Thoughts and a couple of bugs

Democracy 3 General Discussion
1

I’ve run into a couple of problems with Democracy 3. The first isn’t a problem as such, but more a case of “how did that happen?”.

Basically, it seems that I have won the game in my first term of office. Due to my own political leanings I played the game as a socialist in the UK. I added every welfare policy in the game, increased education and health subsidies, increased the size of the police force including comunity policing to tackle crime and did various other things… then my GDP crashed partly due to the economy not being competitive enough.
Anyway, with the power of technology I managed to get my GDP back up again and I now have 92% approval rating, almost no crime, unemployment or poverty, a very healthy and well educated population and a budget surplus of over £100bn.
I’m not quite sure what you can do about it, but as it stands it seems a bit too easy to achieve a socialist utopia (if only it was that easy in real life! :slight_smile: )

On to the bugs! … all two of them.

It looks like the game doesn’t know what to do when you go to one of the categories to enact a new policy but there are none left to enact. I can’t confirm that this is the cause of the bug but my game crashes every time I try to go onto the welfare tab in the list of policies that can be enacted and it’s the only thing I can think of that might be causing it.

This is only a minor bug. When I tried to take a screenshot of the game on fullscreen using PrtScn on my keyboard it took a screenshot of my desktop with a black window.

The user interface seems to be much more intuitive than Democracy 2. Good work! :slight_smile:

2

I would like a back button within sub screens

Let’s say you choose GDP and the click on one of the Causes after you press X you return to the main screen. It would make a lot less clicking if you could return back to the GDP screen.

( sorry if you feel i high-jack your post but i thought it might be good to keep all thoughts organized in one post.)

3

Hi, thanks for the feedback, I’ll investigate the empty category thing. Regarding balance, have you won more than one term? things get harder over time. Any deficit will eventually cause problems, and also those 92% happy voters will become jaded over time. Plus all kinds of events might happen.
If its still too easy for you, ramp up the difficulty slider when you start the game :smiley:

4

I broadly agree with CountVlad. Democracy 3 seems to have the potential to have a lot of depth, and has some really nice features, with all of the dynamics around how different things affect different groups approval and the complex interactions between stats. Unfortunately, from what I’ve played so for, it’s too easy for any of this to appear at the moment.

I’ve played the UK and US so far and in both cases I’ve easily managed to maintain 80%+ popularity in my first term without considering voter opinions at all by only considering the problems in the red bubbles and putting into place policies that directly improve those things. This just makes the game very shallow and without much real challenge. I don’t end up thinking about the complex systems, I just think ‘what do you do to improve crime’ or ‘what do you do to improve technology’ and nothing about how these things interact.

EDIT: Editting just to add that I’ve played the UK through two complete terms, and by the end of the second it felt like the economy was so strong (meaning I could pay to fix all my problems while also having low taxes), and I’d maintained a 97% approval rating for so long (basically the entire second term), I couldn’t really see it becoming more of a challenge? At least, not any time soon.

I really like the interface and the simulation, the bits of it I’ve seen at least, and I think the main barrier to the game being more fun is that it just isn’t really challenging. I’ll try some of the other countries to see if I’ve just picked the two simplest, but the US at least looks like it has serious problems at the start, but they were all pretty easily resolved without ever really having to worry about a budget deficit or angering anyone particularly.

Looking to the more positive stuff (which there is a lot of), as someone who played D2 a fair bit, the game (despite in many ways looking very similar) really feels different and like it has more potential for depth. The ministers feel more important and interesting, I feel like the security stuff is much clearer and I have more agency over it, just fixing the economy doesn’t feel as easy as it was before. You can also really feel the lag on effects coming in, which is nice; there is a real consideration with state funded schools that while investing in them has lots of positives, you’re going to be dumping money into them for a long while before you see that effect. The voter focus groups looked interesting too, but I’ve not really looked at them just because I haven’t ever had to worry about people liking me. I’m sure more of the changes will become apparent too as I play more (and if I’m forced to engage with them by more challenge).

Another couple of thoughts:

I got one of the achievements when I played the tutorial (the one about equality). This seems a little strange, given that all I did was literally what I was told to do.

The time from hovering over a policy to see it’s name and the arrows is too long, and is a bit annoying at the moment. After playing for a little bit, I found myself just clicking on them to bring up the full screen even when all I wanted to know was what the icon was because it was faster.

(Also, I realise this is super early but I would be interested to at least know what the basic things to know for creating a mod are, though I appreciate this is probably not a priority on beta release day)

5

I think I’ve won the election about five or six terms now with an approval rating over 90%, though there have been one or two events that have forced me to change one or two policies. Thanks for the reminder about the difficulty slider. I was so excited about playing that I didn’t even notice it. :slight_smile:

6

Just have to agree, it is too easy to score high. Really, really high. 100 percent approval, no more members in the opposing party and whopping 99.somewhat percent on election day? (98 and 97 the next two elections) Wow! I run a surplus and do not even know where to put all the money.

Something I’d like to mention, not really a bug but quite weird:
I have a booming economy and 100 % retired? At the same time there are 100% parents and 11% youth?
I know people can be part of another group, too. But if everyone is retired, who is actually working and creating the massive GDP? When everyone is part of the “parents” group, then where are all the children, there should at least be 33 percent (mother + father + 1 child) and how do the newborn manage to become parents?
The other groups and percentages do not add up either.

Two more things: Why is GDP and unemployment connected with a green line? Will a rising GDP not decrease unemployment?

The “oil price shock” even fired. Before that, I had zero demand for oil, thanks to massive subsidies for hybrids and monorails. With the oil price shock, demand increased. Does that make sense: Nobody wants to buy oil but when it becomes more expensive suddenly people want to buy as much as they can? Oil certainly is not a Giffen good. :wink:

7

Ok, actually I’m changing my mind and beginning to think you guys may have encountered some bugs with this, because NO WAY should it be that easy, and it should not vaguely be possible to raise the percentage of retired people that high, by any means. Can people with such weird setups email me a zipped up save game to cliff@positech.co.uk describing whats strange/easy?
The save games are in \my documents\my games\democracy 3\savegames and they are just xml files. (big, so please zip them)
Cheers

8

You have mail…

9

And another one. :slight_smile:

10

+1 to this. Acts quite strange.

Also on this topic could we have a oil supply shock event to? To simulate the oil crisis in the 70-ties?

11

Hi, I’m, working on some tweaks to change Oil Demand which should address this. For example, right now GDP doesn’t affect oil demand, which clearly it should do, as should car and bus usage :smiley:

12

Sounds great, oil supply/price and such could really go into a lot of places, hope you find a good balance.

Keep the good work up!

13

Another thing I noticed, for most of my game I kept the same ministers. However, I decided to reduce taxes as I had quite a surplus. When the financial crisis hit and I started to have around £30bn overspend each turn, I left the tax sliders alone because I had enough money saved up to weather the storm without going anywhere near minus figures (several thousand billion) …but my ministers disagreed. Several of them resigned within a space to two or three turns having been loyal throughout the game.
I was just wondering what you guys (and Cliff) think. If their resignations were to do with the overspend then should they resign if there is too much of an overspend or should they only resign if I am something like five turns away from bankrupsy? Personally I would prefer the second of the two options.

14

Ministers happiness is related to the happiness of the voter groups they ‘identify’ with, as well as having a general level of ‘volatility’ plus a slow tendency to become jaded over time. They are not directly concerned with the budget, just with voter opinions. Were your polls low?

15

No, the polls weren’t low. It’s probably just them getting jaded as several went simultaniously and I’d had them all for a long period of time (several terms in office).

16

When one gets fired or resigns, that acts as a hit to the happiness of the others, so you may have had a bit of a cascade effect.