Add more obstacles to advanced stages of the game

Democracy 4 General Discussion
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Hello!
I’ve been playing this game for some time now, tried different maps, party ideas and difficulties (100-130%). I think the strengh of the game is, that you can slowly rise the difficulty and try to figure out, how to win as different parties like Liberal-Kapitalists or Religious Patriots. Basically it seems to be important to adjust the policies in dependance to investors sympahties and to some of the largest groups of the society.

But it seems like a problem, which, judging form other forum entries, is well known among a lot of players and probably the devs aswell. It’s kinda hard to get elected during the first elections (espacially if there is a economic crisis :)))) ), but once this is accomplished and the election promises have been choosen wisely, it gets fairly easy to maintain the lead over the opposition. On all of my 5 succesful “playthroughs” the game got kind of uninteresting after my party got elected the second time. There weren’t a lot of options, since I already annulated, adjusted or implemented all the policies I did (not) want / need. The approval of my party among the society stayed relativley stable aswell.

As stated the early stages of the game are pretty balanced, challenging and fun. So good job on that! But I think that playthroughs loose their challenging character after the second election. Thats why I suggest to add more obstacles for the player to deal with. Maybe already satisfied folks could get more demanding or not-so-satisfied people could go on a riot, burn some cars and demand more concrete policy changes. I think the media reports are going in the right direction (for example a tourist gets killed and that effects tourism). Same goes for the indifference-mechanic. But I think that their impact should increase throughout a playthrough. The player should feel the consequences and the urge to act quickly. Right now it’s too easy to ignore those situations or find a easy solution. Also it’s kind of hard for the members of a certain group to demand more, if most of the policies already work in their favor. So maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, if not all of the policies are aviable right on the start of the game. Or maybe add new ones, which will be introduced after the second election (maybe bc it’s somethink completely knew for the country, like the pandemic was for us all).

Anyways I don’t regret buying the game and the gameplay was pretty nice so far :slight_smile:

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Some things like implementing voter elasticity (which is on the agenda), may improve these things along with other changes.

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It is indeed a problem with the long term play of the game. As you say, the first term is a decent challenge, the second term… not so much.

Fundamentally its because the opinion system in the game might be too simple:

“If voters are happy, vote for the player. If they are unhaopy, do not.”

This has the benefit of being something that is easy to understand and explain, and you can see it quite clearly on a chart. However, I suspect it is limited because the real world calculation is more like…

“If a voter is happier now than they were at the last election, and they think that the players party is the best option, vote for the player”

Now actually we COULD model the first part of that quite easily. In theory, we could keep a personal record of every turns opinion for every player (although save game size would jump a bit), and we could then have them vote on that basis instead. This would have these advantages:

  1. its more realistic
  2. It means you could get re-elected despite there being many problems still around which need fixing in later terms…

But tragically, it would be REALLY hard to visualize. I’m thinking out loud here, and maybe it would be possible to do this, and to display, instead of each voters happiness, each voters change in happiness vs the previous election… and vote on that basis?

An alternative approach might be to simply give more credit for fixing problems. So I could change things so that some problems (red situations) are much slower and harder to fix (pushing their fixes into the second or third term), but compensate for this with relatively short term boosts to everyone’s happiness when a red situation is fixed, or a green one appears?

So in simple terms:
“In term 1 you have obesity, gridlock and low productivity, You only fix one of these (gridlock), but in the short term (1 year) voters are happy enough about how you handled that to vote for you anyway, with the expectation that you will fix the other issues eventually just as well…”

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How much would save game sizes increase by? Would it be a manageable amount?

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Probably not too much actually. 2,000 votes X 40 turns (5 years) = 80,000 records, happiness each turn would be 4 digits so 4 bytes = 320k extra for a 1 term game, 1.2MB for 4 terms.

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Sounds manageable, right? :slight_smile:

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here is my list of ideas would you consider them. whenever you could. here is my list .

Poll tax
Sex work tax
Earned abroad income tax
gaming tax
Tourist tax
Land value Tax
religious institution tax
negative income tax
Age of consent
Voting Age
Driving Age
sex offender resigstry
public sex offender resigstry
exclusion zone orders
Housing associations
3 strikes law
Right to Buy
Rent supplements
Price control
police community relations-a general measure to show the relationship between the community and the police

sense of safety a simulation-To measure how people feel safe

New Zealand

Could you let me know what you think to them because. i have many more that i can think off that very good to add.

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The wealth tax is already in place, and for the rest most of them are now modded

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I see no reason why they can not be integrated into the base game.

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It’s an issue of complexity, not “if it could be added” but “should”.

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I personally think voter elasticity would probably be a good addition as well. “I’ve always been a Republican/Democrat, why would I change sides this election?” Just because they are marginally happier than the last election does not mean they will switch sides out of the blue.

On top of that, opinion is important too. Fearmongering, misinformation, and the general state of the internet mean that a lot of people think their country is doing poorly when in reality its not. As an example, the $800 Billion stimulus after the 2008 financial crisis was mostly seen positively by the left and negatively by the right, irrespective of its actual value. A person on the Republican side of the spectrum would not believe the stimulus was good and would not switch to the Democratic Party because of it, even if the money may have benefited them.

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I think that the US has a lot of issues with “Fake News”, so to speak, so it tends to polarize the population (media monopoly of course is independent of this, arguably it would reduce polarization, even if people stick to just one side of the spectrum), voter inelasticity will have to be, as Cliff likes to remind us, a generalized sim value, which would be applicable across all nations, not just the US (not saying that you’re saying that), although, I imagine in real life, if you make everything okay, like fix infrastructure, make businesses great again, reduce foreign influence, improve health, etc…, why wouldn’t people love you? I think that it’s a question of not “Republican” v “Democrat” in the case of America, I think that it’s more an issue of “Republican Representatives” v “Democratic Representatives”. But of course, Republicans would still likely vote for a Republican legislator, even though they may have more in common with the policies of a democrat (like for example, making healthcare more accessible), tribalism and all that.

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As stated above, this could be a result of the fake news / skepticism of the media that is quite common in the US at the moment, especially with older generations.
It could be really interesting to have fake news feed into elasticity, but I always worry about exactly how we convey that to a casual player…

The simplest way would perhaps be to have high elasticity called out as an event, so the player would actually get a message saying “due to fake news and other factors, retired voters are currently very slow to change their political allegiance.”

That seem a bit opaque though. The data kind of already exists in the game, on the post-election analysis screen, where you will occasionally see some blue voters scattered in a sea of red voters (for example), which illustrates voters who ‘if they were rational’ would vote red, but are still members of and thus supporters of, the blue party.

Pretty hard to explain that graphically though :smiley:

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Sorry, I guess living in America necessarily created an American Centric view on politics. I do like the voter elasticity system, and I agree that the system might turn out to be too complex to be distilled into a single event.

Perhaps this could be added as a bubble in the main window of the game? something like “Disinformation,” that would cause everyone (or just a certain subset of the population) to dislike the player more.

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