they should not specify values;

- party logos should use all of the three shades of blue used in the original logos, and only those plus white, and optionally black. They should be surrounded by a thick white border.


BALANCE NOTES:
I spent a LONG time balancing these parties, so there shouldn't be any game breakers. They were balanced in part using bonus-point equivalency (as per the Wiki site), modified by comparison to the original eight parties. I also tested their AI-desirability using the race-selection screen, which I assume suggests parties using the same engine the AI uses to select them for itself. The AI seems to like the Social Darwinists, the Moralists, the Labor Party, the Longshoreman's Union, the Nationalists, the Frequentists, the Foundationists, the Intellectuals, the Security Party, and the Big Party. It still, however, happily chooses all of the original parties except the Populists (not a great party anyway). I assume the AI picks the parties it did because they are focused on weapons/ defense/ influence/ diplomacy bonuses. The other parties may actually be more powerful, but the AI probably won't ever pick them because they give bonuses like loyalty, luck, and creativity, for which the AI does not seem to care.

In bonus-point terms, Most of these parties give you about 4 bonus points worth of benefit, and take about 9 away if they lose power. However, economics, diplomacy, weapons, defense, hit points, and possibly morale are all more valuable to the AI than point values would indicate. Because of this, some parties that have these bonuses have fewer "bonus-point equivalents" than the rest. Some singleton parties were given more point-equivalents, especially in the case of the "undervalued" abilities. I also chose to avoid making parties that specialize in diplomacy, because very high diplomacy can already be achieved with the Super Diplomat ability, and high diplomacy bonuses seem to be especially powerful.

Some of the parties here seem especially powerful, like the Legitimate Businessmen who get more trade routes, or the Longshoremen with their big trade bonus. However, I picked the penalties and opposition parties to even out the value of each party... if the Longshoremen fall out of power, they lose more trade than they got from themselves, and they take a big hit in trade from their opposition party (the Mercantilists). Basically, the longshoremen go on strike and stop unloading freighters! Also, some of the powerful parties have bonuses in abilities like sensors and trade routes that aren't always as useful later in the game because the ability is capped.

As a bonus, this mod includes a tab-delimited text table of racial bonuses, ability costs, and party bonuses and penalties for DA. The raw data on the parties, races, and abilities were drawn directly from the .xml files (note, the wiki has some incorrect values!).


HISTORY:
This mod was originally finished in late April, 2007, back when I knew nothing about modding etiquette. It had a number of other people's parties in it, and none of the logos were original. It was immediately pulled (unpublished) for reworking. The new version has all original material, although a few of the parties have the same names as, or have bonuses similar to, other people's mods. The number of parties went up too, although I think I may have just about hit the limit of what you can do within the mandate I set for myself (see "rules" above).

Since this mod is no longer a re-hash of theirs, I encourage you to try the original inspiration for this mod, the parties offered in mods by Narakir, TheShadowHawk, and Tremo. Also, since this mod was initiated, SCPX has put out a small collection of political parties. I cannot speak to the balance of these other parties, but the authors' approaches were a little different than mine, and you might find you like theirs better.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Many thanks to Kryo for his guidance on this mod, as well as Lukas Dettlinger and geminisama for encouraging me to get off my butt and finish it. Thanks are also due to Narakir, TheShadowHawk, and Tremo for showing the way. Finally, a friendly howdy to SCPX... nice "anarchist" logo, buddy; great minds really do think alike!


WWW Link to Mod