The Elections Expansion
- Though it may sound similar to the Electioneering of D3, it’s always an interesting matter. More tricks to elections can add another layer of strategies. Democracy the game is about letting players know why so many real-world politicians don’t do something seemingly good in my eyes, by giving a chance to put themselves in politicians’ shoes. Letting them to have a chance to mess with elections will be a good one, too.
- However, I want to point out that they might end up being another first-term shenanigans. While I actively use electioneering contents in the first term, they start losing their value very quickly after that. I don’t even make any speech after the first election, needless to mention pledges. High-Campaigning ministers are broken strong at the first term but it doesn’t matter when my approval soars. All I need are effective & loyal ministers who can help me achieve +23 PC/turn for either Satellite Road Pricing or Faith School Subsidies. For campaign funds, I don’t really care about it for the whole game. New electioneering tools won’t be any different from them if over-90% vote share victory is a norm.
- Another worrying point is, that I’ve never seen any shenanigans involving political apathy slider. Players can set political apathy level before starting the mission but it’s rarely touched. If manipulating voter turnout was important in this game, there’s a high chance that someone has already tried exploiting that setting.
- I hope it to include vague notions of parliamentary elections or intra-party conflicts (possibly primary/caucus). Introducing needs to care about party loyalty can be a good way of adding more difficulties for widely-supported governments. While it can be said that minister loyalty kinda does this, losing their loyalty wouldn’t be as damaging as losing the confidence of your party.
- Nonethelss, I’d say that it’d be better to take my feedback with a pinch of salt since I was skeptical when D3: Electioneering was released. Currently I’m actively appointing high-campaigning stat ministers at least in the first term.
The Situation Room
- I guess you should remember that Emergency & Terrorism mod or something from Democracy 3. It was one of the best mods in D3 for me. It would be nice if I can see a DLC expanding its features.
- I hope this to become a chance to make the conservative voters more important. I’ve recently tried laissez-faire capitalism and ended up employing lots of policing & security measures (even including racial profiling, which I have neglected until then) since it was quite hard to suppress crime. It was the first time I felt that it might be helpful to go with the conservatives. But it’s not the case for more paternal governments, which tend to have near-zero poverty. Though this may mean that the poverty & game difficulty need to be addressed (as it has been recently discussed here), introduction of more general terrorism can also be a key.
- I personally liked just a bit of predictability on terror attack frequency in that mod. Terror attacks were more likely to happen if you have high racial tension and poor security. It gave me choices - will you look at the bigger picture and hope for good results or take a hard-line approach and achieve victory? Though actual links between a society’s racial tension and terror attack probabilities can be disputed, it was interesting for a game mechanic in D3.
Just a bit about Modding Tools
- I understand what you mean by ‘let modders do what they can do while developers doing what only devs can do’ and it could be seen as something quasi-feasible to add ‘missions by starting years.’ But modding tools are still rather restrictive.
- I had several modding ideas and have actually implemented some of them. But it wasn’t possible to do so without directly modifying some .*csv files. Sometimes the targets weren’t up for modding via overrides (LIS mod). There also have been some cases that some specific overrides didn’t work at all (income adjustment). And now I can’t find any example how to modify existing dilemma/event results (CreateGrudge ones) via overrides. Attached related forum post links below.
- +I’m still not sure whether circular links between 2 factors is okay to have or not.
- I appreciate your efforts to make moddings more accessible for broader users. But I hoped more powerful tools in my hands. I don’t really want to distribute my mods with download links and tell them how to install them (also, *.csv modifying mods need to be updated every time the game gets an update :/).
[My modding projects discontinued because of limitations]: