It might make the game more interesting if certain policies only become available when certain conditions are met. E.g. some of the more technologically advanced policies might not be available if your country is lacking in technological development + as technology advances certain events occur that are related to technology in society. Another example is drone strike policies might not be available to countries with a ceremonial military.
There could also be events that only occur after a certain amount of in-game time has elapsed, which could make the late stages of a game more fun.
3 Likes
The cute (and modding-friendly) way to do this is to let anyone use the policy, but scale its effects by the thing that actually makes it efficacious. You can order all the airport expansion you want, but if you have no technology, you’re going to just waste your money on cargo-cult airfields.
Conditional events and dilemmas are also already essentially possible since their probabilities can be weighed based on simulation variables, and the game already does a ton of that.
There are some policies with conditions actually. The only ones I know of are banning private sectors like healthcare and schooling. I think if they haven’t already added other conditional policies they probably will in the future.
Those two always can be activated - they aren’t conditional.
I think the scaling idea is the best solution. The troubl with pre-requisites is it would require us to also have a system to auto-cancel a policy if the pre-requisite then failed after implementation.
In theory thats easy to put into the game, although you then need to show that a policy was cancelled because of this, so you need a new next-turn event with UI to show this… It is actually a pretty interesting idea though. for example should there really be an opion to have smart meter policies and driverless car laws at all when your tech level is low…
Something to consider during early access certainly.
2 Likes
The one that really stands out for me is Space Program.
It could be as simple as greying out the policy. It still exists but it doesn’t do anything.
1 Like
Sure, but it also needs a popup saying “you cant reimplement this until you do that”, and you likely do need a notification, because otherwise, once the policy is removed from the screen, the player needs to know not to look for it.
Its all definitely doable, and cool, I just need the time to code all the various UI bits involved.
3 Likes