I assume you're talking about the internals of the game. Like marketing, it takes a while for the politicians to be bribed. This is to prevent players from maxing out lobbying the month before taxes are due, then zeroing it out for the other 2 months. Thus reducing the money sink effect it's supposed to have.

How it works, there is a maximum lobbying budget based on year. We take the amount you are spending and divided it by the max budget. That gives us your lobbying spending ratio. If that is higher than the effect, we increase the effect amount by a fixed rate. If the lobbying spending ratio is less than the effect amount, we drop the effect amount to the exact ratio the spending ratio is. (Politicians hate for their toys to be taken away from them.)

We then use the effect rate for the various things that use lobbying. Such as contracts, taxes, subsidiaries for new factories, lawsuits, etc.

Yes, I'm talking about internals, trying to make sense of save game data to understand where I am with lobbying efforts. Thank you for explaining. So the effect you are talking about is stored in CompanyList EFFECT_COST_LOBBYING? How does that number get interpreted? For example, right now the value I have is 169572. Is that a lot or a little? What would be the maximum?

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

Yes, I'm talking about internals, trying to make sense of save game data to understand where I am with lobbying efforts. Thank you for explaining. So the effect you are talking about is stored in CompanyList EFFECT_COST_LOBBYING? How does that number get interpreted? For example, right now the value I have is 169572. Is that a lot or a little? What would be the maximum?

It's divided by the maximum lobbying amount. The maximum lobby amount is a dynamic function. You'll have to wait for the indepth manual before I throw out the formula. The easiest way to see what it is, is to max out your lobby slider. See the amount you would spend? That's the maximum amount.

Originally posted by Eric.B:

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

Yes, I'm talking about internals, trying to make sense of save game data to understand where I am with lobbying efforts. Thank you for explaining. So the effect you are talking about is stored in CompanyList EFFECT_COST_LOBBYING? How does that number get interpreted? For example, right now the value I have is 169572. Is that a lot or a little? What would be the maximum?

It's divided by the maximum lobbying amount. The maximum lobby amount is a dynamic function. You'll have to wait for the indepth manual before I throw out the formula. The easiest way to see what it is, is to max out your lobby slider. See the amount you would spend? That's the maximum amount.

Perfect, thank you. So 169k/1200k or so, a little under 15%. Makes perfect sense now.

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

Originally posted by Eric.B:

It's divided by the maximum lobbying amount. The maximum lobby amount is a dynamic function. You'll have to wait for the indepth manual before I throw out the formula. The easiest way to see what it is, is to max out your lobby slider. See the amount you would spend? That's the maximum amount.

Perfect, thank you. So 169k/1200k or so, a little under 15%. Makes perfect sense now.

Yup, and lets say your budget is set to 250k. It will slowly go up to 250k. But if you were to drop it to 100k. It would immediately fall to 100k the next turn.

I am a little curious about something you said about "going up by fixed amount if your current is over effect". Right now I'm funding it to the max every turn. Does it mean I'm wasting money, since I'm only at 15%, so if I was to fund at 20%, then until I reach that point it'd be going up every month by the same fixed amount no matter if I spend 20% or 100%? Or does the amount it goes up by depend on how much over you are spending?

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

I am a little curious about something you said about "going up by fixed amount if your current is over effect". Right now I'm funding it to the max every turn. Does it mean I'm wasting money, since I'm only at 15%, so if I was to fund at 20%, then until I reach that point it'd be going up every month by the same fixed amount no matter if I spend 20% or 100%? Or does the amount it goes up by depend on how much over you are spending?

I don't have the code in front of me, so I am not entirely sure. You can easily test it though. Write down the amount it is now. Sim a turn. Save. Write down the difference and the new amount. Drop your budget, sim a turn, save, write down the difference from the previous amount. If the differences are the same you have your answer.

Yep, I just thought you might recall offhand. Anyway, I went to test it out and what you said initially was right-it's a flat rate increase regardless of how much over I spent. Both saves started at the value I quoted above, 169572. In one, I kept spending at 1.2mil, and the result was 186539. In another I spent only 600000, and the result after one turn was still 186539. Looks like it's going up at about 1.5% of the current maximum per month if the current value is exceeded.

So a gradual increase strategy seems best. Only it's too bad this value of your current progress isn't exposed easily anywhere in the game, so you have to either guess based on how much your construction is subsidised and your taxes reduced (which is hard because the max is unclear), or look into SQL.

It's not meant to be exposed. At most, I'd give it a word score such as "Current Lobbying Efforts: Horrible but Improving."

Which may be doable now that we got rid of the background image window.

Any kind of indication would do just fine, I think. I imagine a 0-100 percentage score would be easiest to implement, but mapping that to word categories works just as well.