Latest Democracy 4 Developer Blog #34: Royal Nukes

Enjoy!

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I missed this for a week. Some of what was said in this post does relate in some way to my own country, which is Canada.

First off, for the EU contribution, we have something similar…ish with our provinces. Wouldn’t it make sense for the EU contributions/payments to scale with the country’s GDP? Countries with a strong GDP would pay in and countries with a weak GDP would receive payment?
The similarity to my own country comes from our provinces. In the 19th century when we were formally founded as a country is was simply impractical to have a single government administrate such a large area, so it was divided into provinces and territories which each having their own government. There’s a mess of relations between 10 provincial governments, 3 territorial governments and a federal government. It’s a delightful mess. The similarity to the EU would be our equalization plan. In basic terms, the point of it is that the provinces who are performing poorly economically receive grants from the federal government. In theory this is supposed to provide economic stability as well as stability of government spending. In reality the formula gets adjusted so that some provinces economies are intentionally underrated so that they will receive more money than they should, and others get the opposite treatment. This is done for partisan reasons, to reward provinces who “voted right”, bribe provinces who’s votes are in question, and do so by raiding the finances of provinces who “voted wrong”. Of course if you ask any past or present PM if this is what they are doing they will deny it…politicians deny many things.
I went on a bit of a tangent there, tldr is shouldn’t the EU scale with the nation’s GDP?

The monarchy is something that is also applicable to Canada, but differently. It doesn’t give us the tourism or foreign relations bumps, but it does cost us some money, please patriots, and upset liberals. It would also be something that could be cancelled, but for an enormous political capital cost. 50 would be reasonable.

Re: The House of Lords. We have a close mimic in Canada, it’s called the Senate, and has many similarities. It’s the upper house, which is not elected, appointments are made directly by the PM* with no need to explain who is getting the seat or why, the appointment is for life (or until voluntary retirement), and they have actual legislative power. They don’t tend to be a source of policy, but rather a method to slow down policy. They arrogantly refer to themselves as “the house of sober second thought”. What the senate does is they effective allow past PMs to retain some political power after they are no longer PM. This is absolutely an affront to democracy, is something which many politicians have promised to reform or abolish to score votes, yet everyone who has ever assumed the PM’s office has suddenly decided that they like the idea of being able to retain power after losing an election.
To model the senate in game, a policy would need to be added which reduces PC in the early game (to represent the outgoing government deliberately frustrating political processes so they can criticize the player for not accomplishing enough), and increases PC in late game (to represent the player having stacked the senate full of loyal yes men). This policy would need to be expensive to cancel, so that by the time the player can abolish the senate, they no longer want to.

*Technically senators are appointed by the governor general (GG), who is “the Queen’s representative in Canada”, but the GG does whatever the PM says, and while the GG is technically appointed by the Queen, they are actually appointed by the PM with the Queen’s signature being involved somewhere.

Thanks for the information. It might be that we need a separate situation and policy for the royal family for each country eventually, as each country has a very different setup for their monarchy.
I think I am already adjusting EU contribution to take into account GDP but I will check this…

That would be good if it scaled, what I’m referring to is the possibility for reversal. Although I am not directly involved with the EU, I can’t image it expressly names Germany as a country which will always pay in, or Spain as a country which will always receive money. I’m saying it should be possible to create conditions where Germany receives money and Spain pays contributions.

Do I have to suggest a link between the spanish monarchy and corruption if it gets implemented?

That might be making a political statement.

Indeed. We cannot have politics in our politics game :D. (I’m kidding, I know what you mean)

The king can’t be prosecuted acording to spanish constitution, so it may be a way of modeling it.

A bigger democracy tank perhaps?

Let’s say Juan Carlos I used that a lot, from what we know, he get a peseta(the old currecy) from Saudi Arabia for every oil barrel that was imported, it is said that he get more than 100 million € from the AVE from Meca to Medina, bank accounts in fiscal heavens… so, maybe, the game should refflect that.

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