The 🇨🇦 Canada feedback and balance thread

[cliffski]

CANADA ! Is coming soon, and when the next update rolls it out, I am keen to hear peoples thoughts, especially if you are from Canada and can see where we have gone wrong!

I’m looking for feedback on places where any of the policy settings or values seem wildly off, or any really mainstream policies are missing,

Obviously remember its a game that has to be balanced for fun, so we may have used some artistic license in a few places.

We can have country-specific overrides of any effect in the game, so I’m open to feedback and suggestions.

[Roy]

Hey Cliff, here are some minor bugs and some feedback for you.

I’m not sure if that comma is supposed to be there, but I’ll point it out just in case.

There are some names in the list that aren’t fully capitalized such as ‘party’. It would also be nice if you could add “The Conservative Party”, “The Liberal Party”, and “The New Democratic Party” to the naming list as those are the three most popular parties in Canada.

You currently have Canada set at 5 years per election. Although in our constitution it states there must be an election every 5 years, it is generally regarded that you call one every 4 years. So I would suggest setting it to 4 years instead of 5 years.

Canada has fully universal healthcare that covers everything except dental care, eye care, and pharma care. Around 70% of healthcare is state-run in Canada, so I would probably set the state healthcare to a higher level than where its currently at.

Unknown character in this person’s name?

Canada passed Euthanasia in 2016, and I believe it is one doctors approval.

As others have stated, there needs to be a baseline of supporters within your own party. About 1% of total population.

From strength to strength? Is this what it’s supposed to say?

I would probably lower personal income tax to around 40%, because we have a scaling income tax that increases based on your income. Not many people pay above 40% as a result of this. You could also create a set of policies that deal with income tax brackets which ties directly to the income tax rate. Just a suggestion.

Third Parties need to be strengthened across the board in countries with parliamentary democracies. In Canada, a third party usually wins 15%-20% of the vote (or around 2 million votes). As the game also counts non-voters, this would translate to about 7-10% on this election screen. So just some general re-balancing there.

That’s all I have for now, but will post more after I play another round today.

[cliffski]

Thanks for the feedback. I’m fixing some of this now. ‘from strength to strength’ is a deliberate term, maybe its only common in the UK? basically means ‘keeps getting stronger’. I admit that when analyzed, it sounds like nonsense

Some of these issues with canada are a result of game balancing. the country seemed to have sa way bigger deficit with the default model, so I had to tweak some things,m including giving them more oil supply from tar sands, a healthier outdoor lifestyle a tourism boost and the northwest passage as a trading boom over time.

Sadly third parties cannot be easily ‘hacked’ as they are emergent in support terms. I am considering some demographic overrides to the canada map so that conservatives and religious people are less extreme, although I would rather find out what policies may have led to that, than just blindly hack in an adjuster.

Basically it seems like canadian conservatives are fairly moderate comapred to the US, and our model doesn’t know why yet…

[AvianOverlord]

@cliffski

Thanks for the feedback. I’m fixing some of this now. ‘from strength to strength’ is a deliberate term, maybe its only common in the UK? basically means ‘keeps getting stronger’. I admit that when analyzed, it sounds like nonsense

It’s a line from the King James Bible, I believe. I (an American) have encountered it as well.

[Mppd]

Not sure if you want glitches on this thread but I seem to have quickly come across a visual glitch playing with Canada

[raxo2222]

They seem to happen while playing for over half of hour…

[cliffski]

I’m still investigating this. I have tried to reproduce it but failed. its something going wrong under specific circumstances in our algorithmn. I might release a patched version early tommorow that dumps a bunch of debug information, and gives the player a hotkey to dump out data for us.
It might be some combination of video card typesize and screen resolution that we just do not have access to

[raxo2222]

Well those glitches didn’t happen before 1.115 release for me.

[cliffski]

I think its possibly the case that they are part of the 64 bit version of some of the middleware used to render vector graphics, so they would not have been an issue until then, which is very annoying, but I’m sure we can track it down.

[BloodySoap]

Canadian here.

1. This is actually incorrect. While Canada does not have an “inheritance tax” on its own, there is still effectively taxation of inheritances in that when someone dies, the transfer of their estate to their beneficiaries is treated as a sale, so that the capital gains are still taxed. It is not a very effective way of taxing inheritances and leads to inequality in the long-term, but it is still a tax in inheritances. Keep in mind that this is a game in the end, and some choices have to be made in order to simplify the nuances of the real world. In this case, we can safely assume that the “inheritance tax” policy in the game covers the taxation of inheritances in general, so that it is correct for it to be present in the Canadian context.

2. In effect, what you are saying confirms what Cliff states, which is that Canadian conservatives are more moderate than American ones. I’m in Alberta, which is basically the Canadian version of Texas in terms of conservatism, and even our conservatives are not nearly on the same level of their American counterparts.

3. This is actually already in the game! It’s the “married tax allowance” policy.

[BloodySoap]

Good job on the overall balancing and policy positions in Canada, Cliff. I have yet to see any glaring issues, with one exception: Canada’s debt.

From what I’ve seen so far, the debt figures for the other countries in the game are generally from the end of the last year, and include the entirety of the public sector debt load - federal, state, local, etc. - which is called the general government debt. For example, Germany’s in-game debt of around 1950 billion Euros represents the general government debt as of the end of 2019.

However, for some reason you chose to only include the federal government’s debt in Canada’s current in-game debt. For consistency’s sake, I think you should make the figure be representative of Canada’s general government debt, which in Canada is held much more by provincial and local authorities than in other countries. The year-end figure for 2019 is 2497 billion dollars, as per Canada’s statistical agency:

General government gross debt, quarterly

[perfectwing]

Why is Canada’s Gay Marriage value so low?

[BloodySoap]

On my third playthrough now, and I noticed one other major problem, aside from the debt one I mentioned above. Canada does, in fact, have a capital gains tax, though it is not a separate “tax” you can point to. Instead, half of your total capital gains are taxable, and they get added onto your income for the year when its time to prepare your tax return. So, in practice, our capital gains tax rate is actually not very high. I would suggest a value of around 10% as a default policy setting for capital gains tax.

Capital Gains Tax — Canada 2020 | Wealthsimple

[cliffski]

Thanks for the feedback. I am supr swamped right now, but will edit canada when I get a chance!

[Sasquatch]

Canada does have a national space programme, although it’s a small one:

Canadian Space Agency

Canada should definitely start out with a real-estate bubble. We’re on par with Australia as far as out-of-control real estate costs go.

Canadian property bubble

In response to @roy above: including the New Democratic Party for Canada is okay. For us they’re a bunch of harmless socialists. In Germany the National Democratic Party (or NPD) is the neo-Nazi party. When I went to Germany and mentioned that the NDP were our third choice nationally it raised eyebrows until both sides explained the party platforms behind the names/acronyms.

The exact timing of the election is still up in the air. Our previous Prime Minister (Steven Harper) tried pushing through some American-style legislation where it defaults to every 4 years but the government can still easily vote to call a snap election within the 4 year timeframe or to delay an election up to the 5 year limit (although the second scenario hasn’t happened yet). 4 years is the most reasonable default.

Fixed election dates in Canada

Other than a few small nitpicks, it looks great. Thanks for including Canada

[Roy]

One last piece of feedback on Canada: Remove legalized sex work. Canada does not have prostitution (unless you’re counting stripping as prostitution).

[BloodySoap]

I was going to comment that as well, but I did some research and found that this is actually partially incorrect. Here in Canada we have a sort of “hybrid” prostitution law that is present in a couple of other countries as well. Essentially, sex work is legal - you can sell sexual services in Canada without the seller breaking any laws. However, it is illegal to purchase sex work - therefore, the buyer could be found criminally liable in that case. However, there are some nuances to that when it comes to lower level sex work, meaning things that are not explicitly prostitution. So I think a “medium” value for sex work is actually fairly accurate given the circumstances.

[AvianOverlord]

Uh, no, the Nordic model is 100% making prostitution illegal, just in a way more palatable to liberal sensibilities.