In D3 I found that I could easily win landslide elections after just one term of office, then I would just consistently get 100% of the vote with 0% voter apathy. I think that the opposition parties should always maintain a presence and criticise some of your policy decisions. Under the British democratic system, no party in recent history has ever got more than 55% of the vote, so it just feels like I am completely democratically unaccountable in the late game.
I tried turning up the difficulty, but that just seems to start you off with a much higher deficit and lower political capital.
I was also excited to play around with the coalition mechanic in D4 but getting an unrealistic landslide one way or another just means I never get to that point.
@cliffski could fix that using logistic function, or by normalizing happiness/opinion impact.
Logistic function would scale sum of happiness opinions in such way, that extremes are very hard to reach and middle is almost linear.
Normalizing would be sum of happiness (in case of voter: membership * opinion) divided by sum of absolute values of happiness (in case of voter: membership * opinion).
If sum is 0, then use default value (if scaled between -1 to 1, then it would be 0).
Voter group normalized/“logisticized” happiness could be then adjusted by complacency and cynicism.
This way voter groups and voters approval could be in 30 - 70% for example, and rarely going beyond that range if almost nothing annoys/excites voters and voter groups.
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Experimenting with this is on my todo list. I need to make sure it doesnt break absolutely everything first, so its likely not in 1.07 but in 1.08.
I probably need a really weak application of it, so it retains most of the current model, but just skews the very top and bottom ranges.
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So it would add almost linearly between 20% - 80% (or entire yellow range) and then getting closer to 0% or 100% would be harder and harder.
Adjusted voter group happiness (without complacency/cynicism) + cynicism + complacency also would be good change - those things would affect voter group happiness equally hard no matter how many stuff affects them.
Motorists for example very easily crash to 0% happiness in my games - gridlock situation seems to be too strong and quick.
Honestly gridlock is a bit of a weird problem because technically that’s mostly not gonna be a concern of the whole state in most places. I mean it’s possible they build absurdly bad highways causing this to happen there, but usually it’s cities that have to deal with this. Cities usually have to fund their own infrastructure efforts. So it’s kind of a local government issue and it will not uniformly affect the entire country.
I guess it’d depend on how centralized the government is. It’s also weird in the other direction: The US is treated as one nation from the outside, and as far as the outside is concerned, that’s probably true enough. But in reality it’s fifty states with fifty sets of laws that just happen to share one common backbone. That backbone is perhaps more deeply embedded than what happens with the EU and its members, but nevertheless, you can cross state borders and end up with vastly different rules.
I suppose it’d be hard to model those different layers from federal or even international down to local in a way that’s not weird.