Weekly Pacing
| Setup group | Weekly Pacing |
|---|---|
| Default | Monthly |
| Premium | Yes |
| Eras | All presidential eras |
| Career Mode | Not offered |
| Designated Survivor | Always weekly |
What it does
Weekly Pacing changes how often the player takes a turn. Normally a turn covers a month; with this option on, a turn covers a week, and four turns make up a month. Every turn still includes an event, a policy choice and the focus group's verdict, so wars, the economy and elections all move in smaller steps. The setup screen labels the choice "Monthly turns (48 per term)" or "Weekly turns (208 per term)", and warns that weekly pacing has not been fully tested.
Where it applies
The toggle sits on the setup screen and is not available to a free account, which is prompted to upgrade if it tries to select it. Designated Survivor always plays weekly, because its crisis unfolds week by week, and it hides the toggle while that scenario is under way; the ordinary setup screen returns to whatever the player had chosen once it ends. Career Mode does not offer the toggle, because a career is tracked in months rather than weeks. An older save with no pacing recorded loads as monthly.
One known problem: the setup screen's label of "208 turns" does not match the length of a term as actually played, which runs 192 turns, the number needed for a term to end after four years.
What changes in play
With weekly pacing on, the calendar reads by week, such as "Week 1 of March 1961", and a cabinet directive's countdown to taking effect switches from months to weeks once it falls due within a month. Because a week is a smaller slice of time than a month, most of the rates that drive the game are reduced to match, including the economy's drift and the pace at which relationships with foreign countries and stakeholder groups shift. Other systems described elsewhere on this wiki, including the Red Scare, Covert Operations, Dirty Tricks and Expanded Congress, update in the same, proportionally smaller steps. The change shown beside approval and other headline numbers is given to one decimal place rather than rounded to a whole point, because a week's change is otherwise too small to see.
Each week still draws its own event, so a term played weekly uses about four times as many events as the same term played monthly. If a period's supply of events runs out, the game reuses events already seen rather than stopping. During an election campaign, extra event types written for weekly play, such as campaign stops, donor meetings and attack ads, appear to keep the additional turns varied.