Hey, so I don’t think this will ever be a part of the game and it would very likely be a lot of work to make possible, but one thing I would really really like is if Democracy 4 had start dates.
One problem with the game I’ve noticed is that the game seems to feel very… I don’t know, sort of timeless? Like every single term you take is sort of like the present but maybe 20 minutes in the future.
Anyways, while that’s not really a bad thing, I do think it would be incredibly interesting if we removed that timelessness by giving various countries start dates. My personal recommendation is that start dates vary from country to country and be the beginning of each term of office after each historical election up to the most recent one.
Now, this is a big change, and would very very likely require a lot of work to implement, however not in the way a lot of you would think. I do not think the Technology system would require modification, as it represents technological advancement as compared to the rest of the world, not in any sort of objective way.
However, what would need a major overhaul is the “year” system. We’d need to completely change how that would work in order to have start dates, since the country is unlikely to have a rare earth crisis in 1999 unless something really, really, really bad happens, but the rare earth crisis becomes more and more likely as years go on.
In addition, it would be a lot of work to research what policies were in place in certain countries at certain times instead of just today, and coding them into the game. That would undoubtedly be the hardest and most frustrating part and this is the major reason why I don’t think this will ever happen.
Lastly, some of you may be saying “but what about policies that can only exist after a certain technological level is achieved”. This is a very valid question. I personally do not think the start dates should go earlier than 1979/1980, but that still leaves a few policies that can’t really be implemented until certain technologies are invented. Not as many as you’d think (synthetic meat has been around since the 1970s!), but at the very least the Cryptocurrency policies wouldn’t be able to exist until 2008 because that was when Cryptocurrency was invented.
My proposal for this is that we create a new category of policies called Year-Locked Policies that cannot be unlocked until a certain year. This would include the Cryptocurrency policies and a few other Internet policies, but it’d be also really neat to see a few new policies.
Anyways, I could go on like this, but I just think it’s a really cool idea even though it’s unlikely to happen. I would genuinely love to completely reverse America’s drug policy in the middle of the War on Drugs or have the UK start recognizing trans people a decade earlier than they did historically. That’d be cool.
Thank you for reading, I really appreciate it