Religious group

Democracy 3 General Discussion
1

I find it much to easy to kill of the religious group, the creationism vs Darwinism policy is very effective to get the group to collapse.

I think this policy is problematic in more ways as it is a Americanism. The discussion doesn’t really exist in Europe at least as far as I know. So it’s more then a country having a strange policy for balance. It’s more like a alien army in a ww2 game for balance reasons.

At least the religious group should survive for a typical life time after the policy change, arguably the policy mostly effect young people joining the group.

2

and religious groups tend to become very fanatic if you try to cut them down hard.

3

Yeah the game kinda shows this but as they get small quite fast it’s not a big concern.

4

Are you suggesting that the size of the religious group should perhaps reduce more slowly? I’m trying to balance things so that it takes a long time, but is still achievable to have noticeable impact within a single game (over multiple terms). There is always the risk of going ‘too fast’ and angering those groups, of course.

5

I’d broadly agree with this. It’s very easy to have a negligible religious group just by not trying to appeal to them (e.g. teaching evolution only, not having faith school subsidies, not having school prayer). I’ve definitely found they’ve disappeared in a short amount of time (one or two terms). I’ve only ever run into a problem with them becoming hostile when I’ve been actively propping them up with faith school subsidies and school prayer, but also doing stuff they don’t like (like unlimited abortion or stem cell research).

I think this is most noticeable with the religious group, but it’s a trend I’ve generally noticed, and I think contributes to the game feeling a bit easy. I can just decide I’m going socialist, and while it might upset some capitalists for a little bit, soon there just aren’t enough to matter. For example, the USA is the most capitalist country at the start (~45% capitalist, ~55% socialist), but after a term and a half that’s swung by 15% to around 30% capitalist and around 70% socialist. This is without me really trying to get rid of capitalists, and just putting in more socialist policies, and it ultimately means you’re not so much lead by the voters but the voters are lead by you. While I agree that should happen to an extent, and it’s nice to see, I think it’s just too much too quickly at the moment, to where it means that individual voter groups aren’t really important. The ones you’re pleasing grow and the ones you’re annoying shrink, and soon you just have a population that agrees with you and as long as you don’t break the country you can sail along at 90%+ approval.

6

Yes the size of the group should be reduced more slowly. I did a quick test with Germany with difficulty and other parameters set to default, here is the results:

Size of religious group:
Beginning: 30%
First midterm: 18.4%
Beginning second term: 3.20%
Second midterm: 1.7%
Beginning third term: 0.00%

This was with evolution only and max tech grants. As you see it is possible to make the religious group irrelevant to the first re-election, so it’s a complete non issue to aggravate them.

Also this game suffered from the 100% pensioners and 100% parents issue, min maxing things are to powerful at the moment.

Attached a save with this issue and a very stable situation that is quite heavily min/maxed. Mind you I didn’t try very hard here, people that like to game games will succeed way better then I did here.
Germany second.xml.zip (234 KB)