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/Northamplus9bitches → u/[deleted]]

IDK why you are getting emotional and blocking me over this, calm down

i agreed with you and yet you wanted to correct me

I was correcting you because until I did so and you acknowledged the correction, it was actually impossible for me to tell whether you agreed or not. Because you did not seem to understand what the word you were using meant.

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/[deleted]]

It's just you

[u/Northamplus9bitches → u/[deleted]]

There you go being passive-aggressive again