New ideas for the game, need opinions

Did anyone every realize that the overall population of the countries never change? I mean the amount of people in factions or groups change but the total population always stays exactly the same. Ex. my country population thought out the game was always 54,004,720 I am kind of upset over this. Though democracy 2 is a great game i think these feature would make the possible democracy 3 even better. As my country becomes rich and Eco friendly, doesn’t it make sense for the population to go up? When crime is high, drugs are legalized and pollution is great, should n’t the overall population decrease? I don’t know i just think a population feature would make the game more interesting. It would add more events or features like cramped cities and housing problems. You could also issue a new decrees like only allowing two children per house hold, launching campaigns discouraging population growth. I mean it would enhance the game greatly. I mean a bunch of countries have population probs like Japan, china and India. India a democratic government would be perfect. Plus with more people gradually, my taxes wont be as boring. They will go up with population increase, or down with the decline of a certain working class. income tax- wealthy + middle class.
Another idea could be more control of the military. Unfortunately as the chief executive of armed forces you don’t have to much control over your armed forces besides increase or decrease spending. I think there should be a few options like declare war on certain countries or be invaded if you piss off a specific country. Plus maybe the military spending should be a bit different. Spend a certain amount on offense and a certain amount on defense. Also if your the aggressor international trade greatly decreases. I don’t know maybe these requests are a bit too much for cliff. After all he works on his games mostly by himself, but it would be nice and if these features were included in democracy 3, i would buy it right away. What are your guys opinions on my ideas?

A war could be created,involving a situation and many many event/dilemas. It might be better to have 1 or 2 country(s) with the chance of war. The situation could show the serverity of the war, which would slowly have the effect of turning the public against it. CeaceFire/Peace talks could reduce the situation below the stop value and trade embargos etc could start war. Patriot would become much more important.

Ya i was thinking of that. But like i said besides the actual fighting, you should be able to control how many troops to send + where. I don’t know i just brought this up cause i think the whole military thing could actually lure more and diff customers for cliff" Plus it would make me want to buy the 3rd democracy even more (:

War tends to not mix well with political games. At least not complex war. You could have it so that “war” is a ‘crisis’ and causes things (drop in GDP, raise in patriot support, people dieing (need more hospital spending) an employment crisis (if people are drafted) and if it goes on for long enough, a drop in support) But having a complicated system where you send troops here and there might not be the best thing for a game that has a simple interface. Ideally, the game should remain simple to learn and difficult to master.

I agree that a dynamic population would make the game more interesting, but adding a complex war machine would not. It would take up too much development time if done well and distract from what the game is about.

It’s not as obvious as you think that wealth would lead to more population growth. Wealth usually also correlates to better healthcare provision, and better healthcare usually correlates to lower population growth. I don’t know if the relationship is causative or not, but it seems to be statistically solid.

As for wars, it’d make a decent crisis-situation. And hey, lax gun laws would finally be useful for something, as they’d act to prevent/lessen the war-crisis. Those patriots who wanted to be able to defend the country would get their opportunity. (Nobody invades Switzerland!)

I would have several situations, for example winning war and losing war, and/or unpopular war. Over time, the large amounts of events(mainly war related) could make unpopular war more likely. Clearly military spending increases chance of winning. Things like secret service spending could infuence whether a successful or unsuccessful mission happens, and therefore the winning dilema. Maybe a hiden value (like terrorism) could be there. Basically, it would take a lot of work, but could be done decently. If you want to actually control armies and etc, wrong game.

Long wars have consequences: higher taxes to pay for wars, recessions, and loss of support for the incumbent government represented by the player. One excellent example was Portugal, which prosecuted a long colonial war in Angola/Mozambique for over a decade and the ruling government was forced out of power in 1974 as part of the Carnation Revolution. Portugal spent greatly on the armed forces, suffered from consequences from war resistance to a decline in international trade. I can see how a long war could be modeled in the game: increased expenditure for the armed forces, national service, wiretapping, perhaps inflation by printing currency to pay for things, a long recession which compounds many problems, etc.

About wealth causing population growth, this is not really true. Increased medical technology/facilities leads to rapid population growth (granted, most of the time wealth is required for these facilities… but not always). Wealth, OTOH, leads to increased standards of living and, hence, increased demands on families, leading to a commensurate reduction in family size largely due to cost.

So, to summarize:
Medicine = rapid population growth
Wealth = slower population growth

This is a very basic model. You could also throw in religion (the more religious the larger the families generally) and so on… but at some point a compromise between ‘game’ and ‘life’ needs to be found.

-AEWHistory