First off, brilliant game. Little overpriced I would say in relation to content but perhaps not with respect to the amount of work it must have taken. UI is really clean, things are explained well and lots of detail. However you must have chosen one of the most difficult things to accurately sim. From browsing the forums i can tell you genuinely research stuff but i’m not sure about the bias of your sources.
Is there a reason that my state housing cost just doesn’t change? Only the slider bar matters which doesn’t seem correct. If i put a lot of money into state housing, and go for policies which would decrease the amount of private housing after enough time, state housing would become the majority housing. Government would only have to pay maintenance costs and minor building costs for new developments …reduces state housing costs, giving me a surplus which I could use to decrease the amount of income tax (btw choosing tax bracket %s would be nice) and then people like my government more.
What on earth is complacency for socialists? Decreasing their happiness apparently?
Would be nice if there was some form of bribery or corruption system in game game to make it more akin to real life. Also more input from ministers would be nice, criticising policies etc. Being able to just pick any policy you want and wave a wand doesn’t seem much like reality. I suppose it depends whether you want sim like behaviour or game like. Is this the kind of thing that mods would be capable of? How much access to the game do modders get?
Could you mod a system where following policies has a cause like “scientists invent 95% efficiency solar panels” which in turn gives you another policy to subsidise solar panels on houses, which gives lower dependancy on oil, better energy efficiency, stimulating the economy (in the same way that subsidising oil drilling would.) Speaking of which, why are clean energy subsidies are default cost in a new game, when fossil fuel subsidies are an order of magnitude higher nearly, and aren’t a default. I’m not quite sure oil drilling comes under the same remit; as energy subsidies usually come in the form of tax rebates, and it isn’t a default anyway.
Not saying this is a bad thing but with the way the system works it seems a fair bit harder to go for a “free market” approach (could have been me doing it badly though), obviously to an extent this makes a lot of sense, it doesn’t really benefit the majority in the same way that a social approach would and thus less votes. Which shows how well your modelling really works. Are you looking to design w.r.t game difficulty and make it easier to “win” with a free market system, or design w.r.t model accuracy?
Anyway i’m really glad someone made a game/sim like this and I hope you look at really going indepth (or allowing modders to) at some point. Are you looking to patch it or do a system whereby people can pay for lifetime upgrades? Or is it just going to be Democracy N+1 which people keep buying?
