Bugs and suggestions from first impression

Democracy 3 General Discussion
1

First as a veteran of D2 i have to say i really like the improvements to the interface and ministers. Great work.

So far i have only played the UK and i too found the game easy, however this may be due to the fact i used the same principles in D2, solving crime then strengthening GDP from the off.

I’m playing on a mac and encountered the bug where if you click on implementation tab and there are no policies to implement the game crashes (this happened for Welfare). I also managed to get 100% retired.

I remember there being a spreadsheet file for D2, this was very useful as it told me at a glance the political capital of changing each of the policies and their effect. However ideally this shouldn’t be necessary, would it be possible to display the costs of each of the policies around the circle? another suggestion would be to have a filter option to filter out the policies you cannot afford. however this would be less useful because you would not be able to tell at a glance if you could enact multiple policies with your political capital.

The final suggestion and possibly the best is to make another tab on the top right of the screen listing all the policies and giving their political capital costs for enacting, raising, lowering and cancelling. This could be sorted ascending/descending and maybe give a brief summery of what the policy does by showing the groups it affects in a green/up arrow column and red/down arrow column. Essentially the spreadsheet information displayed directly in the game. This would also counter my final quibble which is you cannot see who the unimplemented policies affect. Additionally you could show the sliders in this new list view tab, and alter them from here for even greater ease.

Finally the time it takes for the “affecting web” to come up after mousing over a policy circle is too slow, there should be a time delay slider in the options.

Overall a great game and had a lot of fun with it.

2

Also i have noticed if you use drones and don’t put the spending to the very max you increase violent crime?

And Socialist don’t seem to like you spending of technology colleges? i guess there might be a perception of funding elite skills and public money could be better spent elsewhere but it does seem a little odd

3

Oops that drone thing is a bug, I’ll get that fixed right now… Yeah, the technology colleges thing one is a bit weird maybe, I figure that selecting some students to give them specialist education and better job prospects is a bit divisive? It maybe should be represented in a separate ‘education policy’ choice instead?

4

I think in the UK tech college type schools are disliked by socialist because they’re all pretty much Free Schools set up by businesses, like the JCB school. This means it’s seen as a form of privatisation of the education sector. Not sure if this is really what is described in the game policy though, so not sure it applies? It still feels somewhat capitalist inspired, because the focus is on skills for jobs specifically, not on learning for personal improvement. The coalition has definitely come under fire for that kind of thinking from the left.

  • El