Ban Women From Driving Religious Effects? Seriously?

Democracy 4
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Last time I checked, Western countries are made up of an overwhelming percentage of Christian based faiths. After that those unaffiliated with any religion make up the next largest percentage of the population.

So, why in the **** are religious people happy about banning women from driving in this game? (There is no ISIS state to play as in the game remember). The West are far from being predominantly extreme sects of Islam. The only people in the world I have ever seen happy about banning women from driving are radical authoritarian regimes, or pretty stringent Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia.

Go to a church. Talk to a Christian. See how many of them would think banning women from driving is a good thing that Jesus would do. This is ****ing horseshit. If anything making Ethnic Minorities get pissed off makes more sense because they are supposed to represent everything from a Latino to an ex-ISIS affiliate (which is garbage by the way we need to fix that too). Breaking news, THAT WOULDN’T make sense either would it?

I am genuinely pissed off at the pure naivety in the implemented affects of this policy. Furthermore, why would conservatives be happy? Conservatives are not the ultra right wing. Conservatives in the game represent (unfortunately) everyone on the right. The vast and overwhelming majority of conservatives would NOT support this policy. We would hate it. So why the hell does the game say we would like it?

This game needs to represent extremists better and segregate extremists on the right and left from the majority aligning center-left and center-right. As well as segregate religious extremists from traditional religious people and/or spiritualists.

Banning women from driving should please radical Muslims and ultra right wing chauvinists. That is it. Not the overwhelming whelming majority of Christians, or conservatives.

Change this shit. Now. This is just teaching kids even more about political polarity, that does not ****ing exist in this matter at all.

Rant done.

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So, in order:

Yes, religious groups includes everything from just-not-atheist to deus-vult-extremist for the sake of simplicity.
But that doesn’t mean that extremism is not represented. Every voter has a percentage of how much they are into a specific group. Someone 5% Religious is technically religious, but will almost not be affected by banning women from driving, but if they are 80% Liberal at the same time, they will be absolutely horrified and will definitely not vote for you.
Also, keep in mind that while all the countries currently available are in Europe, this will not always be the case (South Korea is coming soon).

The different categories of Ethnic Minorities are being discussed and will probably be better defined in the future.

Now onto the point that “Conservatives are not the ultra right wing”. Well in this game, Conservatives are basically Authoritarian/Totalitarian/Traditionalist and Liberal are basically Libertarian/Anarchist/Progressive. Again, for the sake of simplicity. Conservatives in this game are not America’s Republican or any political group that exist in the real world, they are purely defined as “The opposing view to Liberals”. That’s how a “Conservative-Socialist” is basically a communist in this game.
Yes, it is true that someone that is 60% conservative (so still a moderate) will be thrilled to see women banned from driving, and yes by that logic, this is very unrealistic. And if you have a solution that doesn’t just duplicate the groups and that doesn’t significantly alter the game, I’d be very happy to hear it.
But for now, if you want to make a moderate society in the game, my best advice is just to not increase the membership of a group too much, because this will cause the people of that group to become more extremist.

And finally, chill dude. Politics are complex, and if a game wants to perfectly simulate it, it has basically failed before even starting. If you have a constructive way to improve the simulation, by all means explain. But if you just want to “rant” because you feel like the game is not treating the name of the group you identify with correctly, then please consider that it’s merely for making things easy enough to work/play with them.

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Awesome reply!

I would like to start by saying that I am not ranting ““because “I” feel like the game is not treating the name of the group “I” identify with correctly””, instead because I obviously misunderstood the mechanics behind the scenes that direct voter responsiveness to policy.

Why I am upset is obvious, and it seems like you can understand why so we are on the same side here. I was absolutely NOT trying to make this political, I was simply making an observation of the game that we can both agree is a ridiculous representation of the voter, without understanding why the developer was somewhat forced to make this so.

That being said, I do have an idea on how we can address this that ties into what you mentioned; “Every voter has a percentage of how much they are into a specific group. Someone 5% Religious is technically religious, but will almost not be affected by banning women from driving, but if they are 80% Liberal at the same time, they will be absolutely horrified and will definitely not vote for you.”

With that logic in mind, why can we not have a set threshold of alignment, or better yet, a scaling alignment threshold that triggers reaction to policies logarithmically?

For example, banning women from driving. We all know who would support this. Radical religious groups, specifically Muslims as evident by Saudi Arabia and 2018, and radical authoritarian regimes. So yes, the religious group, albeit, the most extremely religious should be supportive of it. Extreme right wing conservative chauvinists (think the women should make me a sandwich and keep her ass in the kitchen type) would be supportive.

We both agree that the vast majority of conservatives and religious groups would not be regardless of religious affiliation or on differing traditional conservative view points. SOOOOOOO.

In the name of simplicity, keep the groups the same. Yes the extreme right wing should be part of the conservative group. Yes the extreme left should be grouped with the liberals. But, why not add a multiplier into the mix. It would be relatively simple, easy to retro into the game, and allow for better representation of voters. I will list some rough numbers below to better explain this.

Let’s say we have four voters, we will call them voters, A1, A2, B1, B2.

A1: Religious 50% Conservative 50%
A2: Religious 80% Conservative 20%

Banning women from driving will affect this voter (for the sake of simplicity I will make some shit up here)

Policy: Ban Women From Driving (100%)
Effects:
Religious Opinion +50%
Conservative Opinion +50%

If voters A1 and A2 had a base opinion of the government of 1.0 their new opinion would be 1.5 because —Voter A1 — 1/2=0.5 — 0.51.5+0.51.5=1.5. OR Voter A2 — 1/5=0.2 — 0.241.5+0.211.5=1.5

If we add a multiplier to the mix though we can take into consideration that voter A1 is not an extremely religious or extremely conservative. He is split and for the sake of simplicity be represented as a moderate citizen. If we had a a third metric to the mix that applies to all voters (which I am sure is simple enough to add because it is only one metric instead of splitting up liberals, conservatives, socialists and capitalists into multiple groups) called extremism to the mix we can better represent the aforementioned policies impact on voter approval/disapproval.

Let’s apply a scalable value to extremism from 1-3 (for the sake of easy numbers). That value will scale (again for simplicities sake here, this is up for balance changes) by 0 at <50%, +1 at 51%-75% of voter alignment to a specific group, +2 at 76%-99% and +3 at 100%.

By applying this to voters A1 and A2 we will revaluate and call the new voters B1 and B2. The policy in question will be flagged as an “extremist” policy. Because the policy is flagged as extremist the voters will revaluate their response to the policy.

Policy: Ban Women From Driving (100%)
Effects:
Religious Opinion +50%
Conservative Opinion +50%

Voter B1
B1: Religious 50% Conservative 50%
Voter B2
B2: Religious 80% Conservative 20%

Voter B1 would recalculate as
1/2
0.51.50=0
0.51.50=0

So voter B1 would have no change in approval of the government as there is a net value of 0 applied to the voter after extremism is taken into account. The policy would not lower their opinion (because I get that would add to much complexity to account for.)

Voter B2 would recalculate as
1/2
0.81.52=2.4
0.21.50=0

So voter B2 would approve of the policy because they are categorized as extreme since they are greater than 50% affiliated with one particular group. In this case it is the religious group.

Yes the numbers suck, but the value can be adjusted as well as how it scales. The idea behind it though is clear. By adding one metric to the voter you are totally able to play around with how a voter will respond to a policy without changing how they already align to groups in the game :slight_smile:

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I have to agree with the OP. Personally, I just don’t touch this policy, and pretend it isn’t there. I advised the developer in a post not to go ahead with adding this to the game, I think I wasn’t alone, and I think he’s just being contrarian by adding it.

It might not be terrible to add a “radical” group for many of the voter blocks. It would be interesting to see a simulation to separate the moderates from the extremists, and what pleases each. Without such separation, some groups become cartoonish, and have more in common with how they are depicted by their opponent groups than an actual representation of the supposed group. Not all socialists see wealth as inherently criminal, not all capitalists are Pharma Bro, not all liberals want everyone who disagrees with them to be de-platformed, and not all conservatives are offended by the mere thought of a gay person.

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This is all confusing religiosity with being aligned politically as religious. In the USA, the vast majority of residents are religious, even highly so. But it’s a key part of a minority of the voting block.

So how would this play out? It’s not hard for me to imagine that in a fictional second term, Trump suggests some version of this… like allowing states or counties or communes to ban women driving. And while very few would use such permissions, it’s not hard to imagine an evangelicals base that loved Trump (in game terms giving him the political capital to implement it) applauding the move even if they don’t want to ban driving for women in their community.

This is not that different from socialists loving programs even if they don’t personally benefit from them. One might want to keep their private doctor but largely applaud expansions of the public sector or bans of the private sector.

The other thing I can imagine is that the game is slated to include nations where this would be more realistic.

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I think a good way to represent polices only extremists can stand is to give them a negative impact on the everyone group.

Another way is to exploit the mechanic whereby the vast majority of simulated voters are effected by the opinions of all four of lib/con/soc/cap, with policies where the group made happy is made less happy than the group opposite them is made angry. For example, let’s say we have an extremist liberal policy that has liberal+0.1 and conservative-0.5. Only people who are 80% liberal or more will approve of that policy. This does have the limitation that even those extremist liberals won’t like it very much, unless the numbers are set high enough to tank you with everyone else.

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I’m not sure that is the way it works. I think that if someone is 80 % liberal, he/she will have the 80 % of the effects on liberals, but none on the conservatives.
Isn’t it possible to simply overwrite the effects of the politics for “democratic” countries? Making it annoy everyone and specially liberals but also conservatives.

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That’s how it worked in D3, but it’s been changed. Now an 80% liberal will have 80% of the liberal effects and 20% of the conservative effects.

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I’d like a policy to ban HUMANS from driving. Self driving cars only!

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