The game as it is now is too easy.
And it is not only because I played Democracy 2 before.
As France I canceled all Welfare Policies aside from “Childcare Provision” (and “Welfare Fraud Dept.”), and I still had the “Socialist”-Voters opinion at maximum! Pretty unreal.
On 3 games (Germany, UK, France) I did as much as I could against religious voters (mostly as side-effects of my pro-science, pro-liberal policies): once I even received the “Darwin”-Accomplishment for eradicating them. While there usually where some (up to 122 or so) “Crusaders of the Lord” armed extremists for some quarters, they never attempted to kill me (… I never saw the threat get “red”.)
In D2 I was probably killed by extremists half a dozen times until I had learned my lesson. And in one or two scenarios I could not win at all: never managed to get re-elected, no matter how hard I tried.
In D2 I more than once had the “Island invaded”-event right before elections, that would kill my reputation with patriots and the general public - it was almost if I was triggering it with my standard playstyle.
In D2 until the first reelection I usually managed to set the country on the right course, but that often reduced my voters opinions to the level, where my reelection was threatened (- or my life was threatened by extremists as already mentioned). So I had to learn how to calm the people with some policies between the things I really wanted to do, and delay some until after the election etc.
I haven’t had any of these challenges escalate in D3. I just go instantly for the “ideal” policies, and not much bad happens along the way. Even in the case where I get additional “red” situations (“Internet crime”, “Cyberwar”, “Tax Evasion” etc.) it does neither derail my election, nor does it bankrupt the state.
Suggestions:
Make voters react more to introducing and canceling policies.
Make it harder to gain a budget surplus - in a global downturn it should be almost impossible to have a surplus.
Don’t have policies that are “all positive”… - every policy should have considerable “negative” side effects in terms of voter groups.
Edit: Ok - after having played all scenarios I can say that only the US scenario required a few tries: in all other scenarios I was able to stay in power and alive right from the beginning. (I’m firmly in the socialist / liberal quarter in all my playthroughs).
BUG Report / Crashes: sometimes I hear the sound for unlocking an achievement while D3 seems to freeze: two times I had to use the taskmanager to close D3. A third time after waiting for a minute while using shift-tab and/or task manager the program continued suddenly by showing the achievement (- this time the “flip-flop”, which obviously was triggered while I was once again reversing the pollution standards policy for the 3rd time from max to min and vice versa). In other playthroughs I had crashes / freezes after the election, when the “continue” button didn’t appear - but if I remember right these freezes where also accompanied by the accomplishment-sound in the background, so there possibly was an undisplayed achievement window, which I couldn’t click-away. Maybe you can have a look into how the program finds its way back after triggering an accomplishment, or make the accomplishment-window always show “on-top”, or let it trigger only at the same time when quarterly results are displayed or something like that.