Educational, but too easy

Democracy 3 General Discussion
1

Good job on the game. I haven’t played any of the previous titles, but I’ve bought Democracy 3 on launch day because I’ve always wanted to have a complex political sim in my library.
It’s a very educational experience, the user interface is spot on, and the various statistics & data are informative. Great work there!

One thing I found lacking, after having done 5 runs (all being max. 2 year terms), is that there’s not much of a challenge - it’s too easy to succeed with any given country!
I’ve played through France on 200% difficulty, and maybe I just got lucky but it wasn’t that harder than completing the US on 100% diff., with 96% approval, GDP health crime poverty etc. all the vital indicators maxed out (green).

Having said that, I believe the way to increase difficulty and provide a real challenge would be to come up with more random events that really do affect your country, and also introduce some kind of a “mission system” - goals that for one reason or another are vital to succeeding in your term. I’m not sure this can’t be covered by modding the game, but I’m no means an expert on this.

Perhaps playing North Korea somehow, where the public, after having been brainwashed for decades is “expecting you” to launch a space program for the glory of the People, however impoverished your country might be. In this case though, you wouldn’t really have to contend for votes, rather maybe just having to keep other nations from going to war with you.

War, for example is completely missing.

Interaction with other countries, like trading, energy exchange, shared borders, military union, etc. would be a great feature, though requiring more development I assume.

Anyway I’m happy I’ve bought Democracy 3, and have found the educational value to be very high!

2

First off, love the game, I can’t get enough of it. Very fun and very detailed.

Second, if you found this game easy, you must have a knack for sims. I do not find this game easy or simple. I could see that large drastic changes do not typically work and that in some cases you are trying to get to a balance point with some of the issues that come up.

I agree with you that some “scenarios” would be welcome, I really like the North Korea idea or even China.

I would like to see if there is some way to link up say 4 to 8 countries in multiplayer so that there is a real Global Economy and interaction between policies in one country to the rest. As well as some way to simulate conflicts like War or specific actions like “Send troops here” or “Attempt Assassination of Dictator” or ways to have secret government actions that are not public be going on that can get exposed like Wikileaks or under cover reporting.

3

I love the sound of this, while I’m not much for waging war myself maybe sometimes it’d be fun to do some of those things or at the very least have to deal with invasion or world war or any kind of issue like that. How does your country react? How does it survive or die? Those options sound interesting, too.

4

I say we organize & get WAR introduced! :slight_smile:

Seriously, just doing Australia on 200% and after the second term it’s like you have everything laid out for you. The public can now be molded into any sort of wacko, militaristic, religiously anxious trigger-happy brain drained ultra conservative dysfunctional mess, with a GDP topping that of China’s!
After your initial 2 terms, you’ve pretty much reached policy utopia.

And here’s an idea: how about the better your country stands, the more likely that some of your poor, wacko, militaristic, religiously anxious trigger-happy brain drained ultra conservative dysfunctional neighbours start landgrabbing! You’d suddenly have to bolster your military, tariffs set against you would nil out the economy, etc. etc. etc… This would be phase 2 in any prime country’s start-up life.