I just gave the thought that Democracy was fundamentally made easier because when choosing the budget to give to a policy, you can basically see pretty accuratly how it will change what.
Maybe there should be a game option to get the game “blinded”, so that all these nice colorfull barres would dissapear. That way, you don’t end up massively investing in drugs because you saw it would allow to get the gang crime down, before discarding it because you can see the threat is not likely to come back… or you don’t put the “youth house” to the max when you see that it only has positive effects.
Of course, this option would be cool if it came with a slight randomisation of the effects of the policies, so that when starting a game you would basically not know to which extend what works… and then you have to do like a real government, that is trying things that should do “x” and finding out if it doesn’t end up doing “y” instead, by monitoring your country.
Of course I don’t know to which extend this can be added to the game, but to my point of view it would offer a bit of added lifetime to the game for those who already know which policy to set when at what budget. Surprise is the spice 8)
I think you have something there. It’s certainly something I have considered. it might be worth having a system where the effects had some 'fuzziness, where it would show the effect with a ±25% margin or error, so you got a rough idea what the effect was, but could not see it exactly. What does everyone else think?
It’s certainly the case that even governments find it very hard to tell the exact effects of a policy.
I think you could simply add an additional option slider to the game, like the Cynicism or Difficulty sliders etc. - Randomize Policy Effects .- with percentage values like 10,5,50 percent etc.
The engine would then randomly add or substract some amount to each of the policy effects when implemented,or changed,based on the general base effects written in the csv file.
For example an effect adding 0.25 to Conservatives would have a random modifier of +0.05 to -0.05 to the effect when the slider is set to 10%.
The modifier could be applied randomly anew each time the policy is changed in any way, to represent the unforseen complications and countless variants in the way the policy may be implemented.
Eeeek My brain gnashes slightly just thinking about this. It sounds simple in theory 9and it is), but the code that applies this stuff is already horrendous. Plus the saved game needs to store out the current fuzziness fo every effect. And presumably just for policy effects too.
I am tempted to give it a try though, as i think it would add realism to the game.
Who would use this option?
Well I’d certainly like to add this, although it would definitely have to be a beta-tested thing for a while before it went ‘live’. It’s a matter of allocating time to do this rather than work on another game, always a balancing act of staying in business
I’m imagining it as either a ‘fuzzy’ bar chart that has no precise value, or maybe one that oscilates up and down like they do on all those screens in star trek
Or maybe just a higher and lower limit shown for each effect.
