Democracy 2- Suggestions and Ideas

Democracy 1 & 2 Democracy 1
1

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Democracy is a great game. We all know that. Its alsoa leader in its field.However, Democracy two, right now, seems the same game, updated a bit. This needs to change.

Democracy 2 needs multiple countries, with multiple difficuly levels and multiple scenarios. Upon readin the diary, it seems that when I buy this game I will become leader of a virtual country. I will not have a choice of country. A choice of country is required, alongside a mini-explanation of what goes on at the start of my country. The possibility of a dificulty level and other information is there too.

A world map with countries will be helpful, possibly randomised country names and relative status internationally and nationally. However, large and small countries will have differant things to do- large countries will be harder to run efficiently, small countries will be more susceptable to change and have (usually) less resources.

On the subject of resources, each country could have a more detailed budget, listing resource prices (moving accordingly), and percentage of world resource found within your borders, and those needed for import.

Infrastucture should be allowed to be built. SO if you choose to build a ‘National Rail Service’, you lose money over time, but make most voters more hapy, create jobs, make motorists unhappy etc. Options could include dams, highways, ports, large factories etc.

Alongside this, diplomacy (help with natural disasters, help with monetary difficulties) could be implemented.

Countries should be able to recieve news from each other, including natural disasters (probability depending on location, V. Low), assassinations, war (?) etc. and act upon them (cancelling imports/exports, providing assistance) and these actions should have an effect on voters.

Country Info Example:

This could implement currency economics, large scale businesses ad their effect on economy and voters, war, imports/exports and their relative effects.

Just some ideas that need to be bounced around. Hopefullly it made some sense.

P.S why do you use BMT Micro Orders? They take forever.

2

Very interesting. I’m currently examining the simulation stuff and trying to select the best places to improve. The structure of Democracy is hugely complex, and its tricky to decide where to add stuff, and where to leave it abstracted.

I intend for there to be customisable countries, and also preset countries with interesting initial setups.

I originally used reg soft, then Regnow, then Plimus, now BMT. Of the 4, BMT seem to have better customer service, which is why I use them. Sometimes, fraud checking can slow down an order though ;(

ideas and thoughts on Democracy 2 are always very very welcome.

3

I think Democracy 2 has a slight identity crisis. It could either be a game where you manage people (a social game,) or a game where you manage finance. My personal preference is for the former. I’d like to see more political maneuvering, sometimes in spite of what the country is doing financially.

For example, I’d like to see an Opposition party. Say you raise income tax, the Opposition might make a statement saying how outrageous it is for the government to take advantage of hard working middle income earners. Your popularity with those voters will go down, and they might even start supporting the Opposition if you can’t justify the tax increase.

You said that portfolios will have ministers, and this adds the potential for a lot of dirty politics. Travel rorts, undeclared shares, conflicts of interest, personal scandal - on both sides of politics too. I’d like to feel like I’m in a real fight to be elected for the next term, rather than the passive way that Democracy seems to play out now.

I’d also like a “victory” screen (or an ego screen, I guess you could call it,) once you’re out of office. A summary of how long you were in power, what policy changes you affected, whether you just scammed your way through power or whether you made the country a better place. You could store it in a Hall Of Fame for later reference.

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I was playing Democracy and i thought the way new events is displayed could be altered to appear at the beginning of the turn in the form of a newspaper headline. It would save clicking the new event button every turn and you would get a sense of national annoyance or celebration depending on the event. For example, a headline and then a short description of the event followed by who it has affected just like in Democracy.

Basically what you are describing is the original Democracy. You pick a country, you change the difficulty in the options menu and each country has different problems which in essence are like scenarios.

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Is it possible to make some international leaders act like ministers, where there would be a effect if you make them happy or not?

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the current new version of he game has that quarterly briefing window as a full screen window you can always return to, and it has the dilemmas and events (as well as the old icons remaining above the people data). I thought about newspaper headlines, I’m undecided, it is a bit of a sim-game cliche.

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Have you ever played Superpower? After every turn there would be a newspaper that was divided by things like tax, the military, etc… I thought it was really cool.

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I don’t think newspapers are particularly cliche, I think in fact they’re quite cool.

Especially if there were several newspapers which didn’t always agree. And what they print could be affected by what censorship your government imposes.

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The quarterly briefing sounds like a better idea than the newspaper for reports. If you decide to go ahead with adding a newspaper, maybe it could be used for opinion of your government rather than reports. A tabloid paper could be used to represent the opinion of lower earners and a broadsheet newspaper to show the opinion of higher earners not that i am implying all low earners read tabloids.

In Democracy, i found that i could reduce a voter group to zero yet the program still treated the group as active. For example, i reduced poor people to zero so in effect the value of equality should change to reflect the lack of poor people. Will Democracy 2 update on this feature and alter values accordingly due to the changes in voter groups?

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Or even better, it shouldn’t be that easy to reduce a faction to zero, except possibly for the Poor. At least it shouldn’t be easy.

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Perhaps there should be a limit as to how low certain policies will reduce groups to. For example, religious persecution will not entirely eliminate the religious because they’ll simply go into hiding. Maybe policies should reduce group size by percentages. That might work better.

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this should be fixed in D2, because now, individual voters have different ‘levels’ of membership, so you will have religious fanatics who are all but impossible to sway, for example.

13

I have just bought Democracy and I like the concept. Just a couple of things I noticed on playing the UK a couple of times. The military budget is just absurdly high at $17 billion a month and around 25% of total spending. In real life UK defence spending is around 5% of total spending (2-3% of GDP).
Also the economy just seems to grow or contract at unrealistic levels - for example I have seen the economy grow 10% in one go and another time it dropped 16.67% - this would not happen in an advanced nation (unless the world was going over a cliff!)
I have read that there are two areas for deeper, more realistic gameplay - the economic side and the politicial/social side. I would say both need to be worked upon because tunning a country requires both. Hopefully you will be able to improve the realistic nature of the economy (spending, tax levels etc), build in some more detail for things to change on the economy and then incorporate the political ideas people have mentioned.

I found this via a link on 80soft - their President game is very realistic, it would be great to have a game like that for governing (rather than just election campaigns).
FYI - I bought this through the BMT people (forgotten their exact name) - it was quick as easy.

Keep up the good work.

14

I think trying to model existing countries was a mistake. I should have done what Democracy 2 does, and stick with theoretical virtual countries. Hopefully you will find the sequels simulation model more accurate.

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I didn’t think so, but then, I never assumed you were representing “real” countries. How could you be doing so, given the thousands of factors required to provide an accurate simulation? You were giving us a strategy game with different scenarios, modeled after different existing nations, in general terms. That worked well for me, though I can see why it might confuse some people into expecting what wasn’t delivered.

Sounds intriguing. Hopefully, each nation will have its own background that’s constant from game to game–unless we use a new game option to scramble these factors.

Just a thought.

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At the moment the new game screen is pretty bare, it just lets you change the number of people in some of the groups (like motorists, religious and environmentalists) using sliders. I’m hoping to include a lot more stuff than that, and have some of the more personal and entertaining stuff like you get in Nation States.
Picking a flag might be cool (although the new game has no flag backdrop), a currency, and country name etc etc.

17

Would players be able to draw custom flags and save them in a flags directory for use within the game? Art is not my thing, i would just use the flags with the game but other players might want to add extra flags as mods.

18

that would be cool, not sure where I can put flags in the game right now.

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You could display the flag as a background on the quarterly briefing screen or if not as a background then maybe an icon. Maybe you could have a flag display policy/dilemma. Who would agree/disagree with flying the national emblem?

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I came up with an idea for Income Tax policy.
The Income Tax policy could have three sliders instead of one.
One slider for each of the classes, Wealthy, Middle Income and Poor. You could then tax each class at different levels using a multiple slider system. Other policies could have the same system if they need additional sliders for further options. I don’t know if it is viable to program such a change into the simulation at the current stage because of the requirements for new variables.