So I’ve only played about 9 hours of Democracy 4 but I have played Democracy 3 before so I have experience with the series. As such I have a few initials thoughts about the fourth installment of the series I would like to share.
- Elections are still messed up. It is just way too easy to placate enough groups to win re-election even if intentionally trying to go hardline on issues such as pushing an aggressive socialist agenda. I feel like if you were given the option at the beginning to give each party a “natural” base of support with like 3 or 4 groups that you had to keep happy or that would initially oppose you that not only simulates some sort of partisanship but also guide you in what sort of policies to pursue. It would also help make third parties relevant because, as far as I can tell from my experience, they get very little support because nobody ever fanatically opposed me enough to join and vote for them. Obviously certain groups would be mutually exclusive, so for example you select Liberals as a base for you party then you couldn’t select Conservatives and vice versa. Basically instead of developing these bases through policies you start off with them and then can use policies to solidify them while trying to expand support to other groups.
- It seems like changing the membership of groups happens way too fast. It is easy to turn the population from being decidedly capitalist to decidedly socialist in only a term or two. This is a great mechanic but it should probably be a bit slower so it takes longer to dramatically change the composition of the electorate.
- Electioneering seems way too OP, especially when it comes to the power of perceptions on election results. If you get them high enough it seems to give you such a big boost, like 20% or so that combined with the ease at which one can satisfy a lot of groups stops elections from being very close.