I know that many countries have certain aspects that are hardcoded into the game; some countries deal with more congestion, some have worse race-relations, some have unique features like the Northwest Passage or Royal Family. I wonder if presenting a country’s “Constitution” can do something similar with specific policies.
I envision a screen that shows the country’s “Constitution” at the start; this is a list of certain policies that have their PC cost and effects amplified. For example, I imagine it should be far harder to affect change on gun laws in the USA, where the Second Amendment exists and it is thus a political talking point, compared to a hypothetical Bahamas, where no such right exists.
Other benefits here are that it’ll help inform the player, both in a gameplay sense of “here’s some policies that are harder to deal with” and in a general trivia sense.
I then wonder if it could be possible to give the player some method to affect a law’s constitutionality. Perhaps they could remove the USA’s right to bear arms, thus lowering the cost and effects of altering gun laws, but pass healthcare as a human right? Passing or repealing a policy’s constitutionality would be difficult, but would amplify a policy’s effects. There could also be a negative event, “Rights Infringed” that comes with a general negative modifier.
Very interesting post, thanks for the ideas. Yes its true that we could probably customize things a bit better tin terms of political capital here, and its probably quite easy to do actually.
The ones that really stick out for me are gay rights and stem cells. Neither is really any kind of issue whatsoever in my country (UK) where every party is pro stem cell research and pro-gay rights (It was actually the right wing conservative government that introduced it). Obviously in the USA this is super different…
I will make a note to look into this…
Term limits are another one which would probably be more difficult to change than this game represents. The bit I find particularly odd is that there is less resistance to extending the term limit than the term length. If for example I extend American terms to 5 years, that brings my time in office up to 10 years, but a 3rd term brings me to 12. The term limit only costs me 34 pc while the term length costs 35.
I think thats fair though. Extending term limits just means that we do not artificially stop the sae person continuing to win elections if the electorate want to be governed by them. Extending term lengths, especially considering it affects the current term, is a way of putting off the next election, and denying the electorate the vote they were expecting.
If you dislike the current government, but at least cling to the hope you can vote them out in 2 years time, them changing the law to make that 3 years is going to be VERY unpopular with you
This is a very fundamental difference between presidential and parliamentary systems. In a presidential system removing term limits is basically jumping up and down while screaming “I want to make myself dictator!” while changing term length is a fairly minor procedural note, while as you say, it’s the reverse in parliamentary systems.
That line is kinda blurring though. The UK has a parliamentary system, but some of our prime ministers have definitely started trending towards presidential attitudes and actions.
We could add into this, as I mentioned in one of the topics I posted, that lowering the independence of judiciary, should lower the cost of implementing policy changes and new policies across the board. To balance this, we could make the opposition and the judiciary a thorn in the side of the player?
