General Suggestions

Blah blah, hello. I’ve got some suggestions for you to consider (mostly from a modding perspective), but also to increase gameplay dynamics

  1. Policy Incompatibility
    You can currently legalise Gay Marriage, and then go on to Ban Homosexuality. There should be a part within policies where you can designate contradictions - so if you have Gay Marriage, you simply cannot criminalise Homosexuality - and vice versa.

  2. “Neutral” Situations
    Some of your simulations, mostly when measuring the Private Industry may as well disappear when they’re at zero. All situations are currently measured solely in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It’d be interesting if you could create neutral situations (yellow colour? dark blue?) for ‘simulations’ that effectively by player-choice go dormant and measure little.

  3. A new votinggroup mechanic: turnout. I had an idea for a “VotingAge” policy, but that doesn’t work because reducing or increasing the voting age doesn’t cull or increase young people (frequency is the only way to model this currently). It would be used for anti-democratic policies that enrage specific demographics and quell their turnout (banning postal votes, increasing voting age maximum, etc)

3 Likes

actually young voters are programmed to turn out less

That’s good, but it’d be nice to have some control through policy and simulation to impact their turnout.

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that would certainly be nice, yeah

I’d love to, at some future point, do a whole bunch of things to do with elections, to encourage (or discourage) turnout, to pass laws on enfranchisement, and on voter suppression, maybe postal vote laws, and limiting campaign spending. There is a whole world of stuff we could do on those lines!

6 Likes

Glad to hear it.

Policy contradiction is another part of this. Is that easy to put in?

Do you mean policy flip-flops? implementing then cancelling? This is already in. Its called a policy fli-flop and I think IIRC it affects the voter perception for trustworthy. Making this more obvious is on my current todo list.

No, an inability to pass specific policies if you’ve already got certain policies - to prevent you from Banning Homosexuality if you’ve already legalised Gay Marriage.

A similar thing to prereqs, but policy vs. policy

2 Likes

Another thing would be tax ethos contradictions and economic policy contradictions, it would make people behave in a less ‘gamey’ and unrealistic way

Actually its not as simple as it sounds, but I agree that there are currently anomalies and I need to engineer (properly!) a system that allows for this sort of thing. Its tricky because of cancelling a policy meaning another policy is no longer valid, and so on, and it needs to be clear (and obvious) from the UI what depends on what… it needs properly designing, coding and testing.
Currently I’m fixing bugs and working on balancing Australia, so I wont be able to do this until after that.

I understand - but I think you should go into it (in the end) because you can probably ‘win’ through weird and incoherent policy combinations in some instances currently.

With regard to banning homosexuality while simultaneously legalizing gay marriage, it may be that there are too many policies for the same topic. Perhaps it could all be tied into one slider bar on LGBT policy to avoid contradictions? Slide all the way one way and you have banned homosexuality, slide the other way you have things like legal backing for gender pronouns etc.

This wouldn’t address any other contradiction though.

1 Like

I mean those are somewhat related, but different things. In any case, however cliff would do it, policy contradiction is a must in my opinion.

I would like to see an infinate slider, one where you type in how much you want to spend. In most cases it’s not necessary but the military budget is a good example. The US is already on max but it could easily put more money it. Per GDP Russia is spending more on the military

I think the Gay Marriage and Ban Homosexuality should be the same policy. Maybe it should have notches ranging from Total Ban, No Legal Punishment, Civil Unions Recognized, Marriage Recognized, Positive Action. Gambling and Sex Work could be similarly modeled. Gambling ranging from Total Ban; Limited Stakes, Age Limit; Age Limit; No Restrictions. Sex Work ranging from Prohibited; Abolition; Regulated; Decriminalized.

Also, I’d personally like to see the Term Length policy have more variation. There are nations that have a 1 year term limit, so I’d like to see it range from 1 to 6 years with the last one being No Term Limit. That way we could enact our plans of running a Monarchy.

Finally, I think it’d make sense for Tax Policies to have a percentage descriptor instead of the None to Low, Medium, High. They’d start at 0.1% and go however far per policy. Ironically, I think the Income Tax Policy is the only Tax Policy where it really makes sense to have it be described as Low, Medium, High, Maximum.