In Italy, I won 4 elections, I was in my 87th turn: GDP at max. levels, and I just starting to think I finally succeded in generating regular surpluses without endangering election results.
And BOOM, the game dropped my credit rate, erasing surpluses, creating deficits. How? I have surplus? GDP is very high and my budget has never been better than this, and my score gets downgraded?
I was okay with things like global economy getting crashed before every election but what is this? Very disappointed.
Yes, this is potentially a late-game balance issue which needs to be resolved. Or alternatively a gameplay motivation in the game coded in to encourage surplus, which turned out to be too strong, either way, or any other way, this is a balance issue that needs to be resolved.
Who would punish surplus to encourage surplus. Other forum members or Cliff will need more info on this matter to understand how it happened. I’d recommend the original post writer to upload a screenshot of financial charts.
As far as I know there are at least 3 factors influencing credit ratings - Debt to GDP, Revenue-Spending Gap, and Stability. So it is technically possible to fail to convince the international creditors that your liabilities are sustainable even with slight budget surplus. Other possibility would be a rise in Debt/GDP because of a small fall in GDP. Nonetheless, there’s still a chance this is a bug so upload a screenshot.
There is also the influence of monetary policies such as helicopter money and quantitative easing, although if this is italy that would not have been an option. I would love to see a save game showing this.
I am currently working on code that should improve late game balance to ensure 2nd and 3rd terms etc provide more of a challenge. Currently the game skews too easy for terms 2,3 and beyond, and I’m still improving it.
Paradoxible had earlier pointed out the survivorship bias. The people making it to the 2nd and 3rd terms might be the better players from each previous term. So, making the 2nd and 3rd terms more difficult should probably coincide with making the first term easier?
This depends on how in-depth your statistics are, if they’re not in-depth enough, you could send out a survey to each player to collect this data.
I think it’s about Debt/GDP ratio. GDP fell rapidly in the last quarter, because of crashing world economy to very low levels, I realised that after posting this/reading replies. GDP is back to where it was after 2 turns and credit score is upgraded now.
I was just feeling really good about my game, it was frustrating to see that downgraded cs.