August has been a pretty big month for DynamicSim, with a lot of the focus on making the game world feel more connected and giving your actions more visible consequences. I'm particularly excited about Approval Ratings and Lobbyist Groups, which add some new depth to politics through public opinion, endorsements, campaign spending, and relationships between lawmakers, businesses, and advocacy groups.

Musicians can now finally use stage names, and we also held the 5th Harmonix Awards using the new live event system on DynamicSim and Discord. I was really happy with how the show went, and I'm excited about what we can do with live events going forward.

There's plenty more in this month's update, including a redesigned Wiki, the new Homebase, Support Tickets, DFL improvements, and a lot of smaller changes and polish throughout the game. Thanks as always for playing and helping shape DynamicSim. Here's everything that changed this month:

Core

• Added Lobbyist Groups to the game to represent specific business industries as well as certain advocacy groups. These groups will pay state legislators and Senators who vote the way they want, make endorsements, and run election ads in races where they've endorsed a candidate. You can also meet with specific groups to gain their endorsement as a specific energy-costing elections action. All characters and public companies can donate funds to lobbyist groups to better carry out their mission. They're already live with the current election cycle so take a look and let me know if you have any thoughts!
• Added Support Tickets to ask gameplay questions, submit suggestions, or report bugs to the GM & mod team
• Created the Homebase section to manage your character itself. This is where various actions like Upgrade Skill have moved. There will be more features to come here, but for now it's just a more user-friendly way to manage your character itself outside of your chosen career
• Completely redesigned the game Wiki to hopefully help you find the information you're looking for quicker instead of just being an info dump
• Added the ability to upload photos to press releases. These photos then get reviewed by AI and may be continued onto resulting news articles
• Added the ability to tag characters in social media and debate posts. This will generate a notification for the character
• Upgraded to latest AI models where possible

Business

• Added the ability to upload a company logo for your business
• Added actions to Expand, Sell, and Close Assets
• Polished a lot of the business charts to be more user friendly

Government

• Added Approval Ratings for all characters
• The President now has the opportunity to deliver a State of the Union address once per term
• Added Attack Ads as an election option, including for surrogates
• Introduced 2 new partisan news outlets that automatically generate up to 6 partisan-slanted articles per day
• State Legislature members now receive a salary of $1k per day. The salaries for other positions have been increased as well.
• Polished the State Legislature bill debate page and fixed a few bugs regarding amendments. I've also consolidated the Add Text and Remove Text motions into the single Amend Text motion. This motion will allow you to add or remove text in the same step and should hopefully be much more user friendly.
• Rebalanced character relationship effects from bill/motion voting
• State of the Union addresses now receive greater weight in the news cycle.
• Selecting an issue for campaign ads and rallies is now optional. It's still encouraged but no longer required.

Music

• Added the ability to set a stage name for your musician instead of being forced to perform under the character's name. You can set your stage name on the Music dashboard
• Harmonix Awards will now be held on the site and streamed to Discord

Sports

• Added the ability to upload a team logo
• Added automatically generated Power Rankings and game recap news articles
• Completely redesigned the DFL game live broadcast page (in the wiki and linked to from Discord) to be more user-friendly and provide additional information like team ratings, historical record, etc