Moddest proposal for modeling the EU in Democracy 4 (or African Union, ect.)

Democracy 3 General Discussion
1

I understand that the existence of other government levels, and how they interact with the national one, which is played by the democracy 3 player, make it extremely hard to include them into the game. However as a player from an EU country this is something I do miss as it takes away a lot of the realism in the game.

Minimum:

  • Every term, preferably at the same moment in every term, the player gets to pick a Commissioner, there is a choice between sending someone from your own party, which gives you a small popularity bonus, sending someone who will defend the national interest, which will give a small gdp bonus, or, if applicable, allowing your coalition partner to make the choice, which gives you a lot of political capital.

Medium:

  • Same as with minimum, but:
  • As in the real world, some policy decisions are not available to the national government: At a minimum these include border controls (set to low), death penalty (total ban), tarrifs (low-medium) and possibly agricultural subsidies. These policies are still visible on the main screen but you can’t influence them, they could be indicated with a flag of the union to make this clear.

Maximum:

You no longer just play as a national government, you now also play as a co-decision-maker in EU politics, as is the case in real live. You can now click on the blocked policy domains, and make proposals to change the union policy, the bar will indicate your likelyhood of success with a colour scheme, a variety of factors determine your influence:

  • Length in office (the longer the more influence)
  • Whether you picked your own commissioner (same party leads to higher influence)
  • Standing in the world (if you and your country are well liked abroad you will have a higher chance of success of changing the policy)

Other Policy options:

Leaving the Union: You can make the decisions to leave the Union, but this will cost a phenomenal amount of political capital over multiple turns, perhaps there should be an event chain to decide how exactly you leave, which will have a different impact on your economy and immigration.

Joining the Union: A multi-turn (possibly multi-term) process in which you have to follow certain criteria of GDP, debt and policies (no death penalty, low censorship and low corruption).

There should probably be achievements for both, and probably also one for leaving and then joining again, or the other way around.

1 Like
2

Hi MayorOfAmsterdam,

that´s a brilliant idea! I am mostly thrilled by option three. In this scenario national governments and respective citizens would be core influencer whilst the player is the president of commission.

One core feature could be the simulation of the institutional interplays between council, commission and parliament to find compromises on core policy

Beyond budget CO2 reduction could be weighted equally as core KPI to measure success. Digital transformation of governments across the union could be reflected in future administrative savings and economic competitiveness.

The EU drives an open data strategy so most data of policy priorities (.e.g climate, digital, trade, innovation, etc.) are publicly available. Hence, there are no real inhibitors to develop an EU version of Democracy 4. If I were the EU I would even fund it!