Hey, Democracy 3 & 4 fan here. Just wanted to give you some suggestions based on my experience playing the games.
-
Since almost everything in the game is on a scale from 0 to 1, I think it would be great to put those numbers somewhere on the graphs, especially for good and bad events. That would help to scale more precisely the policies that fight them. In this example, to know how much Import Tariffs I need to put to get rid of Uncompetitive Economy.
Here’s what it currently look like
And here’s a proposal on what it could look like -
On that note, there is what I believe to be a bug, where if you implement a new policy you can choose the scale for free (that’s fine), but once you quit the screen of that policy, if you come back to it you have to spend points like it’s a new turn. That makes for awkward situations when you don’t remember at what level you should implement it and have to either load the save, take a guess or spend political capital.
-
On the subject of intelligence, a lot of arguments in favor of intelligence gathering is that by having some sort of “pressure points” on other countries, you can negotiate better trade deals. So it could be interesting if (at a high level) this could influence International Trade. But I also think that the cost of a huge intelligence agency should be way higher, both from a political capital and money point of view. And that critic also extend to Police Force. It’s so easy to get rid of negative Lax & Order events, because nothing really prevent you from maxing out Police Force and Community Policing at the very beginning.
With just those two, crime is basically 80 % dealt with by turn 4 for just 5 political capitals. -
On a completely unrelated note, I think there should be a distinction between the Border Control and the immigration policy. One prevent illegal immigration (like its description suggest)
the other describe what are the rules for legal immigration (or lack thereof). A highly enviable country with a very strict immigration policies would need very tight border controls to enforce said policies. I can understand that in the end it amount at the same and that it can add unnecessarily complexity, but I’ve always found weird to have Border Controls basically be your immigration policy.
Thank you for reading this block of text and good luck with the game, Cliff. I really appreciate your work.