Add all your criticisms of the modelling of Australia in the game here, and we will do our best to improve the way the game is repreesenting this country. Also a good place to include any suggestions for mission-specific dilemmas, policies or situations for Australia.
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I think your attempts to balance Australia may have gone too far, considering I didn’t change much other than make liberals happier and reduce oil dependency.
Interesting. does it get harder for you in the second term?
Subsequent elections always are easier than first one.
Unless you try to reduce expenses, then game is more challenging.
I think its biased in this way, because most of policies increase happiness, as you spend more on policy
Usually there is no reason to not start policy at max level.
You should track election streaks too - that is number of election won in same game.
Information could be stored in saved game.
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There is a general problem in the game that I need to spend some time on where the game is mostly about the first election, because to get elected once requires you to solve enough problems to get 50% happiness, and from then on, happiness does not degrade enough for you to be sufficiently challenged.
The game DOES have a number of systems in it to prevent this being a problem, but they likely need to be ramped up. The ones I can immediately think of are:
- Cynicism on the part of voter groups who are especially happy makes them harder to keep at 100%.
- Global climate change continues to get worse which puts pressure on food prices and immigration over time.
- Technology increased lifespan, and thus population and pushes up health costs.
- Ministers loyalty slowly degrades so they need replacing
- Some negative events are artificially more likely when winning, such as hurricanes, high-rise blaze, food scandal, and loads more.
its possible that the systems just need to be ramped up a bit.
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Wait, that’s a thing? Other than initially, when ministers are random (I’d argue you should be free to pick your ministers on your first turn), I literally never notice this. Once they are aligned with what I want to do, they don’t drop.
But also, should that be a thing? If you are doing stuff they’d like, I don’t see why they should get less loyal. - In absence of another force to make them more loyal to anyways.
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The idea is that over time, ministers will gradually find reasons to be disloyal. They will resent actions you take, get blamed for mistakes, passed-over for promotions, and generally lose the initial optimism they had when you first promoted them to the job. Generally speaking it does seem that over the long run politicians become less loyal to a party leader over time. Although maybe thats a UK perspective?
That’s what my last sentence is about. They have to have a reason to get disloyal. It doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. If you do actions that please them, they won’t drop off.
In reality, you have to compromise and that can cause resentment. If you manage to boost that, it’d make sense for ministers to start perhaps hating you. But in the game, once you get over the initial hump, as established, you basically don’t need to compromise. People just love you all the time.
That being said I wonder how this will end up working. Like, eventually, if you have already implemented all the right policies, if you push these things too high, you’re effectively making it so it’s impossible to keep going. I guess at some point, there just is the end game of having implemented all reasonable policies and tweaked them (mostly, of course, minimized or maximized them) and at that point it’d be silly for people to eventually vote you out because you don’t change a thing - because you can’t change a thing.
So weirdly the balance would be to have resentment grow quite a bit relatively early (in order to keep each election even remotely challenging) but in the long run still make it obsolete (namely roughly when you’d have everything implemented)?
I’m not sure how to best handle that. Really this game, as it currently stands, just hasn’t very strong end game design. All I can do at that point is, like, minimize term lengths and then set term limits to finite, and “retire gracefully”
Which, I suppose, is fine? I’m honestly not quite sure what to do about that. You obviously can’t just have infinitely many policies.
But anyway, I like those other things more than the one about minister loyalty. At least if it’s out of the blue. If there is a reason which you can actually affect, I’d be fine with it
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Excited about the Aussie addition. Haven’t had a chance to play it properly, but here are my suggestions for dilemmas and situations. Should be clear which groups each of these impact.
Not sure I agree with our obsession on private schools. I’d say we are more obsessed with Aussie Rules Football (AFL), at least below the Barassi Line
Dilemmas
Deputy PM caught having an affair with staffer, who had his baby
Choice:
- Sack deputy and institute ‘bonking ban’
- Do nothing, personal life does not affect job as politician
Introduction of a new Mineral Rent Resource Tax (also a policy)
Choice:
- Introduce the tax
- Don’t introduce it, or water down legislation so much that no money is made
Scandal over government purchased of land at 10x real value for new Airport
Choice
- Introduce Federal Government corruption watchdog
- Do nothing
Situations
- PM eats an onion https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/it-was-beautiful-tony-abbott-finally-explains-the-moment-he-bit-into-a-raw-onion/news-story/78f086ab4bf3f01d30670a9cb50d7401
- PM berates opposition leader over misogyny in parliamentary speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogyny_Speech
- Robodebt – automated debt recovery for people on govt benefits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
- First Online Census lead to IT meltdown https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-09/abs-website-inaccessible-on-census-night/7711652
- Right wing senator wears burqa in parliament to ‘expose security threats’ https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/pauline-hanson-in-parliament-with-a-burqa/news-story/b73c1be5cfa37b4f9dae6644dd7b245d
Starting policies Feedback
Intelligence Policies
- Tasers - Yes. Many State police have Tasers as standard issue. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/at-a-glance-taser-use-in-australia
- Secret Trials - Yes https://www.smh.com.au/national/secret-trials-our-judges-need-to-resist-the-government-s-pressure-20200717-p55d2p.html
- Wire Tapping - Yes, extensive https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/08/assistance-and-access-law-encrypted-messaging-explained/
Other Policies
-
Sales Tax Policy (AKA GST as it is locally known). It is 10% (with some exclusions like rent and food, excluding junk and takeaway food) , not 12%
-
State Owned Telco: National Broaband Network (NBN) is a Federal Govt wholesale broadband network owned by Australian govt, private retail telco must purchase this to resell to citizens for fixed line internet and voice
-
Tobacco Tax: Should start at 50%, not 30% see https://www.who.int/tobacco/global_report/2017/appendix-ix/en/
Game is too easy, if you spend recklessly.
Play as liberal socialist, you don’t have to care much about debt and environment.
Everyone eventually voted for me as lowest approving voter had more than 60% happiness.
Debt crisis doesn’t do absolutely anything, as its still too easy to counter it popularity and GDP wise…
Recommendations:
We have a massive alcohol problem in this country- so the Alcohol Abuse situation
We should probably have the Welfare Fraud Dept policy- I happen to work in it lol, and Australia very aggressively means tests its welfare, so there are many more opportunities for such fraud to occur
Most of our health system is actually private, but tbh you haven’t coded any policies that really accommodate our healthcare system (public/private ownership, public rebates on approved treatments).
Rural development grants are a thing over here, particularly in the Northern Territory and Queensland.
There should be an Australian geography modifier to represent Aboriginal people as part of ethnic minorities.
I’m not sure why we start out with import tariffs when other countries don’t.
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An Aussie the Workshop created a mod to simulate Australia’s Superannuation Guarantee pension system. The mod was created before Australia was released and is specifically about Australia’s retirement system. Link here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2254145619
Tidbits from the Workshop page:
- Employers must contribute 9.5% of an employee’s wages to their retirement accounts. This is called Superannuation. It’s been in Australia in 1992, and meant to reduce the state pension liability.
- Australia has a Super Tax, at 30%, which is levied on gains & losses from private pensions.
I can’t verify those facts, but this sounds like something that could be simulated in-game somehow? Perhaps even incorporate some aspects of the mod into the game proper, while tweaking its sliders?
I ironically have a lot of difficulty when it comes to solving deficits long-term, if that helps. Some of the modded maps out there have done wonders at making subsequent terms a lot harder.
The publicity stunts are really good for balancing, too, because they’re limited in use. I’ve more than once bailed myself out of an election by doing publicity stunts, only to then be unsure how to handle the next election once I’ve raised taxes.
Probably the hardest challenge is fixing debt problems will staying in office, assuming you’re in a debt crisis and you’ve survived election 1’s happiness problems. Subsequent terms become “How do I salvage this situation where 60% of my expenses are purely debt and 40% of my income is borrowing?”
Superannuation is taxed at 15%, only above like 250K income and contributions does it go to 30%
Some great Australia-specific ideas here. I plan on revisiting all the countries after a few more are in, and getting more country-specific stuff in game. Some of it may require new artwork, which is why I’m waiting to get it all ordered in one go :D.
Regarding minister loyalty, I did make a tweak yesterday, for tomorrow’s planned update, which halves the impact on minister loyalty when you sack a colleague. I think that it was definitely too high, and meant reshuffles always made more sense than a firing, which was not the intention.
For climate change for Australia, I’m not sure how this would be implemented, but they have a Carbon Emissions Fund. It’s similar to the carbon credit / purchasing schemes proposed over the years in other countries. tl;dr businesses can sell emissions cuts they make back to the government See https://www.industry.gov.au/funding-and-incentives/emissions-reduction-fund maybe this would be the eco-generation tax policy or a climate change fund? It’s $3.5B.
Giving Australia the Great Barrier Reef as a unique tourism attractor that makes patriots & environmentalists happy - but can easily degrade due to Year + Pollution + the Fisheries event + Oil Drilling and only be repaired through expensive environmental policies - could be interesting too.
They also planted 20 million trees over 7 years (ending in 2020) in their reforestation program, see http://www.nrm.gov.au/national/20-million-trees.