Nothing Bad Happens with Crazy amounts of Debt


I have 170 trillion dollars in debt and my GDP appears to be as low as it can go and yet I win 100% of the vote and everyone loves me and all indicators other than GDP are really good. Shouldn’t people have stopped lending me money a long time ago?

I’ve noticed this as well. It’s been a problem with the democracy games for a while. Basically if you keep implementing policies to make people more socialist, you could ignore the debt crisis. In real life, government borrowing would lead either to other nations hating yours OR losing loyalty from other government officials. Either of these could be implemented into the game.

do you not have the debt crisis event? and if so… is it not causing you enough problems? Obviously we are in alpha, and this is the sort of thing we definitely need to balance…

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I do have the debt crisis modifier but it only makes my debt increase, and give me more pp. If it actually stopped people from lending to me that would make more sense in opinion. Because at the moment having ludicrous amounts of debt does not seem to have any negative side effects. Thanks for the reply, love the game so far

Perhaps if debt spirals to much policies should be automatically cut? (Like welfare and transport first, then public services, then economy, etc.)

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Perhaps this sort of situation could lead to hyperinflation as the currency becomes worthless and that I imagine could reduce popularity

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So, I just tried doing this myself and yeah I can confirm, “Debt Crisis” has absolutely no effect if you’re already polling close to 100%.

Basically I had a nice wee authoritarian socialist setup and then I decided to abolish the 5 biggest taxes (Income, Sales, Capital Gains, Payroll and Frequent Flyer). I just had an election: I was £20 trillion in debt, my economy was in tatters, and I still got 100% of the vote.

So some rebalancing is definitely needed; I would suggest maybe weighting “everyone” as a category a bit more compared to all the others. Because “everyone” was really dissatisfied with my government but it didn’t matter because my population was 100% socialist, 100% religious, 100% conservative and 100% patriot, and they all loved me.

Can confirm I had the same experience, my debt had gotten out of control and after a while I just ignored it, because I could.

As far as I’m aware, massive amounts of debt should realistically cause some sort of default/bankruptcy eventually and effectively cause a massive recession or some kind of restructuring of the debt in order to avoid a total disaster. But you would have lost almost all support and popularity before reaching that point, right?

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Hyperinflation is a situation in the game already. it sounds like it needs to trigger more easily…

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Stability should affect the trigger because as you can imagine a country like the UK or the US can borrow immense amounts of money with no impact on their currency valuation while a Latin American country on the other hand could get inflation or a balance of payments problem. There is also the factor of inflation generally only being a problem in a domestic sense if you push growth past real resource constraints.

Wouldn’t this completely crowd out private lending? I’m not sure what kind of effect you’d represent that as.

if you destroy private lending, that’s kind of the same as destroying business confidence, which already damages GDP, although maybe I need that effect to be more dramatic at the end, and non-linear.

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I don’t think anything will be enough to make debt an issue besides a mechanic for government defaults. Or whatever the term for people refusing to lend a government any more money is.

well destroying GDP is always a game-ending event, because with zero tax revenue and high unemployment/poverty everyone is going to be unhappy. Its likely that we just have not balanced the scenario of having debt crisis, but the government keeps spending like crazy anyway. Maybe right now the effects do not compound enough.

No democratic government ever survives long with a debt crisis, high unemployment and poverty, unless you go full venezuela with dubious election-rigging etc.

I mean, that’s the whole issue, isn’t it? If you hit a debt crisis you shouldn’t have the money to spend. Maybe the player should be able to “turn off” programs in a debt crisis, but has to have a balanced budget to press “End turn”. I suppose you could fund things by printing money, but well, hyperinflation.

Yup indeed. Well you can always borrow… But yes, hyperinflation may not trigger easily enough yet. I will look at it.

Consider having assignations trigger more often the higher your debt goes

Well high debt upsets capitalists and makes their terrorist group larger, but high debt isn’t going to make socialists or other groups angry. But yes, in a sense this is already in the game, through the capitalist group.

Perhaps this is my Keynesianism showing but the loanable funds theory is really bogus. Liquidity preference FTW.