Concept Suggestion: Multi-Stage Dilemmas

Democracy 4
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Why not add to my list of unreasonable suggestions from a coding point of view.

I think it’d be a cool addition to the game if there were multi-part dilemmas. So instead of simply receiving the notification “Diplomatic Immunity: foreigners now hate you”, you’d get to issue a response, do you stand by the diplomat, do you offer justice, or do nothing, and then a second part would come based on your actions, and grant a greater impact than the first stage.

Equally, this would potentially allow for things like diplomatic conflicts. When the dilemma to send troops to defend oil sources comes, it could be followed up (if you choose to send forces) by you receiving a trade embargo, which harms your trade and investment, or perhaps your forces encounter heavy resistance, and you have to commit more money to your military spending or risk the shame of defeat.

Even greater is that this could act as the grounds for a simple war system. A simple set of two or three choices, with differing chances of success based on your strengths and weaknesses in various areas (GDP, Military Spending, Racial Tension), and additional options thanks to policies you have implemented (Drone Strikes Act, Leniant Refugee Policy), which then pushes the war closer to defeat or victory. With victory, you gain whatever the war was about, perhaps receive an income source of reparations temporarily, and, Everyone, Patriot, Conservative, Strong Leader boosts. Whereas in defeat you lose all of those factors, and maybe a policy or two gets a Manifesto Style “target” on it that you have to meet and hold for X Turns, where if you break it you will start a new chain of war events, and lose Trustworthy.

To me, all of these suggestions seem simple so long as the multi-stage dilemmas matter is possible. The war idea becomes very easy to do from there, in my totally uninformed standpoint.

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This is such a cool concept! I’m not sure if the war idea fits in this game, altho I suppose that boils down to people wanting different things from the game. I love the idea that my choices can cascade into different outcomes; kinda reminds me of Paradox games and their character choices.

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I guess Cliff could investigate multi-stage dilemmas, but it would add a lot of complexity to the game. As for war, Cliff has expressed earlier that D4’s mechanics and gameplay style as basically a government sim are not designed around war. But Cliff can be more clear about this.

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@cliffski Bumping!

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So, technically right now, you can mod in a branched path of dilemmas by using grudges for example

Dilemma 1
Option 1: Create negative Grudge Against Dilemma 1, Create positive Grudge for Dilemma 2
Option 2: Create negative Grudge Against Dilemma 1, Create positive Grudge for Dilemma 3

Then in three turns, if Option 1 then Dilemma 2 but if Option 2 then Dilemma 3.
The only thing that isn’t possible is to have branching dilemmas on the same turn.

One thing I would LOVE to see, however, is the ability to use equations or to add some RNG to the effects so that even if you choose the same option you may not get the exact same result (and maybe even a negative result?) it also means that we could create more dynamic dilemma paths.

Cheers,
Asla

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Yeah I remember seeing such in some D3 mods. So it should be possible to do the same in D4 and it might be possible to find some examples from the D3 workshop.

I hope to see events & dilemmas getting some expansion in the future either by mods or updates. :smiley: It would be nice to have more of them not just for flavour but also for immersion & replayability. Some well-placed & explained dilemma choices with RNG results could improve replay value IMO. And I personally want to see ones with specific policy-mix requirements. Such dilemmas (or events) can enhance immersion by giving a sense of responsiveness.

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Sorry to necro this, but I think I found a seemingly feasible way of implementing pseudo-RNG results for dilemma choices by modding.

The trick is adding the 1 ~ 3 more of the same dilemma but with different outcomes. Let’s see an example.

  1. add ‘BanLivestockImports2’ dilemma with the same conditions
  2. write a new grudge for option0 CreateGrudge(FoodPrice,0.15,0.9); (and you can consider strengthening farmer disapproval)
  3. add something like CreateGrudge(BanLivestockImports,-2.0,0.95); (intensity & decay definitely needs fine tuning :/) to both options so that the original BanLivestockImports won’t be triggered in reasonable turns
  4. add overrides from BanLivestockImports options to BanLivestockImports2, preventing the latter being triggered ‘for reasonable turns’ after the trigger of the former
  5. now you can’t discern whether you are seeing BanLivestockImports or BanLivestockImports2 until you choose an option

crucial points would be 1) preventing the flip-side version of a triggered dilemma from appearing in 32 turns and 2) ensuring both of them to have similar probability of getting triggered after that 32 turns. the latter might be possible by applying the same grudges to influences of all duplicate versions of a dilemma I guess. and, most importantly, players can just choose to cheat dilemma results by loading the recent save since RNG is fixed at the point of turn initialization.

of course it would be nice if RNG results for dilemma choices can be officially supported by the point of Situation Room DLC later. but it seems to be possible with existing modding tools.

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