Glad to hear it! 
So, true!
- Much easier to press a button!
- Trident is the nuclear weapon Harrods would sell you!
- Whatâs the last resort, Piccadilly?!
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i like this, but what about the diplomacy options?
Any true leader makes decisions on his own initiative, he dosenât just react to events, and implementing an actual way to do foreign policy would be a big step step towards that.
For more info look at my previous post this thread.
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I think most of the time, a leader is indeed planning, analyzing and initiating action, but at the same time, as president/prime minister you are sometimes put on the spot where immediate decisions need to be made. Its rare, but it definitely happens, and its the flipside to the normal day-to-day drudgery of politics.
For diplomacy, we already have a system of policies and situations. This DLC would deliberately target only the âOMG mr president what do we do right now?â events.
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Makes me wonder about what President Zelenskyy was thinking about, when he waited till Russia invaded to issue a general mobilization and martial law? Maybe it wouldâve been seen as a sign of aggression and lead to an early invasion by Russia, and Ukraine wouldâve been less combat ready? Perhaps this wisely allowed Ukraine to prepare quietly and unmolested.
iâm dissapointed that you donât want to implement an actual diplomacy system rather than just general policies, but i do think that the situation room with time limited events is a very good idea and i like that youâre thinking about implementing it.
Also @Chantern15 makes an iteresting point here, if youâre going to have the situation room, one of the things that can happen is war.
Finally, since you have the idea of the situation room and time limited events, what about the idea of having decision trees?
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How do you think a diplomacy system could be implemented in D4?
a map with clickable countries, that give you a drop down menu with options once you click them.
options should be stuff like trade deal,declare war, sign peace treaty, alliance, non-agression pact, etcâŠ
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That does seem workable.
The trouble with diplomacy is that the real world is hellishly complex.
Most people playing this game, on this forum, will have some idea of the state of US relations with China, with Russia and with the UK (for example).
But whats the current state of South Koreaâs relations with France? Do you know if these countries have any military partnerships? much trade? much tourism between them? much foreign investment (in or out)?
I certainly do not, and we would have to model ALL of this, for every possible combination of country in the game, otherwise it would be laughably inaccurate.
But TBH Iâm not phased by the amount of work, its more that you then have to assume the player already knows a lot of this stuff⊠and people generally donât.
Its doable if the whole game is about that one topic, or if you pick just one playable country, but a game like Democracy 4, where diplomacy would just be one piece of the puzzle, and players might be playing a country they only have vague knowledge of⊠makes it a really tricky thing to add.
(by comparison, we can invent âsecurity situationsâ for a DLC which are generic enough to be believable in any country).
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Well it looks like Iâm late to this party, but what about adding a more active opposition? Currently the opposition passively soaks whatever votes the player doesnât win, but in real politics thereâs constantly somebody actively gunning for your job.
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I second that. Though the game kind of has such mechanics by adjusting approval threshold, I still think having apparent actions from the opposition would not only provide more challenges but also more immersions.
Quoted from Potential change to elections
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If you look at HOI 4 and Stellaris, or Crisis in the Kremlin, we can just assume that all relations are neutral, or default to slightly, which depends on different views between nations and their assigned values and weights (for example in Stellaris, A Xenophile empire will have a -10 opinion modifier for a Xenophobic empire, for just those two values, they could have a +10 if they were both democratic, or in the HOI 4 mod, Cold War Iron Curtain, you can spend political power, or political points as theyâre called in hoi4 to gain a foothold of influence in a country and then start subsidizing their economy which will increase their opinion of you by 20, evenn if theyâre hostile or neutral). We can place the players in such a neutral/slightly hostile environment (with some allies) and let them form their own diplomatic solutions to crises/normal geopolitics.
correct, if @cliffski is going to add in the diplomacy system as i suggested itâs best that most relations are a blank slate, and mabye make things like EU, UN, NATO etc⊠have an effect, also this for the coutries that start as members, of organizations you should be able to leave, and vice versa for courtries that are not members, this would be very interesting if we also had the historical start dates.
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Donât a lot of these things fall out from existing policies? Things like the Trade Council, Tourism ads, etc. - while not specific on a country-by-country basis - give a general direction of a nationâs direction. It does perhaps require an element of imagination from the player to fill in some of the gaps, but, as youâve stated before, thereâs only so much space on the screen.
I do also think some players might not always appreciate some of the emergent effects in the game. There might not be a âHow do you want to trade with Sierra Leone?â policy, but decisions like rare earth mining, electronics recycling, foreign aid, agriculture subsidies, etc. all add up in a way that, given a specific country, a player could figure out what kind of relationship their nation would have with a third nation.
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Hmmm more money spent on DLC?
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Iâve been thinking up scenarios for this potential DLC, and I think many of the interesting ones are some variation on the âbombing of Sheffield dilemmaâ.
There is a conspiracy theory that in WW2, the English let the German bombing of Sheffield go ahead, so as to not let the nazis realize that we had broken the engima code.
In general, a democractic government could never actively sanction the killing of its own citizens, or stand by while they were killed, under any circumstances, but there may be circumstances where sticking to that is not practical.
For example: Intel suggests a terrorist has a dirty bomb and is aboard a train heading for the capital city. There is no time to get to the train on the ground, but the train could be deliberately derailed remotely at points. A few dozen people will die, hundreds injured, but its the only way to be sure we can stop the terrorist reaching a crowded capital city. Do we do it?
I guess the game would need to model several possibilities:
- It works. situation avoided, assumed accident. Train use falls!
- We take no actionâŠdirty bomb in capital. huge disaster!
- We take no action, false alarm.
- It works, but the details leak to the press (mitigated by censorship and free press policy, and maybe the loyalty of the law and order minister). PR disaster.
I think the real trick is finding situations like this where the player feels their actions have some impact on the event. Such as free press/censorship/loyalty etc. Perhaps our usage of nuclear power might impact how likely it was that a terrorist got dirty bomb material?
I think in many cases, security effectiveness would influence how confident the intel is about the chances of each outcome.
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I would say mainly corruption, since some of the materials that can be used, like Cobalt-60, can be obtained from corrupt medical oficial, not only from corrupt nuclear oficials.
That seems a weird one in the modern age. Someone in control of the train has a phone in their pocket and could hit the brakes. I see what youâre going for, but you might want to keep it to events which really happened to avoid plot holes like thatâŠunless this is a real event I somehow missed?
I also donât think your customers would be impressed by a DLC pack that just adds a few extra dilemmas. Unless weâre talking about sub $5 micro transactions a DLC needs to feel like it added an entire section to the game or else youâre going to face backlash.
For a DLC you would need something more profound, such as a more detailed break down of foreign relations into more than one single global monolithic opinion, or an active opposition, or a tendency for large voter groups to have internal schisms where they break into new groups, such as liberals breaking into classic liberals and neo liberals.
As for the playerâs use of nuclear fission increasing the likelihood of a dirty bomb, that horse escaped the barn long ago. The materials to make dirty bombs are already out there and wouldnât have to originate in the playerâs own country. Further to that, depending on the design used, use of nuclear fission could just as easily make dirty bomb materials more scarce. Some design of nuclear reactor were made to produce weapons materials first, and produced some energy as a PR stunt. Otherâs were genuinely made to make energy. The latter donât really need refined fuel, and the waste left by the time theyâre done is so low energy that it wouldnât be worth acquiring as bomb material.
The thing is, when you ask players to vote on what they want, content wise, they overwhelmingly pick more countries, or more policies. Gameplay changes of any kind are really low in the list.
I think the âaverageâ player is very different to people who are more into the game, who tend to think more about game mechanics.
This is why so many games have cosmetic stuff like hats. The hardcore players always want more mechanics, more involved gameplay etc, but when it comes to analytics, people buy hats.
I can definitely do DLC with more countries, and I know this would be popular, but I would like to do something different too.
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Thinking more about the possibilities with secret-intelligence services style DLC, there are a number of things the game does not cover which would be decisions taken at the highest level of government. For example:
Whether to use surveillance on theoretical allies (like when the US was possibly bugging the German chancellor - Snowden NSA: Germany drops Merkel phone-tapping probe - BBC News).
Whether to sanction false-flag events like fake attacks, to build up public support to crack down on protest groups. False flag - Wikipedia
The sanctioning of possibly legitimate protest groups, making their membership illegal, and thus dissuading people from legitimate protest.
Actual banning of public protest in certain locations, or under certain circumstances.
The insistence of government access âback-doorsâ in tech companyâs products to ensure government surveillance cannot be evaded. What is a Tech Back Door? | Cyber Espionage
Direct operations against protest groups, up to and including violence and even murder in the name of protecting government security.
I think a lot of these can work as time-limited dilemmas, that bring something different to the game. I think the key thing that separates such stuff from conventional game dilemmas would be:
- A focus on intelligence/secret service stuff, meaning only players interested in that side of politics would get the DLC, offering player choice.
- A time-limit, which puts a different feel on the seriousness of the decision.
- No opportunity to consult outside polling or other data, due to the immediacy of the decision.
- The dilemma would include some imperfect data, whose accuracy would depend on certain policy choices.
- I can add some effects and outcomes which are currently not linked. Such as a ban on protests reducing the growth of all terrorist groups, or the current threat level of all groups being reduced as a result of a decision.
- I think adding artwork and sound effects for every one of these is doable, and would give a different feel to that part of the game.
Thoughts?
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