I know this is a bit late (by a few years), but I just discovered this game a little bit ago. Great job with it first off! I really hope you make a 3rd one at some point, I am sure there is quite a bit of new inspiration in the events of the past four years. I did want to throw some thoughts out there (just in case you do)
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Capitalism struck me as rather strange… there were not many game controls to support it (while supporting other things). I tried to run a game through capitalism but it seemed like the only thing to do (aside from a few measures) was to refuse to get involved with the game / try to not pass anything. Small government is of course an aspect of some views of capitalism, but in game where your only interaction is to be the government… kind of comes down to just clicking ‘next’ a lot and hoping the market sorts its self out. And there are measures out there to help capitalism along, places the government can and does get involved to regulate business and monopolies (capitalism does not mean rule-by-corporation, though that is certainly also an interesting concept). Including something like that might balance things along a little bit? For example, removing moral / religious control from influencing a company (or adding it to go the other way), providing government discoveries to the highest bidder (as many govt do with military research going into the private sector), focusing government purchases to products made by local companies (small business vs. capitalism), control over tax exemptions to make sure the company is located/active/producing jobs in the country, treatment of the company as an a person vs. an organization with people in it, providing tax benefits to companies that spend a portion of their income on charitable / social institutions / retirement / health care, oversight to ensure honest and healthy competition, law enforcement forces dedicated to protecting companies / individuals from fraud / corporate espionage / piracy and copyright infringement, etc. So basically I think capitalism would be a way to play the game (take action in order to elicit a response from the game) in a way that is supportive rather than dictatorial. The few measures that are in place right now (like consumer protection) are all just really focused on the negative ways that a government can cater to companies over the good of the people.
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Religion. Very sticky point of course, and you did a good job covering it without playing favorites. The first thing that struck me a bit was that there was only one religion. I am not saying play PR for the whole world, but given the number of countries where many follow others of the main faiths… seemed like a lost opportunity to add depth. A lot of other religions have their own problems to contend with - like do you allow the sale of beef in a country that is primarily Hindu? Do you regulate licenses for Kosher food like some countries do? Internal religious violence when you have two contending religions with strong followings? And so on. Not only that, but many of those other religions have extra or less penalties from things like drugs and prostitution. A Muslim country would quickly move against a leader that legalized prostitution, while the Hindus and Buddhists in a country might not feel terribly impacted by it - but Buddhists might feel stronger about extra spending to the military. The second thing was education / persecution. I get that a lot of groups feel persecuted if they don’t get their way in everything (or if their way is not imposed on everyone else). Taking a religion out of school having the effect of no one following that religion seemed a bit of an over-step. All the religions were being taught long before kids were going to school, and they have other avenues of being offered - like church and homes. There are certainly ways to bring a religion down (and I’d love to see them in the game - actually removing tax-exempt status, regulating them, actual crack downs like in some communist nations, teaching secularism, promoting an opposite religion, etc), but taking it out of a secular institution having the effect of bringing down an entire faith…? There are also ways to help religion without hurting everyone else (except maybe capitalists) - tax exempt status for charitable institutions (with added benefit of helping the poor without significantly countering free-market), providing zoning for worship where other businesses cannot be built (ranging from ‘its fine to build the strip club across from the church’ to ‘if a town has a church, you can’t sell alcohol within that district!’), religious holidays (from enforced ‘you will give them Christmas off’ to floating ‘you will give employees X days off for their particular religion or vacation if they are secular’), right to gather (‘you can worship anywhere, anytime, including in government buildings’ to ‘you can do it in public spaces that don’t impede traffic’ to ‘only in designated areas for your religion, such as church’), rights to enforce religion in a public business (‘you can choose to only hire people of your faith and force them to pray with you’ to ‘only recognized religious institutions are allowed to discriminate in hiring’ to the very strict ‘you cannot discriminate in hiring your staff aside from those directly involved in the religious aspect of your organization’), right to express religious belief in free-market behavior (‘judges can display their faith and make religion-based decisions over people of different faiths’ to ‘if you don’t believe in condoms you can deny them to those who need them even if you are working in a pharmacy’ to ‘if you are acting in a public non-religious role, you cannot impose your religious views on others’) and so on. Lots of fertile ground for both removing religion from a country, to promoting a religion over others, to allowing religious freedom while separating it from the state.
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I really like that you can legalize some of the sticky debate points (prostitution, gambling, drugs), and that they do not have auto-fails built in for following through on that. There are a lot of groups fighting for stuff like that (swopusa, iusw, various green movements, etc) and its nice that you can try the game with or against the ideas. The drugs one does seem like it has a bit of a failure-point - if you legalize everything you automatically get a lot of social issues, with no alternatives for controlling them / bringing them down. I am not sure I completely agree with that. Just because something becomes legal does not mean a significant number of people begin to do it (I know plenty of people who enjoy drugs, have access to all of them, and 99% have very clear personal lines of ‘I am ok with doing x and y but I will never touch z because I have done my homework’), or that health education and regulation cannot provide some control (though that of course would take more money). And I agree with some of the earlier points that there would be a bit more impact than just pleasing liberals - I could see all three of those having some impact on finances (all of this becomes taxable, and it is a large sector whether it is legal or not) and providing jobs. Prostitution and drugs though would increasing the chance of disease (requiring more funding for good healthcare and health education), though would lower crime. Gambling seems pretty accurate, increasing organized crime but providing more financial gain to the state. Overall happiness would likely be affected by the makeup of the country - anyone religious (well… depending on the religion actually. ok, most big western religions) or conservative would be unhappy with this, anyone secular or liberal might become happier (most people like having choices, though parents may worry more about their kids). All of these would increase tourism, but may hurt international relations in the process. If you want to add something in this area, pornography is coming to the forefront again in 2012-2013, with California trying to regulate pornography out of LA with barrier-protection laws (you have to use everything from condoms - which consumers don’t purchase movies of - to surgical gloves), to Iceland trying to outright ban porn as we speak. Same considerations as prostitution (but without the health impact if health education / healthcare are not provided) - ban = moves into fueling crime (prohibition style), violent crime (no outlet for basic need), makes conservatives / western-religious happy, legal = fuels economy, jobs, makes conservatives / western-religious unhappy, internet crime can cut into profits / undercut this industry. (btw, all of these I think would make capitalists happy since it is free-enterprise with government oversight)
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The space program was wonderful thing to shoot for, until you got there. Once you got there it had no real benefit (especially with education maxed out), it was just a drain. I suppose in a way that can be accurate, but it could / should have an ongoing boost a lot of other sectors including business / capitalism (a lot of products on the market today were discovered via the space program), education (inspiring students), and international support (countries with space programs tend to look better). Maybe I was just missing it though. You could also incorporate the capitalism version of the space program - which is what the US has moved to now. Provide tax benefits / bonuses to companies that pursue space technology (such as the Ansari X Prize). Right now it just feels like a bit of a let-down when you get there and then have to scale back your expectations
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The international front was a bit overlooked in this game. I can see that getting way too complicated of course, but it may be worth pursuing more. Perhaps the effects of tourism (to the country and from) would be somewhat simple to add? And perhaps international opinion vs. freedeom of local press? (Adding in local press too, controlled press will tell everyone that we are liked everywhere and are the greatest, free press would cause international opinion to matter more while patriotism would make us ignore international opinion anyway)
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Middle income earners - this was one of the strangest ones / hardest for me to get to grips with. A lot of things affect this group (crime, education, etc) but the negative policies (taxes) overwhelmed just about everything else. It seems like there would be a few more controls to reach this group, or that the overall status would affect them more - if you have no crime, great education for kids, low prices, strong economy, good home prices, and an average tax rate, I would expect this group to be in the green? And dropping taxes below a certain point would actually increase happiness - if nothing else then because they can look at other countries and go ‘wow, we rock’. No one likes taxes, but there is a point where most people accept them as part of daily life / something they can overlook.
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Environment - this was handled wonderfully - but after the environment is set up, some of the funding that went into that could start adding a bit to the GDP via exports? So govt funds green technology, and then green technology gets sold to other countries for a profit. Alternatively could go the other way, where environment has a stronger impact / more random events (you already have some of this in place as +/-). Right now we have water conservation in place all over because of rapidly rising temperatures (in oregon they are having to cut water for irrigation, negatively impacting farmers, to ensure everyone has water to drink), other places are working on how they will handle the quickly rising water levels (some countries are starting to preemptively build houses on stilts, Manhattan will likely be under water unless the US puts a damn in place, london)… You could either add these effects if the environment is not improved, or some of it will happen anyway and you have to deal with it - because even though you made sure your air was breathable, it doesn’t change the damage done by the country next to you… unless you add something in foreign policy for that. You can also add effects from some of the negative actions you have to take - like if you allow homogeneous foods to dominate the market you will make capitalists happy but you may have to deal with the outcome of Ireland’s potato famine (caused by having a single type of potato grown virtually exclusively) and hurt organic farmers and regular farmers (who have to submit to the bigger companies or get sued out of existence - ie all the lawsuits by Monsanto vs well… everyone). If you ban them completely then your food stuff will be more expensive to produce / fight off pests, reducing your growth / profits from that area.
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Terrorism - I like that you added that in there, along with the causes for it, though I found it a little strange that it was being handled by the military and not the police / organized crime / local enforcement groups. The military would certainly deal with terrorism in terms of concentrated groups (unless it was not allowed to operate within the country without special dispensation, like in the US), but assassinations and bombings performed internally would be handled by law enforcement normally - generally a specialized branch of counter-terrorism. The local version of the ‘secret police’ does a lot of that in many countries. This though would leave the military as somewhat useless in the game (since there is no war in the game, which would be a whole other can of worms), though military would affect international perception of a country. You tend to get the better end of a negotiating table when you tank is much bigger than their stick… unless you try to use the tank, at which point it kind of goes the other way. So military could affect that, and also special events like incursions, high-seas piracy, smuggling (into your country if you made things illegal), organized terrorism (if you let it get that bad / assuming you have a control over it). It may also be good to actually add terrorism as a red bubble like organized crime - maybe a local bubble under enforcement, or a bubble in the international area for the stuff that the military handles. Could even add extradition and international police cooperation (decreasing patriotism to some extent, promoting capitalism via copyright enforcement, decreased by status of drugs, increasing control over organized crime)
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Patriotism does not have a lot of handles at the moment, but there are things that help it - such as patriotic national holidays (small negative impact on capitalism, but one day isn’t a big deal), PR (government influence or outright control over media sources, decreased by internet freedom), state of the country vs the world (if no one is at least Trying to get here illegally, maybe we are doing something wrong. what’s so special about that other country anyway, why don’t refugees like us?), monuments (space program, national museums, internationally recognized libraries and museums), low surveillance (in freedom-based countries anyway, being watched in your back-yard by a police drone is usually a no-no for the government, ditto for wire-tapping without a license, etc).
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On the dead-horse of gun control… urgh. Can’t go right or wrong with that one. No-guns allowed (including police not carrying guns, except for special units) leads to less firearms violence (firearm-related death rate per 100,000 population in one year - washingtonpost.com/blogs/wor … the-world/ ). Soooo my only suggestion would be that firearm related violent crime goes up if guns are illegal (people can’t defend themselves) but provided by strong organized crime, down a bit if people can defend themselves. But not too down, since they start shooting each other in arguments, like what happened in texas with the guy that ‘accidentally’ shot an escort for not having sex with him). If guns are both illegal and not available to most criminals (little to no organized crime, and not carried by police), and very harsh penalties if you use a gun during a criminal act, then crime goes way down. So to expand on that suggestion, perhaps the trick is to separate out ‘crime’ from ‘accidental deaths’ since a lot of the deaths caused by guns in RTC areas are not crime (crime is arguably brought down a bit because the person may have a gun), but disputes gone wrong / crimes of passion (where fists would not have led to a death in the heat of the moment), tie it more to organized crime, and add a bubble for ‘penalty for using guns in a criminal act’ (like increased penalties for accidents when there is alcohol involved).
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Agree with the earlier post on bad roads decreasing GDB since they are needed for transport
Anyway, [EDIT: Just saw that you are working on DM3! WOOT!] Can’t wait to buy it 
