Just for fun last night I decided to start my game off with eliminating all the taxes I could and dropping those I couldn’t eliminate to as low as I could. Then I started giving everyone exactly what they wanted regardless of the cost. My debt of course climbs without pause and I do get that one warning that there is a debt crisis but beyond that there is no drawback. I continued like this for many election periods gaining 100% of the votes. There was never a consequence for this obviously flawed method of running the government.
Although it was somewhat funny it was also a bit disappointing. I generally had focused a lot on controlling debt in the past only to find that it is inconsequential. There should be a more serious penalty for going beyond a certain level of debt.
It does make balancing the books somewhat pointless when there’s no penalty for not even trying to stabilize the country’s financies. Immediate removal from office would be a good starting point.
well it does not make the game ‘pointless’, after all, all games are effectively pointless, unless you are waging a bet on them , If it annoys you that you can have a government debt, then just play the game ensuring you do not have it. There is no automatic penalty for it in the original game, but there’s nothing to stop you setting it as your own objective. A game as complex as Democracy can never be perfectly balanced, there are just far too many possible permutations.
A big apology, sorry if i have offended you Cliff. I like all the games you have created and i appreciate all the hard work you have put into them. Once i get this damn 10 years too late Maths GCSE out of the way and get into learning games programming in (yikes!!) C++ i will appreciate your work even more when i’m stuck trying to fathom out how to put a decent function together a quarter as good as yours.
No its cool, its a fair criticism, the problem is that there doesn’t actually seem to be much evidence of the deficit causing problems in the real world, the US just voted to increase the debt ceiling yet again, so who knows where it will end?
Apparently having a budget surplus can cause problems, because the banks lend to the government in order to get a secure and guaranteed payback. Without that lending they don’t have the same amount of security anymore. This is why defaulting on debt (something for the new game?) is such a dangerous thing for a government - it destroys all that trust and makes banks far less likely to lend their money.
Will you be putting a deficit ceiling option into Democracy 2? Or maybe it could be a manifesto promise to reduce national debt. The option to invest surplus funds to gain interest so the government can spend more money would be nice.
the manifesto promise is a very good idea, one I had not thought of. Maybe an optional game-over if the debt hits a certain level would be good too. Cheers.
I suppose anyone who wanted to build something like that into Democracy 1 could just mod a situation or maybe an event for it. Something like “your currency collapses and china forecloses on your country: 80 everyone sad faces”
In truth, I never noticed, because I never let myself have a large debt. Energy wealth ensures that our country stays afloat, along with good taxes, of course… I do agree that most games are pointless, but that’s part of the fun. The folks who made this put so much effort into it, and the debt ceiling doesn’t seem like a problem when you realize many leaders in world today just pretend it doesn’t matter anyhow, hah.