Topic: For The People Material
Change of Fortune
Dan, The idea for this mechanic comes out of Clausewitz and a graph in an Archer Jones book. The point of the mechanic is to show the added effect that occurs when a sides fortune rises and falls over time.
To understand the strategies behind this mechanic you need to graph the relative SW over the course of a game. What you will see is a sawtooth type of activity, like a stock market graph, where there will be general trend over time in an upward or downward vector as a general expression of how one side is performing over time.
What is being simulated is you as the player are the President (Lincoln or Davis) and one of the political levers you have at your disposal is the ability to time events. So, if you know that you need to do something unpleasant politically or if something unpleasant happens involuntarily, you have the ability to manipulate public opinion by having some 'good' news in your back pocket to reduce the impact of 'bad' news on the electorate. If you have paid any attention to the current presidential campaign you will see multiple examples of this on an almost weekly basis, witness the recent release of the jobs report and how both sides reacted to it.
The strategies associated with this mechanic are to time political or military events to occur in a sequence that maximizes their effect on the electorate (SW). The basic strategies depend on whether the marker is on the negative or positive side. When you are in a negative condition, you want to arrange your affairs so that you take bad news before good news. So for instance if you were the Union and you wanted to fire your Army commander and conduct an amphibious invasion to capture a CSA coastal fort, it would be best to fire the general and then capture the fort. From a Civil War perspective just as Lincoln's opponents are attacking him for 'firing' their guy, positive military news comes out that dampens its impact (overall +2 SW for good timing: no additional effect for bad and +2 for change of fortune). However, if you were to do it in the opposite sequence you would whipsaw public opinion and feel it in the polls (-1 SW for bad timing: +2 for change of fortune then a -3 for the rapid change in the other direction).
When your marker is on the positive side you have to be circumspect about voluntarily doing something that will cause a change in public opinion. A common one in the game is the circumstances by which Davis forms the AoNVa. If you form the army under anyone but ASJ, you will take a political penalty due to the turmoil that ASJ proponents will cause you for passing over their favored son. However, this may be a military necessity and if you were holding an SW event card you might want to first build the AoNVa and then deliver the good news (-1 SW). If you did it in the opposite sequence you would suffer for bad political timing (-3 SW).
Over the course of the game, failure to pay attention to change of fortune could cost you 10 or more SW points. When the South wins the long game (gt 13 victory), they usually have less than this many SW remaining, so failure to handle change of fortune could be the margin of defeat. In a close game Lincoln could lose an election by this many points.
As the old saying goes, "timing is everything."
Mark
