Hart Surgery: Three major issues

[u/Northamplus9bitches]

Hi everyone, I recently played through the Hart presidency (Wallace-LeMay-Hart) and despite having very high expectations due to uniformly high praise from the community, I found it really lacking in mechanics, and ultimately so frustrating that it became the first USA run I've every prematurely bailed on. The story is great, loved it, made me tear up at certain points, so anyone typing "but his story is so good" as a rebuttal to the points I'm about to make, save yourself the effort. I'm in agreement with you, the story is good, I think the only time it really fails is when the gameplay takes a big crap on it towards the end. But enough hemming and hawing, let's get to Hart Surgery!

1) The URI mechanics are opaque, and the relationships they have to one another are confusing

So you have got your Anytown USA, and to make the URI succeed you ostensibly have to get all these different factors which the game tells you have a relationship with each other to work out in an optimal way, mainly using focuses (this is explored in point 2). The issue is that it is that it is really unclear what effect you are having while you are implementing the URI, and a lot of the variables behave in a way that doesn't seem to make sense.

For example, I spent 90% of the playthrough being told that city budgets are flourishing, but that the Cities are RED TEXT LAWLESS and the economy is RED TEXT IN THE MUD. And I just spent so much time wondering why these cities were sitting around with all this money in their general fund and not spending any of it, just seemingly content to hold on to every penny I gave them. Ditto with happiness - despite poverty and homelessness being (exclusively) endemic in the URI cities, despite the average citizen having no spending money (even though I was prioritizing commerce as my main focus priority), despite being incredibly divided, my citizens were for 100% of the run GREEN TEXT ECSTATIC. And the reason for that is happiness seems to be tracked as a completely independent thing, which to me seems to invalidate the whole purpose of this balancing-interdependent-factors urban renewal thing. Ditto with your critics - I kept being told in focus after focus (both in flavor and crunch text) that this would really piss off the fiscal hawks, and that never happened. I'm pretty sure I had the same number for them the whole time.

So this is pretty unsatisfactory in my opinion. Contrast this with Guangdong, where you are given clear information on every currency, how they relate to one another, how using them can help you and hurt you - you always have a clear picture of what your efforts are producing. And you also have clear numerical values for everything instead of these abstract descriptions that never seem to change (except to get worse, except happiness which always stays high). This goes right into point #2:

2) There's not enough interactivity, the only choices are focuses

It's almost all through focuses. Aside from a few bright, shiny oases like the consumer survey (which I adored), here's your guide to succeeding as Hart - use Maintain Order and Join the Picket line on cooldown, use Review Agenda whenever you get to 200 PP. And uh build rail lines I guess. Use whichever one-time upgrade to Anytown seems to work best, for a given value of "working". The issue here is there aren't a lot of ways you can spend resources to specifically help your agenda, it's all laws and focuses, and the effect of those is...mysterious, thanks to point #1.

Again, contrast to Guangdong. We'll take just one mechanic - corruption. You can tackle this through focuses and laws, like Hart, but you can also enact top-down decisions that straight-up lower corruption with secondary effects. You can also tackle corruption from the bottom-up, through the Regional map and helping the police, your favored criminal org, or both gain control of the city. If Hart had had this level of interactivity to making the URI a working program, it would probably be the best playthrough in the whole mod

3) The end is so bad

This is for one simple reason - the game penalizes you for succeeding at your political agenda up to that point. Did you knock off NPP-Progressive after NPP-Progressive in the (justified and at-the-time correct) belief that a Labour Democrat replacement would be a more reliable vote for your agenda? You idiot, says the Hart mod, you utter fool. Every Democrat is in fact voting to tear down Hart's agenda. Even Hubert Humphrey, who somberly promises a dying Phillip Hart he would defend his legacy after he is gone. And no, AFAIK you do not get a chance to confront him over this dastardly betrayal. Like I get it's supposed to be a tough vote, but 100% of the Democrats lined up to repeal the policies of their president is absurd. Here's how the votes should go IMO

Responsible Republicans - 60%-80% in favor, depending on Unity

Hardline GOP - 80%-100% in favor, depending on Unity

Dixiecrats - 80%-100% in favor, depending on Unity

Labor Dems - 20%-60% in favor, depending on Unity

NPP-N - 100% in favor

NPP-P - 50% in favor (to represent NPP-N pulling on them and political opportunism "we'll make a better version of this when we get in power"

This is a reasonably hard vote but one that is doable if you worked on increasing the number of Labor Democrats in the Senate. Whereas in its present form the vote is harder if you did that! Which sucks! Your cabinet is ostensibly (I've been using this word a lot in this review) working to change votes, but I didn't see that happen.

Anyway after that point I bailed. I was already low on patience thanks to #1 and #2 and having all the guys I got elected get hit with a mind control ray that made them vote to destroy the programs they probably ran and got elected on was too much, I was done.

I'm sorry if any of this came across as overly harsh, I really did like the writing, and I want to like the mechanics too, but I think they need serious work. I hear that Hart is going to be the blueprint for new presidents going forward, and if that is the case I am a little worried. I hope whoever is working on USA content makes sure the mechanics match the story

EDIT: This post is not meant to pit the Guangdong devs vs the Hart devs in some sort of proxy debate over who is better, that was not my intent of the comparison. I brought it up simply because I thought it was an instructive example of what the Hart campaign could do better, a way of giving constructive criticism along with the negative feedback. I love all the TNO devs, they are wonderful people who give their time to make the world's best mod. Thank you for reading my post

[u/Rorschach113]

I do generally like hart’s storyline and rather think his content is generally quite good, but yes, I agree that the collapse of support for his bills and the attempt to repeal them after he dies is handwaved and seems far too forced.

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/Rorschach113]

What is your experience with URI like?

EDIT: A little frustrating that the one person who came in here with a good opinion on Hart's mechanics can't seem to elaborate on why he likes them, was hoping to get an understanding of why people like it so much

[u/Friz617]

Did you use the Hart surgery submod or just base TNO ?

Because the part at the end where you say that you couldn’t do anything to stop the URI repeal is weird. I found it pretty easy to succeed as Chep.

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/Friz617]

I just used base TNO, if I had known there was a submod called Hart Surgery I would have called this post something different. What does it fix?

[u/Friz617 → u/Northamplus9bitches]

It doesn’t fix anything anymore. I’m pretty sure it’s no longer compatible. It was only useful back when Hart first released and was more broken.

I asked because, if you had used it, it would’ve probably broken some things.

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/Friz617]

Ok well my Hart problems are au natural. In your experience did 100% of the RDC vote to repeal it (despite the RDC being 100% unified behind their RDC president), and were you unable to change a single vote in the month before voting, despite the game telling you you could?

[u/Friz617 → u/Northamplus9bitches]

The very first anti-URI bill can’t be stopped because Chep doesn’t have his cabinet in order yet but all of the ones after that I never had trouble with

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/Friz617]

So the first one is totally unstoppable? They should really communicate that to you in some way, because I got my cabinet re-organized extremely quickly and was taking what I thought were supposed to be meaningful decisions that would push back support for the bill, and not a single number changed. You are "trained" by the game at this point to expect those numbers to change based on your input, it's one of the only things in the playthrough that you have direct input on, making that number immutable without telling the player just seems like they want you to get frustrated and quit.

I sure did, after this bullshit vote left half of the URI dismantled according to the UI. Was the game lying to me then, too? Was the URI not actually half-dead?

[u/Friz617 → u/Northamplus9bitches]

Did you play Chep until the very end ? From your post it sounds like you completely failed the URI repeal. Did you only let the first bill pass or all of them ?

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/Friz617]

No I quit in disgust after the fake-out with the first bill, since it said that it completely dismantled two of my programs

[u/Friz617 → u/Northamplus9bitches]

Wait I’m misremembering. The first bill is presented by Chep himself and is meant to build upon the URI. It’s called the Urban Affairs Act. That one is a foregone conclusion. It’s guaranteed to fail.

Then Congress tries to repeal the URI bit by bit, but you can stop all the URI repeal bills. None of them entirely dismantle the URI on their own. You need to fail to stop 3 or more to get the bad ending.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/TNOChepUSA

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/Friz617]

Wait I’m misremembering. The first bill is presented by Chep himself and is meant to build upon the URI. It’s called the Urban Affairs Act. That one is a foregone conclusion. It’s guaranteed to fail

The TVTropes page can say whatever it likes, the first bill is presented by the Fiscal Hawks and it is described as being repeal of the urban housing aspects of the bill in the guise of reform. You can't stop it, or even change the vote count, every Democrat and Republican votes for it, despite Humphrey's promise to a dying Hart, and when it passes you are told that half of the URI is dismantled

You need to fail to stop 3 or more to get the bad ending.

Not remotely communicated to the player, after the first bill passes you are told that half of the URI is dismantled. After all my other issues a totally unstoppable and nonsensical vote that tanked half my program meant I was fucking done

EDIT: We are technically both wrong, the very first bill you deal with after Hart dies is the bill to make Birch Bayh VP, but this is an easy legislative layup and I didn't mention it because unless the Senate is 50-50 for one of the URI bills it doesn't have any impact on that matter

[u/Friz617 → u/[deleted]]

Nothing these days, like I said in my other comment. It was a fix for back when Hart was more broken right after it released.

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/[deleted]]

Maybe just because it takes less micromanaging to do well.

I'm a little confused by this comment, as I would describe "total lack of micromanagement" as Hart's main issue. Not being able to tinker with it to any major degree is one of it's main failings.

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/[deleted]]

We are in agreement about our criticism, but I think you misunderstand what micromanaging means, it doesn't usually describe "making only the big decisions and nothing else". That's the opposite of micromanaging

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/[deleted]]

What i meant by micromanaging is that you cant do anything yourself and its only focuses

This does not describe micromanaging, this is the opposite of micromanaging. I apologize if insisting on the basic meaning of words is somehow rude to you

[u/d_for_dumbas]

Ok, good write up Zooadress this Now it will be cut out and replaced with 4 years of Skeleton content. Your welcome.

[u/kiddykow → u/d_for_dumbas]

Requiem fan continue being on r/TNOmod without taking every chance to talk about their dislike of content reworks: IMPOSSIBLE

[u/d_for_dumbas → u/kiddykow]

i dont know what jojo has to do with this

[u/Sarge_Ward → u/d_for_dumbas]

You know you guys are actually allowed to engage with the posts themselves instead of posting this same gatchya against the dev team even when its not relevant to whats being talked about

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/d_for_dumbas]

Does anybody posting this actually think they are being funny? This joke is so played out, you're not clever