I have now played through a couple terms once since the update. Here are a couple things I noticed:
-GDP was a bit more difficult to max out, but I still managed it, albeit a couple years later than usual. Good progress, but more is still needed. What seems to be missing is that an overheated economy has a sort of self destruct element. GDP needs to impact inflation, and inflation needs economic consequences. Throw interest rates into this economic web and there’s a lot of important content missing.
-Productivity seems harder to cheese. This is good, it has always been a silver bullet to my economic troubles. I’m late in my third term and haven’t gotten rid of the “uncompetitive economy” crisis. I’ve touched the green line a couple times, but never crossed it. Given my refusal to race to the bottom by cutting corporate taxes or minimum wage, it makes sense that I would have this trouble, which I didn’t before. So, good progress again.
-I’m no longer swimming in illegal immigrants. This is good, the old system was a joke. I haven’t figured out what exactly I did to push illegal immigration to the bottom of the chart yet, I’m still poking around. All I have done on this front is pushed immigration rules to “with job offer” and refugee policy to “fleeing persecution”. I haven’t implemented a border navy or border wall or maxed out border controls or any of that jazz that used to be “must have” policies.
-On the topic of illegal immigration and Canada, we are in a very geographically advantageous position to not really have to deal with this. When a migrant boat does cross either of the Pacific or Atlantic ocean it’s a national news story. Compare this to what Mediterranean nations face. Most illegal immigrants coming from Central America settle somewhere in the United States, and don’t push far north enough to reach Canada.
-Regarding the North West Passage, this thing is OP. Most of the year that passage is frozen shut, and most intentional shipping wouldn’t be able to use it even in July. It’s ice breakers only territory up there. That said, average temperature is the correct input. If average temperatures do come up, which they are expected to in the next 50 years, then this will become a major trade route, bringing both the wealth and the costs of having it. This condition needs to have near zero impact on international trade at low levels, but have a large impact at higher levels. As for the costs of the North West Passage, that would require the Coast Guard to be in the game, who are currently completely unrepresented.
-Health is still too easy to max out. To address this I recommend substantially reducing the direct health benefits of food related policies, and instead pump up the damage caused by the obesity crisis. Not having the obesity crisis should be the main health benefit of the food policies. Additionally, there should be some health benefit from plant based diets. Additionally to this, plant based diets should reduce food prices, as plants are cheaper to care for than animals.
-Education is still too easy to max out, and the benefits could be better. I recommend effectively raising the Y axis of the education chart by decreasing the strength of all inputs to it, but increasing the strength of most of its outputs. I also recommend further increasing the lag time of education related policies to represent why politicians tend to skimp on this. If the player only cares about winning the next election, spending on education should seem to be a bad investment.
-I’ve said it before, needle exchanges shouldn’t produce a health benefit, but rather a health care demand decrease. “Health” seems to represent anything that affects a large portion of the population, and we don’t see large swaths of the population getting just a little bit of AIDS from sharing needles.
-And, again, I have to mention ministers. In this game I got lucky, and got a random draw of ministers who were mostly loyal to groups who start out happy. Those who started loyal to an unhappy group were also loyal to one happy group, so I didn’t have any ministers bail on me before the first re-election. I got to play subsequent terms not because of any masterful play on my part, but because R.N.Jesus was nice to me.
A good report, but I would say I disagree with ideas of focussing strictly on decreasing input potency for things that are easy to resolve. Some ideas really are that simple to solve a problem, but usually it comes down to political or philosophical dilemmas for why they aren’t implemented.
Generally, I think we just need more of a reaction and counter-reaction system. Outrage from major policy reduction or cancellation needs to be greater, just as happiness from those who oppose the policy need to be greater too. A lot of politics comes down to momentum and timing, and not so much to actual practical change (if that was the case, we’d likely see a much greater society for all the money and things we have at the government’s disposal).
Counter-reaction will make issues harder to solve by utilising the aspects of the game that currently go overlooked: the public relations and threat of elections/ assassination. Not everything needs to be systemically hard. It should be easy to get around healthcare shortages by simply putting the entire government tax revenue into a State Health Service, but there should be a consequential backlash by middle income+ tax payers, capitalists, and so forth, who now pose a threat to your reelection chances if you don’t work to convince them to come back or modify your policy (which would anger those you pleased by doing it) or bolster support in the pleased groups to make sure there’s an activist base that can get your campaign message spread.
That being said, more actual pathways and options for influencing systems like GDP, Health, Education, so on, would be good, instead of tweaking numbers for the existing ones. Diversity of playstyle would benefit too.