I have been an avid Democracy player for quite a while now and I really do love the game, however one thing has always gotten to me, - the lack of simulation for Political Ideology.
The game almost always forces you to play as a radical liberal if you want to get elected. You have to have full funding for health care, education & the toughest environmental standards if you want to get rid of contagious diseases and the asthma epedemic amongst other things, and it’s impossible [ in my experience ] to get elected again with those two things going. But that’s exactly it, - while I can understand if you had a National Health Care system and it was severely underfunded that may happen, if you have a top-notch private system and the vast majority of people are getting quality health care and your playing as a Conservative, - then you wouldn’t have this contagious disease.
That’s just one example. From policing to welfare, you always are forced to an extreme.
I think you should have an option to privatize Health Care/education/transports etc etc, and then depending on factors such as personal wealth of your citizens for Health Care, it would either work out well or be a total disaster.
indeed, it’s a fair criticism, the difficulty is in putting together a simulation that accurately replicates voters reallocating spending on private health care depending on the existing systems provision and their personal wealth. This could be done, it’s just another level of complexity to add to the system. it is however, something the game would definitely benefit from, and something I’d do if I did a new version of the game.
I just finished reading through the “Policy Effect change proposals, and your thoughts” thread, and I have to say that I agree wholeheartedly with Kauai about this issue.
Cliff, my advice is that you should do whatever you can without modding the core game to address this issue (even with modding the core game, if time and resources allow). I think that this is the one really weak area of the game… no offense, but It seems as though you’re allowing your own personal views to cloud the game design a bit too much. I hope that you don’t take that as any sort of personal attack, because it’s not meant to be. That’s an extremely common issue with this sort of game/simulation… it’s fairly easy to work around though, as long as you maintain awareness of it. Basically, just try to take every political viewpoint with a grain of salt, and go out of your way to expose yourself to all viewpoints.
I do feel there might be some slanting as far as the policies are concerned, although I’m really not sure it’s too bad.
After all if there was an epidemic already then obviously private issuance didn’t work. Also you don’t have to keep it up that high once hospital overcrowding and contagious disease are lower. What might be helpful in solving this problem is adding another board to the forum and have people add their input and eventually balance it all out.
One problem that may be related to policies and elections is I don’t feel the membership groups are balanced. I start with about 20% of the population being poor then after I increase healthcare, schools, college grants, science grants, and even increase agricultural grants, there’s still about 20% of the population that are poor. Also I don’t think population is properly considered in the membership groups. If you have a lot of doctors, nurses, etc for your hospitals that takes a chunk of your population. Then if you have a lot of farmers, that takes a chunk of your population. Then if you have self employed let’s say some people install heaters and air conditioners that takes a chunk as well. Eventually there are no chunks left! which might actually cause immigration to be a very GOOD thing. Even patriots might be ok with it being that the nation involved needs more workers. Also I’ve noticed that my farmers might go up to 80% but my state employees are at like 60% so 20% of the adult population is state employed farmers? I also think the problem of getting to peoples jobs needs to be addressed. Because while it’s very easy to please commuters, the motorist membership group can go down to 0. Which means no one’s driving therefore has to take other transportion to commute. This could also make the car companies of that nation very mad. After all if no ones driving no one needs new cars.
Bottom line: I think the game is rather politically neutral but does require some realism tweaks.
