You know, even without restrictions on the working week, people won’t just work endlessly if they’re not forced to. As income-per-hour would rise, the work week would tend to fall. This effect is true (if not as powerful) even when working weeks are limited. To go to an extreme, a wealthy individual drawing down several thousand an hour isn’t necessarily going to work even 30 hours a week if his marginal valuation of the money has fallen enough. On less of an extreme, a middle-income individual who wants more time to spend with their family may, as long as they’re paying the bills comfortably, try to negotiate shorter working hours with their employer.
Stress epidemics would be limited by people’s ambitions or desperations. Ambitious people would stress themselves by voluntarily working long hours. Desperate people would stress themselves by involuntarily doing the same. Raising the earnings levels would reduce both of these urges, especially the desperation one.
In game terms, high levels of earnings would reduce the working week, while low levels would increase it. The effect would be most significant at the middle-income levels.
A social interaction statistic would complement your lifespan, air quality and literacy statistics and advance the game. Policies like traditional neighourhoods, community policing, internet access, literacy, equality, marriage allowance, banning sunday shopping, devolution and co-determination could increase social interaction, while organised crime, racial tension, technology colleges, pollution,unemployment, traffic congestion and gridlock could decrease it. A positive social interaction statistic could increase productivity.
Some policy that reduces tax evasion would be nice. Perhaps in the wake of the MP’s expenses scandal there could be some feature relating to corruption or ministers embezzlement? And public protests and how you deal with them.
I think someone modded a policy that acted as a clamp-down on tax evasion. I guess there could be a number of different policies depending ion how it was targeted.
Ideally, if I was not ever concerned with over-complexity, the game would model tax evasion for each individual tax, and by each social group. So it might be that depending on circumstances, corporation tax evasion was high, but income tax evasion low, in which case a clamp down there would be popular with trade unionists and socialists and upset the self employed and capitalists etc…
This is actually probably all entirely moddable, although it would be a bit fiddly onscreen.
More emphasis on foreign policy would also be nice, such as wars and interaction between other countries and their regimes. Declarations of war, forging alliances, trade and joining multi-national organisations, like NATO or the EU or Muslim league. you could opt for an isolationalist policy or interventionist, and try to support revolutions and spread your regime.
The game could have two interfaces; world and domestic to correspond to foreign and domestic policy. other nations may also declare war on you if your regime appeared to tyrannical, such as if you start developing nuclear weapons whilst appearing hostile to another nation, or you introduce extreme policies like mass deportation or media censorship.
You could direct your foreign aid to specific nations, to support other regimes in exchange for trade, or join a UN mission. one objective for the game could be to get your nation onto the UN security council.
I think a more complex representation of the political system that is a prerequisite for the individual actions would be a welcome.
If political capital was not generated only by the loyality of ministers, but from the MPs in an assembly consisting of an arbitrarily set number of people, where each MP can belong to one or more voter groups. Parties can also be simulated, representing voter groups, with new ones being able to be formed during a term, if no current party represents the interrests of e.g. the patriots, or does not realize its election pledges. It can be measured in other ways, for example the way which measures how much high-capital actions are made which favour voter groups.
I think a new parliamentary section can be added to the game, with the possibility of getting impeached or winning support for actions from MPs which also have sympathies and parties, and the efficiency or consistency of actions of whom could be measured by both their party and their voters deciding their repeated nomination, or on an MP with what kind of sympathies will be nominated, and after the election, from the other party nominees finally chosen for that seat.
It would greatly increase the excitenment caused by the game.
I have only downloaded and played the demo. I would add two features.
Internatioanl Relations: where independent countries are represented by an iconic figure (prime minister, president, monarch, dictator, etc.), which would act as the only means of influencing that country directly, other than those countries being indirectly influenced by whatever policies you adopt in comparison to their own computer-generated policies.
Out-of-Box Policies: (much harder to implement) There seems to be sufficient research in what affects what in regards to policies. Write up a program that could identify key words, relationships, etc. Players could write their own policies, the program would analyze the write up and interpret the predicted outputs. The more general the policy write up the more widely the predictions could vary in outputs.
As the game stands now, it seems very entertaining, although for a limited duration, depending on the learning curve to master the game. Both suggestions are meant to expand that learning curve while also including ‘intermestic’ policies and avoiding group-think by allowing players to design their own policies. It would then only be a short step to a massive online multi-player world. I doubt the general population is sufficiently interested, but there is probably a hardcore group willing to pay x8 to x10 the normal price.
Have to agree with the post that mentioned giving each country a more unique set of parameters.
I also think that a way for Political Capital to be based on actual policy changes would make it more realistic, or a boost or decline after some great event. I use the game in my High School Government classes (United States) and we were discussing this today. For instance, after 9-11, it was stated that then President George Bush had a lot of political capital that he could have used to move the country in the right direction (in other words, more easily pass policies). Having the political capital tied to ministers (which my students have a hard enough time wrapping their heads around) seems a bit unrealistic. Not sure you have to remove it from them, I get the concept behind having it there, but perhaps some way of modifying it based on actual game play.
Another thought, perhaps a way to incorporate a “Constitution and Bill of Rights” into the game would be to make the ends of some of the sliders (the ones that have Constitutional implications — ie., gun control here in the States), have a greater impact on all or most people in the country. Even people like me who are for gun control are against eliminating guns because of the 2nd Amendment. Can’t think of another way other than this to incorporate some kind of a Constitutional restriction to what the leader does.
Lastly, and I have no idea how you could do this or if this would so complicate the game as to make it painful to play, but is there a way to incorporate some kind of legislature into the game? I know England’s and our system are different, but here the president cannot just introduce policy without the Congress passing the appropriate laws. Perhaps this is hidden in the ministers and political capital aspects of the game, but would be interesting to see this happen.
I have another thought — it has to do with ministers. There should be a way of shifting ministers between jobs without having to fire them. For instance, if you have a bad minister you want to fire, but you have another that would be better in that position, why can’t you fire the bad one, shirt the one you have now, and then hire a new minister for the open spot.
Democracy 2 is very good, but there is so much you could put into Democracy 3. I think idealy we all want a game that’s as true to life as it can be it never going to happen as there will always be something that will be missed and everything is always interconnected. earlyer in this form someone point out that the increase in women working has led to a breakdown of the nuclear family and someone then made they augment it has something to do with religion they are both right and wrong their missing something. “Politics is like an onion you can pick an issue and peel and peel and always find something new” -Bill Clinton. To that end I’m going to put a wish list and why I think the creator should programme core components to a tea and leave the rest up to the player. I think the majority of the work done on this game by the programmer needs to be in its core (which is good) but it needs to be better a lot better.
Make a issue; policy programme for the game, a sub-programme that is easy to use and allows you to create a policy and its effects without the nasty messing around in an excel doc and making icons you should be able to do it all in one programme. There is another reason for this if democracy is going to improve its realism everything will become more interconnected, it will be very difficult for players to make their own polices without messing up the dynamics. Another feature could be an in game policy creator to make policies on the fly this would be balance its self in terms of cost so the player decides what effect they want air quality and the game with automatically put in a negative the policy names would be decided by the player but it would allow for a longer game. To be clear one out of game that allows the player to do whatever they want with a policy without balancing an one in game that balances the policy.
Second the little things make a big difference. For example I tend to have 90+% of my population as parents in 20 years my total pop hasn’t grown! Very annoying. This may technically not be a bug but it should be changed and vice versa. The effects of this would mean a high birth rate leads to higher tax revenue provided there is high employment. Also if you have a NHS the cost would go up or down. All these knock on effects should be incorporated into the game. Another I always end up with the high tech achievement but why does unemployment not go up. Tech always puts people out of work, the create put thousands of dock workers out of work in the 1960s better factories employ less people etc.
War. There should be war in the next game it’s to important not to be included. Battles can be worked out via stats, tech amount of troops attacking defending etc. You should be able to tell you general how to fight the war defensive aggressive balanced (these effect international perception of you). Your forces are built up depending on how you told your minister to focus on your army again the same options as your general. Again there are so many different policies that could go into it but leave that up to the player (in game policy maker) but this is the core to how the war would work.
Resources every nation has resources it needs to import and export. If you have free market economy it happens on its own if not then you have to make sure your nation is self sufficient or you have an agreement with another nation. Another way is having trade slots (like in cybernations) that way it bonuses you get the games not to complex and you don’t have to worry about micromanagement.
A world map and game year. A lot of these changes need to be reflected, how you are going to know the size of your empire… I mean country if you don’t have a nice map showing you your land and the land of other nations to plunder. . . I mean talk to :P. It adds depth and knowing your time line is always good.
I realise I’m going on a bit now and I have loads of policy ideas which is my point everyone will have lots of policies many that will conflict with each other, just like real politics. My point is this Democracy 3’s core system needs to be solid it needs to be able to realise changes to birth rates in overall population over time, and the effects this will have. It needs to know how much food is produced by the country based on tech level and agricultural development and how this effects the populations health, happiness etc. It has to be able to take a random policy that say improves health but raises crime like banning alcohol and how that affects the birth rate and everything else. Of course by doing this the game will become very complex (good) so maybe an option to limit the connectivity. It would b good to make sure that the game takes these changes into account every turn.
I think the nature of the welfare state could do with a change.
In reality welfare states tend to be either large and universalist, or small and means-tested. In the former the welfare state is catch-all, everyone is protected. Take a country like Sweden where if you lose your job the welfare state provides 80% of your earnings for two years. In the Netherlands someone on Disability Benefit used to be able to get 80% of their income for the rest of their life (it is perhaps worth thinking about the effect of this on unemployment too). In a country like the United Kingdom we have a lot of means testing. You can’t get jobseekers allowance unless you prove that you don’t have a large number of assets, liquid or otherwise, for instance. The effect is that the middle classes in the universalist systems are usually far more supportive of it than those in the means tested systems as they benefit directly (this also applies to healthcare systems like the NHS. The British middle classes overwhelmingly support the NHS because they directly benefit, whereas the American middle classes tend to see their interests lying in the current system). Therefore I propose that at a low level welfare payments irritate middle income earners, but, that at a higher level they start to really like them. It should take a while for them to come to support the increased spending though because in real life the middle classes tend to take a little while to come around.
At the same time I would suggest some form of statistic for private forms of healthcare, schooling and pensions. The more comprehensive the welfare state the less of each of these. The less private stuff being used the happier the Socialists, the more private stuff being used the happier the capitalists. I also propose a series of ‘market-driven’ policies. School-vouchers, charity status, subsidies (making pension contributions tax free would be an obvious one), that boost private sector alternatives. I’d like to see the ability to force private sector schools to take a certain number of poorer students for instance. These things should be alternatives to raising public funding, albeit ones that will wind up the socialists.
In response to the previous poster I do not personally believe that war should be included in the game. Democracy is primarily a domestic politics simulator and that is how it should remain in my view. War is too complicated, and shifts far too much attention away from economics and politics for my liking.
I’m a Yank and I loved the Game as soon after the 1st hour of play. Being a Venus Project and a Zeitgeist Movemnet supporter (www.thezeitgeistmovement.com) it would be really cool to have a option to remove a given Monetary System altogether.
I believe the Zeitgeist movement is a socialist movement. I think the best that you can do is bring back the Gold standard, but then inflation wouldn’t be a problem, but deflation would be a big issue when Gold supply is low.
Given that we’re in during the World cup, I propose we work on something on here. I believe that population+passion for the sport is directly propositional to the possibility of having a good team, so it’s dependent on the patriots and population. Look at Uruguay, with a population of just 3 million they manage to have a good team, but their passion for the sport is without equal. I’ve read that they have had public holidays during the important matches so then everyone could watch the games, including schools, banks and most shopping centers, this of course damages the capitalist side of the country, but boosts elsewhere in the economy because most young players in the team will be bought by stronger and higher paying teams in Europe. I’ve also read that some of the prize money will go to developing more youth players. For the host nation it has been a success, their economy must have boosted quite a lot, even though they invested a lot in stadium renovation, after the event they’ll have to find good use for the expansion of some stadiums. We could also have an Olympics staged every 4 years, which would boost the host nation’s economy. Also, these kind of events are good for sponsorships and advertising for big companies like Sony, Puma, Nike etc. and another thing, racial tension tends to drop during these events.
I love Democracy 2, but I believe Democracy 3 should have more capitalist options, like Renaissance of private industrialization. Also, a stock & commodity market, just that a cartel might develop, but then you need further regulation of the market. Oil, minerals, steel and other commodities could be dictating the price of new developments & expansions like roads and stuff, which in turn are prices proportional to inflation, things like that should be thought through and added on, I’m just throwing in my 2 cents.
