I'd make those negatives, positive myself. Or drop them entirely. The Open Hand should easily be able to get a few hundred thousand votes. Yes they should be a small party initially, but even 16 seats in GDI's parliament is really insignificant. It would take some serious parliamentary dead-lock for someone to remember they exist (beyond certain party's that is) for thier votes to ever matter.
The way I figure it, if the Open Hand needs to roll a d10-X or d20-Y for number of seats, that's reflecting the X*10% or Y*5% chance that one of the following happens:
1) A GDI or Nod hardliner assassinates 'Crucible,' or at least puts them in the hospital, and their movement falls apart.
2) Some private or party-supported
non-governmental operation discredits the party so massively that they can't get on the ballot.
3) InOps gets paranoid, drops the hammer, and shuts down the party entirely.
4) The Open Hand party slate
does win seats, but the legislature activates some procedural rule and refuses to seat them. They probably have such a procedure, because Literally Kane could probably get 100,000 votes running on the Kane Lives Party just from meme-votes alone, and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want to let him sit in the Big Dome.
It's not a percent chance that Open Hand would earn less than 100,000 votes in all of GDI given the chance, it's a percent chance reflecting all the shit that could go wrong for them to prevent that from happening.
Well that's a take.
Like make a robot that can have babies. That is certainly one vision of the future.
Minor nitpick:
Yell0wzon3r (or whatever) has, alas, fallen into a pretty straightforward technophile variant of real life incel/MRA mentality. He's not
necessarily imagining a humanoid robot that can bear human children; the two 'functions' might be separate in his mind.
See... in his (misogynistic) perspective, women are only relevant because of two 'functions,' namely as sexual partners and as brood mares. If both functions can,
separately or together, be replaced, women become (in his mind) irrelevant to society, at which point they would (he imagines) lose the (in his mind) excessive importance that (he believes) society has given them.
How he imagines this working out, I don't know, but it's entirely possible that he's imagining a robot girlfriend and a completely separate "iron womb" mechanism for bringing children to term, with the latter being fixed infrastructure in a hospital or something.
Guh, I feel bad even talking about this shit.
[spits]
I see the Militarists have proven themselves the better party in the 'we support the military' debate. Probably because Initiative First pivoted away from a focus on military matters after they lost the first fight when the Hawks split. They probably saw it was a losing battle and instead focused on gaining the guaranteed support of the Blue Zone supremacists rather than start another losing fight to try and win back the military vote.
As noted in my previous post, I think the IF kind of wrong-footed there, because it turned out that "Blue Zoners who desire military security against Nod" is a much more reliable voter support base than "Blue Zoners who hate and fear Yellow Zoners."
Among other things, a lot of the Blue Zone citizens we
had at game start were probably, at one time, 'tiberium refugees' from some place that is now a Yellow or Red Zone. The median adult (probably born some time in the 2020s) remembers a time when the Zone boundaries were quite different, and probably has (or, grimly,
had) family living in regions that are now, as noted, Yellow or Red Zones.
Defining the Blue Zones as a 'race' was always gonna be an uphill battle for IF.
Also NOD is really stepping up attacks so the Militarists are probably using that to boost their position a lot.
Although notably, the Militarists are not,
as of right now, poised to gain much if any vote share unless they roll quite luckily. And the overall combined vote share of Initiative First and the Hawks put together is actually much thinner than the share the Hawk Party enjoyed in the early 2050s.
Speculatively, this is because despite the military situation heating up this year, the average GDI citizen's desire for military security is much closer to being satisfied now than it was in, say, 2052. Back then you could still see the bomb craters from the Third Tiberium War and it was barely five years ago that Nod had rampaged through the Blue Zones with the border fortifications largely down or bypassed. Now (or so it seems), Nod struggles to take even a single border fortress-city in the Green Zones, and generally fails!
I have not found that independent parties matter particularly much to be honest. Like, they exist and that is about it. So you will probably have a couple hundred in Parliament, but it is just a long list of nobodies for the most part.
One observed pattern is that independent parties tend not to matter much unless they're "cute," that is to say, unless the thread likes them and wants them to succeed.
However, it should be noted that in the 2054 reapportionment, you classified Starbound and the Socialists as independent minors, each with two representatives out of 120 then sitting in the legislature. Both have now risen from a 1.7% vote share in the legislature to the high single digits and have some actual clout. So having the tiny parties does help create ideas for how the legislature might continue to evolve, which is very much a good thing.
In the 2058 reapportionment, we had four independent minors, collectively holding twelve seats out of 1800: Biodiversity, Dominion, Reclamation, and Homeland.
The Dominion Party's demand for Salt Lake Planned City is just...
amusing, the man's a meme to us (I'm guessing their singular representative is male).
But the Biodiversity Party comes across as people who actually have a point, and if they had anything to offer us they'd probably be getting what they wanted. Might happen anyway.
The Reclamation Party, likewise,
might actually get what they want by accident; it's not as if we don't enjoy or desire building more tiberium mitigation. Though it'd be hard for us to hit their ambitious mitigation target on purpose alongside the ambitious RpT targets set by Development... which, of course, is an intentional game-mechanical thing on your end.
The Homeland Party is in the hilarious position of getting exactly what they wanted,
completely by accident, despite being entirely ignored during reapportionment, because we made the Karachi promise to our new sub-director of infrastructure construction, who had a better carrot to offer us than they did. Metaphorically speaking, they're very likely to wake up one day and realize that the Treasury just did what they wanted, and it may well raise more hope and support for the prospect of reclamation of old lost homelands elsewhere in the world.
Indeed, I could easily imagine the Homeland Party, Reclamation Party, and fragments of the United Yellow List forming into a new party that has a "hawkish" political bent, but with the specific goal of promoting GDI's advance into, and clearance of, territories once lost to Nod, tiberium, or both. This would in some ways be a very realistic expression of the muscular and confident sentiments beginning to brew within GDI. I could see these parties thriving in the 2060 election or the 2064 election, depending on how events go; I could even see a
realignment of parties outside of the election year as legislators shift, rearrange, or "cross the aisle" to form a new party.
We might call the thing I'm talking about... the 'Global Reclamation Party' or some such? Something harkening back to that slogan we keep hearing about how it's the
Global Defense Initiative, not the
Blue Zone Defense Initiative...
Now I'm thinking omakes. I don't think I've omake'd for this quest before...
A 4000 seat congress. That's...how do you have a useful debate? Ever?
How do you have a useful debate in a 435-seat congress, like the US's House of Representatives? Or a 650-seat legislature, like the UK's House of Commons? Realistically, the average member of either body does not get a chance to speak meaningfully on every issue, or even most issues.
I don't think the level of party cohesion you talk about is "wild" or all that novel compared to what already exists in real life in many democracies. It's just that as a practical matter, if you want to get to speak during a floor debate, you probably need a certain amount of clout, a formally defined position, or the support of numerous other legislators who all want to hear you speak.
If anything, I kinda expect as the opposition seems less and less threatening that what ever big tent coalition the Developmentalists got going under the hood will start to break down and the party will splinter somewhat into narrower interests. Not split with acrimony necessarily, but it seems at this point there's very little need for the party to present a collective bargaining position to achieve its agenda.
Arguably. What it seems to come down to is that there's a supermajority policy consensus on
more or less what GDI is and what it should be doing... There's a certain amount of wobble between factions that try to stay inside the Developmentalist 'big tent' in hopes of having more leverage with the dominant political party, versus factions that step outside to form their own party in hopes of having more leverage by acting as an independent voter bloc.
I expect coffe when finally releases is going to have in intifal rapid demand because of how much its been hyped by people. Then rapidly drop off because by now theres no people dependent on it (since we havent had it). So the only people that would by it are those who genuinely enjoy the taste. Even then most of those will be disappointed because they remember it tasting so much better. (Since after 10 years you'll only really remember the taste of the best or worst things)
When caffeine becomes more widely available, I predict that people will start becoming dependent on it again in short order.
I just want to have Kane with a badly glued on mustache as as Director of GDI's department.
For his utter confusion.
But... Kane already has a mustache...
TWO mustaches!?
MADNESS!
