So I’ve been playing Democracy 4 now ever since it came out. And I absolutely love it already. The game runs very well on my relatively shitty laptop, the gameplay is a big upgrade on Democracy 3 already despite only having one country. I have played both as a liberal socialist and conservative capitalist. I love it and I can’t wait for it to be improved. I have however come across some issues while playing it that probably need some tweaking:
-Unrealistic elections. Having done 20 elections thus far I have not had a single coalition government as of yet. All of them have been either massive majorities or getting about 5% of the vote after an economic meltdown. The swings are too large and unrealistic, looking at the real world there are very few cases where a party has gone from about 70% of the vote (Or ever had 70% to begin with) to 5% of the vote in a single election. It also takes away from the fun of the coalition government mechanic since it is very hard to achieve due to the large swings in popularity.
-Unrealistic debt simulation: I had a situation where the debt grew so large that it was taking up well over half of my expenditure. I don’t know of a single country in the real world where debt repayments take up half of the government’s budget (Not even Japan which has a 300% debt to GDP ratio). At least there should be a policy for a bailout of some sort or at least a somewhat more realistic simulation of the way that government debt eats up income.
-Credit rating. Why does my credit rating get randomly downgraded from time to time, with no relation to the policies I am implementing or the change in ratio to income/expenditure?
-No option to eliminate the capital mechanic, unlike in Democracy 3 where you could turn it on and off
Overall I really really love this game and I can’t wait for a full release and all the exciting mods from the community. But I feel as if some things need to be tweaked to give the game a more real world feel. The game simulates many things very well but having debt swallow up 60% of your government budget and going from 70% to 5% support in one election is too unrealistic. Thoughts?
