No idea why this suddenly occurred to me…but when a party donor pops up and insists on a specific policy being implemented, otherwise they will pull there funding… is there an argument to be made here that if you give in to this request, that this should result in a boost (maybe only over the short term) to corruption?
After all…what is corruption if not setting political policy in return for money? even if in this case that money flows to the party, and not (directly) to the president?
Are you suggesting that corruption does not desapear just by calling it lobbying?
(pretends to be shocked)
Well indeed…
I’ve added in 3 effects from this. A slight boost to Corruption, a slight reduction id Democracy, and a slight drop in trust. All these effects are time-limited, so they decay over time as the electorate forget that it happened.
The effects happen, but there is no real on-screen announcement of this. I considered changing that,m but then there are a lot of other events (such as ministerial resignations effects on strong leader) that are also just silently happening, and the hope is that the player investigates and realizes that this is also being measured.
Corruption should erode Thrustworthiness.
Hmmm maybe. Although presumably its possible to have a country where corruption is seen as a problem, but the current political leader is trusted and people think they will fix corruption in time? I’m thinking of that comedy show set in ukraine where the PM is the only un-corrupt person in the country…
Maybe something that would change over time? If corruption was high before a leader came into power then nobody would blame them for creating the problem, but if they do little to fix the underlying issues behind corruption voters will begin to see the leader as being a part of the issue. Similar to the “honeymoon period” already in the game.
Indeed. I can see how that would work, and could even be done with existing systems if we created some new ‘tolerance of existing corruption’ value that was then used as an input to all the corruption effects… but I do consider the way that stuff works to be suboptimal, and potentially confusing to the casual player.
Its hard to simulate this stuff well but still keep it obvious to the player what is causing each effect.
I see your point. What if we made the corruption issue get worse over time, making voters more and more unhappy as time progresses, up until a certain point? That would be much simpler to understand for the player, I think. The premise would be that if corruption is not fixed soon, then it will spread and become “entrenched.” In the game the player always seems to start out on their first ever term in office, so we wouldn’t need to explain or even make the honeymoon period I was talking about in my first reply.