Developer Blog #30: Spain!

This video talks about Spain, borderless window mode, changes to cynicism data, education rebalancing and lots more. Hope ya like it.

4 Likes

I’m glad to see more lag time added to education related policies, this will help improve the realism of the game. I hope this becomes a trend for other things which change to quickly :slight_smile:

What else do you think changes too rapidly?

Health. I would definitely pick health as the next tallest peg for something that changes too quickly. Regardless of starting conditions, I can always have health maxed out before my first term is up, and I do it without touching health care spending. I end up in a situation which is strange to imagine where I have the healthiest population ever, with overcrowded hospitals and the doctors are on strike. (Side note: overcrowded hospitals might be something that the doctors are striking about. Perhaps a link should be added there?)

Next in line would be crime. I think Germany has the most difficult crime situation to start, but I can fix all of the crime in all of Germany before my first term is up.

3rd, the environment reacts to the GDP too quickly. If I stop polluting, it should still take time for the environment to heal. The reverse is also true, I’ll have the environment cleaned up nicely, then get blind sided by the pollution crisis because the global GDP spiked upward.

I’ll stop at 3, thanks for the reply, and for taking the time to read this.

2 Likes

Carbon Levels reduction as well. They are too easy to deal with.

Thanks for the feedback!

This all does run headlong into one of the big issues of the democracy series: the difference between a game about politics and a game about governance. There’s a tradeoff between how long policy effects would realistically take, and how long policy effects have to take to allow big meaningful changes to occur during one government/administration. Especially a term limited one.

I used to think that some of these were too quick, but COVID changed my mind. We saw how when major action is taken, like shutting down cities, the impact on carbon were immediate. Skies cleared very quickly.

Similarly, education and health, when very well funded, are quick. If I get better food and a check up tomorrow even after years of neglect, I’m vastly better off.

Perhaps these could scale better… taking very high levels of funding for quicker and quicker/stronger impacts. But this all makes sense to me.

Actually, CO2 emissions only dropped by 7 % in 2020. Indeed, global concentration increased.

And if we talk about the impact, atmospheric temperatures (and so the impacts associated with climate change) wouldn’t drop significantly for at least 1,000 years, even if we shutted off all emissions right now.
The clearance of skies is associated not with CO2 but with photochemical smog, caused by other pollutants like NOx and volatile organic compounds.
I think getting to zero net CO2 emissions will take, for european countries, at least three decades.

7% is actually quite a bit, and that wasn’t the focus of the effort. So maybe it could take a while, but the actions in game could take us there. I think what’s really the problem is that it dosen’t take that much political capital to make such transformational changes.

Maybe some issues like banning coal could also incur some major one-time costs, like the private industries incur, to highlight the need to buy out businesses and pay off workers and other up-front costs.