The game longevity problem

There is an issue of difficulty over time with the game as it stands. If you are able to make enough people happy in one election there is no reason you can’t just continue on this track.
I believe that this is due to the country largely existing in a vacuum. There should be more global inputs that have dramatic effects on your country which will then require a complete rethinking of strategy. The Arab Spring and follow on has created dramatic disruptions across Europe in immigration, employment(un), racial tensions. There was another thread that advocated for breaking down immigration further because not all immigrants are equal. Having further international inputs can then modulate immigration as a whole as well as the sub-groups.
Another example that is already partially modeled for but could benefit in this way would be to have more unforseen consequences to min-maxing sliders. Maxing out education related sliders is great but then you run into “the world needs ditch diggers too” issue. Manufacturing job flight is a very real and politically damaging issue that is partially fueled by a highly educated work-force or one that expects higher and higher wages. It says it perfectly on Apple products: “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” For every high paid design job in the US, there are many more lower paying assembly jobs that Apple moved to China for one reason or another.
Politicians live and die by how they react to dilemmas. These already exist in the game but could use more international inputs to them. Also figuring out how exactly to finesse policies would greatly add to the difficulty and longevity of the game.

3 Likes

Currently a lot of the games events are triggering rarely or not at all. I’ve been balancing these today and hopefully this improves things after the next update.

1 Like

You make some decent points here, but I just wanted to comment on one of them.

You mention that “manufacturing job flight is very real” and that it is partially fueled by a highly educated workforce. This is actually incorrect. There is no determinable correlation between a country’s education level and deindustrialization among developed countries. Germany, for example, has one of the highest shares of manufacturing in its economic output in the world, at about 20% of GDP. It also has one of the best educated workforces in the world. Compare this with the United States and many other developed countries, where manufacturing as a share of GDP is only at about 10%.

Deindustrialization and the flight of manufacturing jobs is a complicated phenomenon that is dependent upon many variables, including trade policies, corporate culture, stability, and economic incentives. But education is simply not one of them. Even a “ditch digger” can benefit from vocational and dual education systems.

In fact, as Germany has shown, a highly educated workforce can actually lead to more manufacturing jobs in the long term as education unlocks potential for research and innovation, which eventually leads to commercialization and production of goods.

1 Like

The legendary industrial revolution mod in democracy 3 imagined the return of the Skills Shortage problem as a result of too many high skilled projects in space programs, robotics and carbon capture, which added some cool late-game difficulty.

I think a game model not unlike Frostpunk in which the player is bombarded with new threats and challenges as the game runs on is fascinating but would require dramatic remodelling of the game. Neat idea though. Climate change, refugee crises, the fourth industrial revolution, wars and socio-liberal revolutions are all but inevitable during this century afterall.

That’s the point, a crisis can come up and you can deal with it correctly or not. There are many different ways to accomplish this.

We definitely need more late game stuff, but a lot of this is balance. How many people have really encountered, and struggled with cyclones in the late game?
homelessness is also a situation that is not triggering much, whereas arguably mass migration caused by climate change combined with unemployment caused by automation should make this a likely future concern for some countries?

6 Likes