Certainly any “ticking clock” mechanic would only be viable in an optional DLC, as it would feel out of character to the rest of the game where 3 months go by every time I click next turn. The same would probably be true of imperfect data. It’s a concept which would be cool, knowing that my current education level is 93%, therefore I should not spend more than required to boost it by another 7% is a bit gamey. It’s also what this game is now established as doing. It could be a slider bar at the start of game “how much inaccuracy will you tolerate”, with some content and even achievements gated behind inaccuracy thresholds. It would also be good to throw in a post game review where the player gets to see what the inaccuracies were after the game is over.
Apart from what is being discussed now, I have one suggestion. I want a dlc set in a developing country like democracy 3 africa.
Also, speaking of intelligence services dlc, I think it would be interesting to have, for example, an event in which people would choose between the allied military and their own citizens, or an event in a situation that could lead to an accidental nuclear war. (For example, a situation where a hijacked US military aircraft is about to cause a 9/11-like event in the UK, Germany, or Japan, or a situation where a strategic nuclear submarine receives the wrong nuclear strike order, such as Crimson Tide or Failsafe…)
Nuclear Power Plants are generally very secure.
Examples:
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The collapse of the Soviet Union did not result in an increase in nuclear proliferation, when compared to the significant increase in conventional arms distribution across the World.
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At the height of the insurgency, Pakistan did not lose control of its nuclear materials.
I’ve done a blog post about this with a voting link at the end to choose which sounds best to people:
https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2022/03/17/thoughts-on-potential-democracy-4-expansions-dlc/
Nonetheless, I voted for Situation Room, let those nuclear power plants be targeted! 
As I don’t have a twitter account (and no plan to have one :P), I’ll just leave some of my thoughts here.
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Voting System
If I were to choose the most interesting topic to address, I would have chosen this. It’s a really important matter and the game has much more to say regarding it. I’d be glad to see this idea implemented into DLC but can’t be sure that this will the best choice for D4. I want this game to make absolute landslide much harder, have more morally grey areas (instead of obviously evil choices), and add more political players involved in power game. In light of these, I think more contents on voting system & funding (which is inevitably linked to lobbying) will improve the game. However, there are risks such as newer players finding election more complicated than actually is, misleading them that electioneering is much more important than governance, or getting neglected since players don’t need all the tricks to win the election indefinitely. -
Situation Room
I’m not really interested in the topic of terrorism or intelligence wars. But I’d still be glad to see this implemented because it will make all these security policies more valuable. Currently, while players can choose to employ all the draconian measures to deal with crimes & terrorism, it is much easier to just prevent them by eradicating poverty & being popular. It would be particularly effective at dealing with this as mere threats of terror attacks or risks of getting a bad result from choices will make players use such measures more than they would have when there was a visible “terrorism” simulation. But I’m still not sure whether time restraints would be effective at pressuring players and worth the efforts needed to implement. -
Dirty Tricks
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t like giving obviously evil choices. I also hate “morality meters” for videogames. While I definitely want more contents to be added regarding corruption, I don’t think Tropico-style score would work here. Also, opposition/voter suppression will only make the game easier. The only interesting thing I can imagine with it is ‘do nothing but election tricks’ challenge. I’ve done it several times with electioneering feature and it was unexpectedly interesting. -
Country Pack
The safest bet would be this. But I personally want to see more mechanics that modders can’t implement.
How is “dirty tricks” a morality meter?
Perhaps we could track both your own morals (on a good → corrupt axis) along with your private bank account, as things that a player could choose to focus on for their own satisfaction :D.
We could just change that to incorrupt->corrupt meter, and it would stop being a morality meter. Then it would just represent reality.
The point of having a meter along with corruption score (or swiss bank account balance) is to say what is good and bad however you call it. You are just playing with words instead of getting to the point.
If the government is corrupt, it’s corrupt. It’s informative for the player, how the political compass is. That’s not a moral judgement, that’s just an expression of reality. If someone takes state funds for any use other than budgetary purposes, that’s corruption. Using the budget to make corruption legal, is a separate issue. It can be called “legal corruption”, (pork barrel politics), but there’s no such policy in D4 (“spend $300,000 to have meals with business executives”).
If there are no moral statements and judgements, how can it be politics?
If you insist that ‘corruption meter’ is okay to have, what’s the point of having dedicated corruption meter along with a corruption score? These two are exactly duplicate unless the former is used to evaluate what is good & bad.
Also you say politics is about moral judgement. But it should be left for each player to have some time to think what is moral. Moral meter is so hated because a bunch of people in a studio decide what is good & bad, like Frostpunk saying killing a child to fix the generator isn’t really evil while beating prisoners is wrong.
Well, ideally, the effort should not be duplicated. Maybe we can have a test to see how two separate corruption methods work and how they are percieved.
As for type of moral judgement. My argument that it’s a video game, and it doesn’t have to reflect reality entirely, and players always work in the world the devs make, it’s a challlenge for players to overcome that adversity. One could argue that it’s a question of passive judgement v active judgement. Why should I have any adversity in my game? Isn’t that a moral judgement, some people don’t face any adversity in life, I want my games to be easy, etc. There can be an argument about what is a judgement or not, or ideological or not. But it’s upto the players how to work around those limitations with the tools they have. Plus, morals are realistic. In FallOut 3, you could nuke that town and have your moral meter drop really low, but there would be no impact outside of people calling you evil, losing some quests and having a different ending. In Frostpunk, you can kill kids, either through ignorance (refusing refugees), or malice, or by “ends justify the means” reasoning by sending them to dangerous jobs, the game doesn’t stop you from you doing that. It just tells you that your people will hate you for sending their children to the meat grinder, and are more likely to overthrow you. That’s a neutral moral judgement and more realistic.
Ideally, in Frostpunk, beating prisoners should make some of your people unhappy too, while making others happy, that’s a question of balance. Furthermore, being more draconian makes more and more of your people hating you and leads to an exodus.
D4 is the same, it doesn’t prevent you from taking an action, it just shows you the consequences of those actions, which is what it should do.
Disco Elysium has a moral system, and there are different outcomes based upon your actions, that doesn’t make it any less fun for me.
My argument is, whether or not a dev makes a game moral or not, make it fun.
You like less or no moral judgements, that’s fine and D4 has not much, it just shows you the moral reaction of different groups.
Maybe you don’t like social moral mechanics, but perhaps economic moral mechanics?
The problem with “moral meter” in Frostpunk was the ending part. It says you have not crossed the line when you sent a child to fix the generator at the brink of explosion from overload fatigue while saying you have crossed the line when you ‘persuaded’ some prisoners with violence. Who decides sending a child to die to save the whole city is moral (or at least not evil) and beating prisoners is wrong?
I’m relatively okay with a character or group saying I’m immoral. Some workers being discontent with child labor when the city is going to freeze without their small hands? I understand. Socialists hailing me for taxing the rich? What else. But the game saying I’m evil not because I’ve sent a child to die in the generator which had been overloaded for fun but as I’m using forceful persuasion method or the game evaluating my political career in a way like “you’ve embezzled XXXXX amount of budget but you are not so evil since you’ve done Z!” is just an immersion-killer.
Also, it’s not really possible to create a perfect moral meter even if there is an absolute moral criteria. People can become reaaaally creative when it comes to being evil.
Maybe it’s the Nature of the society it’s meant to emulate. Children would be sent to chimneys to clean them and were made to work in factories in Victorian times, perhaps because of the the earlier Elizabethan assumption that children were just smaller adults, so sacrificing a child to save the colony might be in line, due to the salvationary aspect of it, maybe it would be better if it were voluntary? But beating prisoners maybe considered wrong, or more wrong, because there’s no higher purpose behind it. People justify wrongs if they serve a higher purpose, but if they see no purpose in that, they may balk at it. Furthermore, it could’ve been an oversight by the devs. People also hail the sacrifice of children as a way of saying to adults, if they can do it, why not you (where there could be an argument about the power imbalance, if adults choose to not make those sacrifices).
It could be argued that punishing prisoners serves a higher purpose, but Frostpunk allows you to arbitrally punish people too, which may not serve any higher purpose outside of terror for order. Which also backfires.
About your point about corruption. This is sort of how some people think of politics in India. Most people would prefer no, or little corruption and vote for those who stand on such platforms, but living in the real world, they choose the lesser evil of those who maybe corrupt but also get the job done, and the advantage of some corrupt people, since they’re so corrupt, they can be bought to look the other way, so there’s less chance for tyranny (Aurangzeb was a tyrant, but he was very honest, but of course not all tyrants are), of course this can backfire. And this is why anti-corruption movements are so popular.
Perhaps we are not interested in creating a perfecr moral meter, just to give people a general idea of where they stand in relation to the most commonly accepted definitions.
About Aurangzeb, it’s not accurate to put modern standards in Aurangzeb, as most leaders in those days had some tyrannical aspects, maybe it’s more accurate to say that he was puritanical (even if he made some concessions).
Actually this is a contentious issue.
Tyranny of Aurangzeb:
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Disagreement: Why Aurangzeb's Reputation As A Tyrant And Bigot Doesn't Stand The Test Of History | HuffPost null
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Agreement:
Aurangzeb's tyranny and bigotry cannot be whitewashed: A counter-view - Living News , Firstpost
This seemw to be a case of left v right arguing, but really where like the genocide of Uyghurs, some of the right has rightly pointed out an atrocity and some of the left has rejected this argument for political purposes. Although I think that this is all political. He’s a tyrant, but there’s no need to change his name from a road that’s so commonly known, although, yes, imagine having a “Hitler Street” in Berlin.
But it’s kind of like the point of David Mitchell about Vikings being so in vogue now because time has passed and we’re not moved by their rape and pillage because so much time has passed. So, who knows maybe Berlin 500 years from now will talk casually about Hitler and Nazis, because it’s an event so far removed from presemt historical memory. I guess time-travellers shouldn’t be surprised to find a “Hitler Street” controversy in the future.
As I’ve mentioned in my ‘immersion-killer’ examples, I can send a child into the generator and die when it’s me who overloaded the generator to 99% just for fun, and which happen to be less immoral than beating prisoners. Moral meters are that crude and vulnerable to “evil” creativity. I personally don’t like that notion in the first place and it will fail anyway. Let’s say most of my party donors are wealthy and I want them to happy enough to be generous. Will it be corrupt if I implement tax haven or other high-earner tax cuts to make them happy and possibly get more campaign funds? What about placating the poor with welfare programs when most of my votes & party expenditure contributions are coming from low-earners? How evil or corrupt they would be? There’s no way the game can strictly evaluate what is a good/moral/not-corrupt behavior and what is not.
I think that we can establish that pandering to your base at the expense of others is corruption. If you only consider the needs of one group over all others, that’s corruption, and all you have to ask yourself is whether you’re okay with that. That tension comes from within the player.
Conceding to demands from contributers raises cynicism and so should it from when you acquiesce to minister demands if not already.
I currently don’t know what raises the corruption sim value in my game, I know what reduces it, but not what increases, and I think that a corruption meter is good to establish that. Because if I accept what you’re saying in that post, it would mean that we can’t have corruption outside of the post obvious kinds.
And I think that the player needs that info, because when I look at the corruption Sim Value, I also default to thinking that it’s the most obvious forms of corruption, which it may not be.
Corruption sim aka ‘how corrupt this society is’ doesn’t have anything to say about moral meter imo and I’m mostly okay with it. The problem is when evaluating players’ behaviors (and intentions possibly). I can use resources raised from others to win more terms and it happens to be the whole point of playing D4. If moral or corruption meter works like “pandering to your base at the expense of others is corruption,” every single election win summary will say you are unimaginably corrupt. Thus, it will be impossible to create a meter that doesn’t sound like arbitrary. Someone will manage to do some very corrupt behaviors and get near-zero corruption meter anyway.
Just ask players to take some time to think their actions are corrupt or not and feel “tension from inside” instead.
And I think that that’s why it’s necessary that we test this, so that we can calibrate this meter to D4’s parameters.