Hanging Chads...

You sure you're losing the election? 71% approval should be a sure thing to win.

I bet he's got one big planet that is below 50% and a bunch of small colonies.

~SDC~

It pulls from the overall Approval Rating when tabulating senate wins/losses, not from the individual planets, unfourtunatly, so thats not the problem.     Really, once you've secured anything over 55% you should be a shoe-in to regain senate control.  If you can save a game before this weirdness happens (and it's reproducable) send it to Scott@Stardock.com and I'll take a peek at it. 

Thanks 

Er, I would say losing with a 71% approval rate is surprising but not unheard of. I've lost control with approval ratings in the 60s before.

I don't know how it really works, but I would have guessed that votes are determined by "rolling the dice" for each senator based on the approval rating. Even with 100x71% chances, sometimes you're going to end up with less than 50 people rolling in your favor.

Any combinatorics specialists available? What are the odds of 50 (or more) out of 100 random numbers between 1-100 being over 71?

(29/100)^51 ....
+(29/100)^(50+n) + ....
+(29/100)^100

29% chance per senator.

chance of 51 senators + chance of 52 senators + chance of 53...plus chance of 100 senators.

ie, pretty damn small?

The summation's a bit different (for instance, order doesn't matter; it's more like sum (i=x to 100) of C(100,x) * p^x * (1-p)^(100-x) for x dissenters and p probability of voting against. Even allowing for 40 dissenters, though, with a 29% of dissent you'd expect to have 50 voting against only ~0.0008 % of the time if were a uniform die roll considering only morale.

There are other things that influence the senate other than just the approval rating. Being too far behind on your military score causes the war party to gain in strength, etc. Or maybe they just use that for how they distribute those that the party looses. I have noticed that when you loose senators, they usually go wherever you're weakest.

Well it's a beginner game and I'm kicking, so I think I can rule out loosing senators to being behind in anything. I've tried it about a dozen times, and each time I lose, though sometimes getting more than 0 votes (the highest was 6, still that's losing 90 votes). I've also tried eliminating taxes, which does let me win, but then only barely. Does this new information discount the possibility of a bug? I'll mail it to you even if it isn't a bug BoogieBac, hopefully I'm wrong, and it sounds like this is just bad politiking or something, because nobody else has had this problem (that I've heard of).

More likely the game is keeping a weighted rolling average of taxes, and reacting accordingly. You eliminate them totally and affect the average enough to win. What's your normal tax rate?



~SDC~

Tax rate is 34%. Spend rate is 40%.

When I adjust my tax rate to make approval 98%, I still get not a single vote. And it's totally random too, a different party wins every time. I think I'm going to reinstall the whole thing, maybe it will fix itself.

Hmmm. Bad move. Choosing the repair option causes the game to crash every time my old game is loaded (:(