I’m saying such efforts are futile since the goal is unachievable.
I disagree. Although we could just make the info that is hidden in the corruption sim, visible.
We shouldn’t have such a long debate about a mechanic which Cliff just mentioned in passing, we can have this debate when or if it is included.
Can you tell me a way to discern what is a corrupt behavior for a player without turning the whole game into Corruption 4 by declaring most of the policies to be pandering?
How corrupt it is to max the Food Stamp in a country with 40% poor voters? What about faith school subsidy? What do you think about behaviors such as closely examining the approval distribution and using budget to target the voters at the threshold? How can I avoid being corrupt when using controversial budget-consuming policies?
No amount of calibration will solve this.
And it’s rather realistic. If I raise tax from the rich and give more subsidies to state-owned corporations, some will say I’m pandering to unions or socialists while others saying I’m making essential investments. It’s subjective.
I’m saying that it’s corrupt in relation to whether you are ignoring other voter groups, if you’re winning elections on broad support it’s not corruption (moral). As for monetary corruption, there aren’t any such policies. If you’re drastically increasing inequality outisde of GDP growth that’s a form of corruption (deliberately). If you’re leaving people to their devices while still collecting taxes, that’s a form of corruption.
What I’m trying to say is that we need to know what feeds into corruption, then we need to expand its definition and include policies in game which directly increase corruption and cronyism (lower democracy would be a proxy).
Food Stamps when 40% of your population is not corruption, because that’s what a plurality of people want. If you’re going out of your way to target the wealthy to fund this, that’s a kind of legal corruption.
I guess it’s more about intent.
It’s complicated to capture intent in the game, so best would be merely to have a proxy for this.
Yeah it’s about intention and the game has few to no way to evaluate it. That’s why indirect approaches do better than moral meters declaring what is good & bad. Just shift the blame of making subjective morality/corruption judgement to in-game characters or groups instead.
Political Compass in D4 works because of this. It measures political orientation of the people not you (some have misunderstanding though).
So, we could have a corruption compass then. But I’d still like to know what feeds into corruption, because that info is not available to us.
The political compass does measure our position too. If you see the description for “steam friends”.
no it doesn’t measure policy choices. just average political orientation of the people in your (or their) playthrough. So Compass doesn’t make any judgement by itself.
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Ah, I see, well, maybe that should change.
I added a poll to the game main menu, and it looks like the top voted option is to do a voting systems DLC, followed closely by more countries.
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I guess we’ll have to wait some more time before we can find out whether my top bureaucrat is a Russian spy or not.
Voting Systems sound cool. With more countries, I’d appreciate more 3rd world countries like from D3: Africa. Also, as a Bahamian, I’d love to see the Bahamas added lol 
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Adding developing countries is a good idea. On top of that, I propose the idea of adding a fictitious country as well. (For example, like democracy2 and Tropico)
An update! I have started working on one of the ideas:
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Is this you telling us soon we’re going to be able to get a range of hats for each country (beret for France, top hat for UK, beer helmet for Germany, etc.)?
This one’s going to require a lot of work, so I would actually be very surprised if this actually happened, but I think it’d be really cool to have a DLC introduce start dates
That’s pretty exciting! Of all the DLC ideas, this was certainly my favourite, as I detailed at length in my New Democracy brainstorm although I would definitely prefer big worldly problems and the future of our world be addressed, rather than the ins and outs of elections and security.
I’m already bemused at the publicity stunts, voter impressions, and terror groups aspect of the game, so I worry that leaning harder into that direction will continue to be disaffecting when what generally fascinates people about this game (if forum subjects are anything to go off) is how politics can be leveraged to solve the problems we see in the world today, and the accuracy and playability associated with that.
That is to say, I’d love to see the climate apocalypse expansion, Industry 4.0 expansion, the 4th industrial labour revolution expansion, space colonisation expansion, etc etc. (in line with the clones & drones or radicalism DLCs from Democracy 3)
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Best DLC idea yet! I am so tempted to have DLC that costs maybe $0.50, but just changes the icons for each country flag to an appropriate hat
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You would think so, and personally I agree, but my in-game voting showed election DLC to be the most popular, followed by extra countries.
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this might be an unpopular opinion but i believe that democracy is the absolute worst way to decide anything.
cliff should do what he wants and ingore popular demand.