There should be mechanic that measures bureaucratic capacity of state.
Demand:
Lots of policies especially Law, Tax, Welfare and Economy ones would mean certain bureaucratic load.
Some of then would require bureaucracy depending on policy intensity.
Capitalists would dislike high bureaucratic load.
There would be supply side of it: Corruption, stability, education, technology and maybe other factors influencing it.
This way you would have to optimize policies, and not just maximize all those âfeel goodâ (no downsides maybe except costs) policies.
If demand outstrips supply:
There would be negative situation - bureaucratic backlog - everyone would be affected by this, maybe some groups would be extra affected by this.
If supply outstrips demand:
Efficient bureaucracy situation would appear, everyone would be happy.
Simulation of bureaucracy would be nice thing that would force you to optimize country.
Currently you canât clog up country with policies even if you enable them all.
All Democracy games were way too easy, unless you set term length to 3 years, but only first few terms were challenge.
You can rush religious/conservative/patriot/environmentalist/farmer voter groups - they are very easy to get 100% approval and membership.
Thatâs why I suggested averaging voter group happiness and then adjusting by complacency and cynicism, and then averaging voters approval from membership and opinions.
Simple addition makes it too easy.
In fact everything should be averaged - this would be simplest way to have negatives/positives still having effect despite overwhelming positive/negative pressure.
indeed, I am very interested in that idea, although it scares me because it would basically change EVERYTHING, and mean balancing stuff effectively has to start again.
Althought TBH a scaled hybrid model is easy to do, take the average, then take the aggregate and scale the final result as some combo of bothâŚ
The way I see it, right now, balancing is way off whack regardless. Youâre gonna have to do quite some drastic changes, especially with whatâs most broken. And that, as of right now, is approval. Itâs just stupidly easy to get to max approval.
Once thatâs more reasonable, you can fiddle with everything else after. Anything else doesnât really make sense: The approval changes will inevitably cause a wave of knock-on balance shifts.
As said before, aside of this averaging stuff, policies should also generally have diminishing returns in almost all approval and effect sizes: Eventually what ever good a policy may do is gonna be practically maxed out / itâs gonna be really hard to get more out of it.
Effectively thatâd stop another broken part of the current gameplay:
Decisions are very nearly binary. Thereâs, like, a handful of policies where Iâm actually forced to consider setting them to anything other than extreme on or extreme off (or, if possible, cancel).
Itâs also more realistic. People are gonna care if you spend a million or a billion but they arenât really gonna care much if youâre spending one billion or two billion. Those numbers just simply donât mean anything to people!
Yes, it would be great to see the positive aspects of bureaucracy reflected. By the way, shouldnât bureaucracy reduce unemployment, 'cause of all those administrators?
Certainly, all policies should add to bureaucracy, not just tax policy. It would certainly be more realistic and also help cut bureaucracy without cutting important social spending programs or running up enormous amounts of debt and deficit which this game punishes quite severely (including no less withdrawing the welfare state). This really gets us stuck in a lose-lose situation. Cliffski can we hack your game to make the Kobiyashi Maru easier?
