A EU mod just spawned on the steam workshop. I highly recommend NOT to download it. It is full of errors and approximations. The author claims to be pro-european and making the mod with a UKIP supporter friend to make it more unbiased. Combining opposites doesn’t really make for a neutral or balanced approach as you probably know. The mod also makes a huge deal of Churchill being the founder of the EU and so forth. There’s also a lot of idiotic ideas like ethnic minorities loving EU military or EU membership… As a political student finishing its master’s degree, the whole thing made my head hurt.
I criticized the mod on the workshop, got blocked in mid-argument and the maker deleted the whole debate. Talk about being open to criticisism (I guess he played too much of Extremism =D)… It wouldn’t have mattered if this mod wasn’t the only one offering a Democracy 3 inclusion of the EU (along with the Austria mod).
However, on a more constructive note, it made me realize how much Democracy 3 could benefit from an in depth mod on european issues. EU relations, Common agricultural, cohesion funds, common immigration policies, schengen and so on. All could provide a very interesting approach if well-made.
European policies from the EP or the commission could be integrated through tricking the situation bubbles. I also noticed a mod being able to implement a seventh policy section (see Martial Law on the workshop). It could prove interesting.
Are other people interested in the idea?
The new “EU mod” that appeared on steam workshop yesterday is a bit silly with the Winston Churchill stuff yes.
It would be interesting if the Democracy 3 modding community could produce some accurately functioning European Union wide policy but I fear most of the policy is too difficult to implement in the Democracy 3 simulation. Real EU policy would probably need a big overhaul of the whole simulation system.
Maybe Cliffski could make it as DLC? Or maybe in Democracy 4.
There is certainly an engine problem as Democracy 3 is unable to force the player to make policy changes or having policies only changeable through events or external forces. The lgbt mod from Elinor has the same problem as you can ban gay marriage through events and legalize it through policy slider.
It could be possible to represent the state having to petition the Union for policy change through extremely expensive political capital costs (like 50 to implement/cancel/lower/increase) but not much more.
I like that the game is easy to modify, but no matter what you do with it I feel the simulation system is not robust enough to actually achieve anything truly great.
The principal of policy and simulation represented through a neural network has an enormous potential. However, there were design errors (GDP simulation instead of a GDP growth one, extremely fast evolution of voters groups, lack of political parties, immigration “converting” citizens rather than adding to the population, lack of demographics simulation and so on) and streamlining to make the game feel game-y. And it’s not surprising. Cliffski is but one man.
Even though, fiddling around Democracy 3 remains a cool and interesting experience.
just made a mod.txt and tried it, the missions won’t appear, several errors appear but the game does not crash
seems like the mod would need a complete overhaul to work with Democracy 3 but from what i remember it would be worth it