I put this up in modding last night, but it hasn’t taken long to realize that this is probably a bit big for a mod. So perhaps it can simply be used for future iterations of Democracy.
My idea revolves around how foreign policy is presently underrepresented in the game. Domestic concerns are generally weighted larger than international concerns amongst a populace, but still far more heavily than is shown in game. My proposed solution to this is to replace the “military spending” item with a set of submenus for the nation’s army, air force, navy, and foreign intelligence services (domestic intelligence is already shown elsewhere). In addition, there would be a map with different regions (US/Canada, Latin America/Caribbean, Southern and Northern South America, Brazil, the Eurozone, the Middle East, North, Central, and Southern Africa, Russia, the Indian Subcontinent, East Asia, China, and Australia/Oceania). Each of these regions would have certain values relating to your nation, and certain internal traits relating to their geography. So a value might be how much trade you do, and a trait might be that the Middle East has a lot of religious people and a lot of oil.
This gives you a lot of options relating to each region. You could say I want X% of my troops deployed to the Middle East or Russia because my nation is very dependent on oil and they have a lot of it. Or perhaps your wealthy citizens are unhappy, so you increase trade with a mineral-rich (jewelery) region like Australia or Central Africa. Or even that you need to increase trade with someone, so you increase your relations by cleaning up pollution. Other things like trade unions, for example, could start to have a more proper place ingame. And the split of troops from before means that you’ll be more effective at intimidating or invading certain regions than others-not much water to use around Russia, but you’ll certainly need that navy to coerce Australia into giving you more resources.
Not to mention what other people have stated before about multiparty systems and congress/parliament and whatnot.
Four more smaller ideas:
- Logarithmic equations for demographic change. I often end up with one or another demographic being completely wiped out, which is unrealistic.
- Labels on the graph axes! I don’t just wanna’ see that my GDP is really high, I wanna’ actually know how fast it’s growing.
- Being able to say “this is who I am as a leader” would be good, because there’s always one or two cabinet members you would never pick to work with you, and often a group that, if you campaigned, would like you but doesn’t.
- Being able to see how much “violent crime” or “pollution” there is at any time, not just when it’s a problem. If it’s a problem, it can show up in the web, but it should still be visible somewhere at any time.
End of ideas, for now. Thoughts?