There could be set of scripts that make undeveloped countries, so D3 Africa could work.
Maybe there could be prereqs triggerable with events?
Eastern Europe countries would be interesting because they are almost developed.
There are lots of countries that are more developed than African countries and less developed than Eastern Europe countries.
Boundless GDP and population simulation (something like disposable income) could make it easier.
This would require iterative/cumulative neural network - growth rate would consistently push GDP/population/average temperature in one direction.
Currently even simulating average temperature changes from CO2 emissions is impossible.
That is certain level of CO2 emissions = certain average temperature.
That is CO2 emissions is total CO2 emissions from beginning of simulation currently.
Yeah accumulative stuff would be great especially for stuff that currently depends on “Year” when that alone ought to play into essentially nothing. It feels very hacky. And also for all the things you mentioned there.
Given the network nature of the game all the nodes should be considered as rates not amounts. As long as you keep this in mind i think things can make sense. So for instance your GDP is functioning at 100% or your environment is suffering 20% degradation. That is the way i think about it when playing. But it is a problem if you mix rates and amounts. You could have accumulators in the game but i think that there are issues with letting them feed back into the network. It wont balance. But accumulators triggering certain events should be possible.
Maybe there could be some sort of CO2 accumulator that after a certain amount starts triggering climate issues.
I think the decision early on was to let your own CO2 represent world wide CO2 as a sort of short cut. Because otherwise obviously individual countries CO2 emissions dont make much difference.
I think high CO2 emissions should hurt international relations. This might be in the game already. I have not checked.
Ok i guess rates aren’t right, its more that the nodes are a percentage of some actual total amount or rate.
So lets figure out how this would work. So the problem i have is that having each node be percentage based means that you can change the meaning of 100% but it changes nothing about the game. For example UK GDP at 100% might mean 1.7 trillion but USA GDP at 100$ might mean 28 trillion. But changing the name means nothing about how the game plays. So maybe having GDP max out isn’t an issue, it just means your economy is producing at its maximum capability. Also time scales are a consideration. I mean its not a “civilization” or “environmental” sim and these values (max GDP, climate change, population) change to slowly to have a real world effect. Just political effects.
I still think that accumulators could work for somethings. How i could see it working is that after a certain amount has accumulated the trigger switches something about how the game plays.
For instance maybe after a certain amount of time at high co2 emission you could I trigger more climate events (except this is not realistic considering the game) but maybe having certain political negatives like getting other nations upset or triggering certain constituents. There might already be such mechanisms in the game?
I think allowing immigration to reach a certain point maybe 20% foreign born should trigger political instability. That would be an interesting mechanism!
The issue is that percentages require a whole as a reference. Either there is an absolute limit, in which case it makes sense to put that at 100%, or failing that, there is, like, a “typical” value that stands in for 100%, and you can actually go beyond it. Arbitrarily beyond. So the fact that it’s percentages doesn’t change a thing.
Like, Iunno, literacy rate can be at 100%, meaning every person who is, in principle, capable of reading, and presumably old enough, can read.
But “100%” GDP can only ever be a reference size. You may pick the country with the largest GDP at any given moment in time, but that country’s GDP can still grow, and another country may also eventually overtake it.
While it sure would be extremely hard (just by size difference alone), there’s no reason in principle why the UK couldn’t someday manage to actually beat the US in total GDP. And it certainly could gain much more than your proposed 1.7 trillion.
I don’t think these things change slowly at all. Heck, people are alive today who saw the world’s population more than DOUBLE! - Granted, most of that growth isn’t happening in the nations currently in the game, but still, hardly a small effect. 1960 we had about 3 billion people on the planet. Today it’s 7.7 billion! Less than a hundred years ago we reached 2 billion. So people who are hundred today (and such a high age tends to become more common) were born into a world with less than a third of the population that there is today!
Sure, games of D4 don’t usually last 100 years. But they sure can last a decade or so, and in that time population rose by like 12% which is not at all insignificant. (Again, this is world population though. It’s true that it’s less of an issue for the currently represented countries. Would be much more important in large parts of Africa and some parts of Asia I think - For the current countries, what might matter is, that migration may also grow accordingly)