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Instead of the hyper-analog scales in D2, where I can (if I have enough fine motor control of my mouse hand) make chances of 0.1% or less, e.g. to income taxation, divide all sliders into a large yet distinctly digital number of points, and allow only these to be chosen. For maximum smoothness, divide each slider that is currently an analog one into 19 value points, from nothing to everything. Or 21 points, from 0% to 100%. This solves a lot of problems, and nobody has any interest in making 0.1% changes anyway. It’s the opposite, rather. One goes onto the page, to see what the change would effect, and eventually concludes that one does not want to change. In that case, restoring the scale slider to its original value is non-trivial.
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Add an “implement” button to each such slider-control page. It is counter-intuitive that I have to close the page (click on X" and then select “yes” to actually implement the change.
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Add one more button, “implement when affordable”, to each such slider-conrol page. This means that the game queues up this change, and reserves all remaining political capital, and keeps reserving all political capital, until there is enough capital to implement the first change in the queue. Only then is it implemented (duh). After that, the game checks if there are other changes queued up, and if so implements them. Once the queue is empty, remaining capital becomes available for the player to use. Often I find myself wanting to implement a really expensive change, but can’t afford it, and the next turn I still can’t afford it, and not the next turn either, but only on the turn after that. Obviously players can engage in self-harming actitivy by queueing up several changes in this way, but it should still be available.
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As an extension of #1 above, alter the capital cost of making changes, so that a small change costs little capital, and a very small change costs very little capital. Keep the current values as base values, e.g. (IIRC) to raise Income Tax in the USA scenario is 34 capital. Fine, keep that, but if the income tax change is only raised by two scale steps (i.e. 10%) the cost is halved, to 17 capital, and if the income tax change is only one scale step (5%) then the cost is quartered (to 8.5 capital, rounds up to 9).
The current system, where the capital cost of making small changes to one thing is as large as making huge changes to the vary same things, is not at all realistic.
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Implement fractional political capital, at least in terms of how much each minister gives, even if the total amount from all seven is then rounded down to the nearest whole number. As it is now, the transitions are often very abrupt, e.g. a minister going from 2 capital per quarter to 1 capital per quarter. Adding an intemediate stage of 1.5 capital helps a lot.
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I can’t be sure if the game does this already, not having played much yet, but what about taking the physical ressources of the country into account? I hinted in my other post, at an old strategy game idea I worked a bit at in the mid 1990s, an Africa political/economic simulation strategy game. Part of the idea is that African countries could be much richer than they are, due to (often underground) ressources that aren’t exploited to the benefit of the nation, or sometimes haven’t been discovered yet (one element I wanted for this “Afrika” game design was the president being able to search for additional ressources, e.g. oil and minerals). At the same time, some countries may be very poor in underground ressources. Denmark, where I happen to live, famously didn’t have anything except farmland, until some limited offshore oil ressources were discovered a few decades ago. That should also be a possible scenario factor in D3, causing some industries to have a hard time, often to the point where they aren’t present in the country at all, forcing it to rely on other types of industries instead (and/or import the necessary raw materials).
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Same with infrastructure. Some of what the player could do in this (partly designed, but never programmed) Afrika game, was to build roads, and improve existing roads. Yet at least in the USA scenario, road construction doesn’t affect GDP at all. The game seems to assume that there already are the roads there need to be, and the only reason to build any more is to please certain voter segments. Yet in many third-world countries, much more road needs to be built, in order that the economy can thrive and grow.
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Also as I hinted at in my previous thread, I’d love to have the option, in scenarios, of starting as a dictator and then being given the choice of switching to democracy when I feel ready for it. That may seem as going contrary to the title of the game, but the end goal is still supposed to be to implement democracy, even if one does not start out that way. I think it could result in a richer game, with more possibilities for scenarios.
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It is often suggested in Danish politics, that if the very high taxes on salaries were lowered, some people would choose to work somewhat more, as measured in hours per week (or seeking a higher level of education in order to earn more per hour worked). I don’t know how true that is, but it almost certainly isn’t 100% wrong, and the Democracy series of games seems well equipped to be able to simulate scuh “delayed effect” phenomena, such as a country’s population that has been “thoroughly trained”, by many decades of very high taxes on salaries, to believe that working more isn’t worthwhile, and therefore will need a long time, perhaps a decade or a bit more, to “unlearn” it after salary taxes have been lowered.
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Often I’m at a loss as to what to do with the amount of politicl capital I have, because it’s a medium-sized amount, and I’d like to do something, but I have to click into every single option there is, to see if I can afford to implement it. Some kind of switchable “overlay” would be nice, where I could turn on options to “highlight all scales which I can afford to increase”, “highlight all scale options which I can afford to lower” and “highlight all scale options which I can afford to cancel”. This gets even more useful if political capital costs for the same changes differ from scenario to scenario.
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Implement earmarked political capital, capital that can only be used for certain kinds of changes. In this way the capital gain can be slightly higher, but restricted in terms of what it can be used for. In British politics, the government will sometimes hire a particular person as a “tsar” with a special resort, a special task, such as improving social mobility. The government could have an eight slot, open for one such “tsar”, of the player’s choosing, which accumulates political capital at a faster rate than normal ministers, but with this capital being “locked” in to certain uses, such as one of the seven “areas” of the game screen (taxes, welfare, foreign stuff"). A variant on this is that instead of appointing a “tsar” person as a sort of government position, the government can simply make a public pledge to do something, and so as a result of this pledge gets bonus capital per quarter but locked in for a fairly specific usage. Maybe 15% of extra capital, ear-marked this way.
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Why do I HAVE to make two election promises? What if I only want to make one, or none at all? I can see why it should be limited to two, making three or four would probably be abusive, but why force the player to make promises? Making only one proise, or none at all, could simply be penalized at the polls, by a few percent for only one promise, and a few further percent for no promise at all.
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Steal from Tropico 3. I’m serious. Unlike in Tropico 1, the player can make election promises before each election (can - doesn’t HAVE to), each time able to do up to three things: (a) Talk down one issue, so that the voters will worry less about it and their voting won’t be as influenced by it (e.g. a lack of housing, or a lack of churches). (b) Make one promise (which is remembered, and will make the population unhappy if it isn’t kept. E.g. a promise that before the next election, Tropico WILL have a church). © And praise one political faction (e.g. a voter segment, of which Tropico has 7, with each voter being able to be a member of more than one segment although some are opposed to each other), so that this faction becomes slightly more likely to vote for a re-election.
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Allow the player to adjust the mouse cursor speed. D2 ignores the Windows setting, and has the mouse move very slowly, which is a bad idea in a game that is 100% mouse-controlled. Really. It, and dozens of other usability issues, makes D2 look like what it is: a one-man effort.
