Duplicate Effects

Democracy 4 Alpha Feedback
1

I just noticed that the robotics research grant policy shows unemployment being affected twice. Has anyone seen something similar with other policies?

2

There were some that were bugged. Most of them should be caught by now.

However, in that case, it’s not a bug:

  • short term, these grants give rise to new jobs, researching robotics and building and maintaining the robots
  • long term, as robots become more effective and cheaper, they will displace workers whose jobs may be automated away.

If you look at the two, they have different implementation timers.
There are a few spots like this. Another one, for instance, is in prisoner treatment. Harsh treatment short term will reduce crime, but long term, people will fall into a vicious cycle of being put back into the world with nowhere to go, resorting to crime to get by, and being brought back into prison, overall increasing crime over if you focused on prisoner rehabilitation.

If you find a spot where stuff is doubled but implementation times are identical, or if you can’t find a long-term/short-term explanation like that, it’s likely an actual bug.

1 Like
3

It’s looking like the UI is going to need to clarify for players that these instances aren’t bugs.

4

Yeah, people keep bringing it up. Maybe @cliffski could add like a “linked” symbol or something between these bars, reinforcing that this is intentional?
Another possibility, which is higher effort, might be to actually have a graph of the effect when hovering over a bar which, in this case, would accumulate identical bars, showing off the short- and long-term effects together. Simple bars just aren’t cut out for showing such effects.

5

But they have different numbers of turns until they come into effect right? Is that not clear enough?

6

Haha, I have had the ‘show graph of effect on mouseover idea’ secretly in my head for ages. just need to find time to do it :smiley:

7

To be honest, no, not really. Those numbers are very often almost safe to ignore and not particularly clear. People barely glance at them. And even if they do, it’s still not necessarily clear that these duplicate stats are entirely intentional, unless being explicitly told so.

8

There’s also a duplicate effect on Crime by Prison Regime. Intentional or not?