Officially the Hellenic Republic, Greece traces its routes to the Ancient Greek civilisation that was the birthplace of much of western civilisation. It is a founding member of the UN, the European Union and the Council of Europe. However, post-2010 debt crisis, it is now a country in dire peril, with spiralling debt, nearly 30% unemployment and rampant tax evasion.
Fair warning, this is a very hard scenario, and is more challenging than any of the scenarios that come with Democracy 3. That said, while hard, it is possible to turn around Greece’s fate and remain in office, but it may take some ruthless politicking…
Please feel free to offer feedback/suggestions for updates/alterations. Thanks.
INSTALLATION:
Just unzip the zipped folder into your Democracy 3 folder. For Windows users, this will be something like: Program Files (x86)\Democracy 3\
Note that to enable or disable a country mod, a restart of Democracy 3 is required.
CHANGE LOG
V1.0:
Greece, circa 2011 has been added as a playable mission. Greece_Xietanu_Mod.zip (157 KB)
Cool this can now be downloaded with an installer from here: positech.co.uk/democracy3/mods.html
If the mod gets updated, PM or email me and I will update the installer.
Cheers!
Fantastic country scenario. Although I did win with 90 percent approval and 200 percent difficulty, it did CERTAINLY give me a challenge.
Kudos to you good sir.
Nice. This is a real toughie. I finally died to a capitalist bullet midway through my third term as I desperately tried to clear the budget deficit. I’d survived bird flu, cyber warfare, and 5 previous attempts by then, on 200%
Something very odd happened with Debt Crisis, though. At one point, I’d barely scratched the deficit, but had maxed GDP, which put me at AA all told. We had ANOTHER market meltdown, which knackered my GDP, dunked my credit rating, and created a debt crisis. Over the next two years, I yo-you’d in and out of debt crisis 3 times. I have no idea why this occurred.
One minor niggle I’ve found; the mod presently lacks an icon for the compass accessible through the main menu, leaving a blank white space instead.
Oh, whoops, I knew I’d miss something. Thanks for pointing that out, Rick, I’ll update and fix it. Glad you’re enjoying it, anyway (and you’ve done better at it than I have, truth told)!
Regarding the debt crisis, I believe a debt crisis occurs (both in the game and to a certain extent in real life) not so much based on how much debt you have, but on how likely banks think you are to pay it back. When your GDP is strong, you can support a bigger debt because you can afford to pay back more interest. What I imagine happened was that when your GDP went in the can, the banks got worried about you paying your debt back, your credit rating fell and you ended up in a debt crisis again.
Oh, sure, my first debt crisis made sense to me on exactly the grounds you describe. What confused me was the aftermath; as I say, we went in and out of debt crisis at least three times in 2 years. Looking at the debt crisis chart, it kept switching between almost vertically up and vertically down on a quarterly basis.
This is likely due to a business confidence effect., which is modeled within the whole debt crisis issue. There are a lot of spiraling effects in there. A debt crisis is a self-accelerating disaster, in that it’s fueled by poor Debt/GDP ratios, but it actually makes things worse by hitting business confidence (hence trashing GDP, which makes things worse).
If you managed to escape from the debt crisis situation you are doing pretty well. Without totally trashing public spending, I’m not sure how it can be done, how did you manage it?
I don’t know about how other people handled it but I found a 75% CO2 tax to be your friend for getting out of the debt crisis. It damages your economy but that’s already gone, so it doesn’t matter, and it raises enough money to get you out of debt in a couple of years. Then you can cut it back andfix the economy properly.
Well, more generally, “Don’t get into a debt crisis”
Since I’m a filthy tax-and-spender, I’m in a debt crisis by roughly turn 4 of this scenario. I’ve spent that time implementing every GDP boosting policy I can find; science funding, technology grants; enterprise tax scheme, etc. I’ve also been working productivity and technology to the hilt; Robotics grants, childcare provision, adult education subsidies, technology colleges etc. I’ll usually hike income tax a few percent, and introduce a maximum carbon tax. This won’t clear my budget deficit, but it’ll keep it manageable
All this means is that suddenly, about half way through the term, the various other GDP-negative situations (uncompetitive economy, etc.) are all cancelled, at which point my GDP will leap to approx 0.6ish on the chart. This shunts my credit rating up, clearing the debt crisis.
Hi. This mod is really great! It poses a great challenge without feeling unfair. One thing I have to point out, though, is that Greece currently lacks an icon for the political compass page, and just displays a white square. I’m not sure if that’s a limit with the modding tools or an oversight, but I just thought I’d point it out.
I’ve now added the compass icon, just redownload the zip at the top and it should all work. Thanks again for pointing this out, guys.
MadnessFreddy - I’m not sure I’m really qualified for that! I’ve only really messed around with modding a bit so far, and adding a new country isn’t really that complicated. I plan to do more stuff in the future, though, so if I feel like I’ve learned something worth sharing I will.
How do you actually select Greece? I have the mod installed and it shows up in my mod list (and as “active”), but when I select new game I only see the same options as before
Would you object to me wrapping this up into a proper exe installer and hosting it on our site for people?