Longtime player of the series and am really liking the updates in D4! Just a few bits of feedback that could be helpful, which I tried to be thoughtful about so I appreciate the read
Bus and Train Ridership Shouldn’t Compete, But Compliment
In the game, biking, buses, and trains all eat at each other. In reality, it takes a network of all of these systems to compete with private autos. Think of someone taking a bus or bike to the train station. If anything, high levels of these three modes should experimentally reduce car usage.
Freight Infrastructure?
A major missing piece is how transportation helps freight. I’d love to see how funding for ports and rail could help GDP, productivity, and the nation’s competitiveness
All Transit Aiding Productivity
I love how high speed rail helps productivity. Perhaps high levels of transit/transportation investment should all have a similar, if less pronounced, impact.
“Unemployment” vs. “Employment”
I like how this is a bigger feature in the game! That said, it feels odd to use the negative… should the metric, like education, be positive rather than negative, with “Unemployment Crisis” remaining a distinct issue? Also, to this effect, an expensive “jobs for the sake of jobs” program would be interesting.
More Busted and Fictional Nations
In prior games, the various western nations felt like variations on a theme. A major exception was the African game. I would love to see failed states recovering, or dictatorships (like North Korea) falling and replaced with a new democratic government, and maybe some made up places to test certain parts of the game.
Consequences for weak military
I personally love this, because it’s a great way to lower the budget without hurting others than patriots! That said, it could have more impact.
I think an older game had you lose an old island. Here are some other ideas:
Loss of prestige, and hurt international relations
Another nation threatens you, causing instability
Inability to participate effectively in global issues like aide, fission, and trade deals
Mars and Space!
It appears that the costs of these are scaled between England and the US. But if I’m not mistaken, sending someone to space would be just as expensive for a small nation as a big one. So is there a way to keep the costs the same (and very high) for any nation, big or small, but the impact to be scaled. For example, let’s say Ireland wanted a space program, the basics would cost the same as a US program, but would radically improve their emplacement, tech, and etc.
I’ll stop there with lucky 7! Hope this is interesting and maybe useful!
Good feedback! A couple of thoughts and comments on what you’ve posted:
To a certain extent, it is not inaccurate for there to be intermodal competition among the different transportation methods. In the real world, there is plenty of competition between buses and rail for passengers, especially in the long-distance sector. Cities with good biking infrastructure tend to reduce the stress on public transportation for short-distance trips. So I would personally say it isn’t entirely inaccurate for there to be competition.
This is actually already in the game! If your car usage is very high, you will likely have traffic congestion or even gridlock, both of which have negative economic effects. By investing in infrastructure like rail or special lanes, this reduces congestion and can eliminate gridlock, which improves your economy.
See above. There is already an implicit positive impact on the economy by removing said congestion through your regular transportation investment. I think the idea behind high speed rail improving productivity is that it allows for faster movement of workers between different cities, which improves the speed at which work gets done. The other types of transportation infrastructure do not necessarily have the same effect on productivity, although I definitely agree that they do indeed have positive economic effects.
I’m also very excited to see that employment and unemployment carry more weight in the game than in previous editions. I think the rationale behind the unemployment metric being “negative” (I assume you are referring to the fact that a positive trend is downwards-sloping on the unemployment chart) is that the vast majority of individuals are more familiar with the measure of unemployment as an economic metric, rather than employment. For the sake of familiarity and accessibility, it is probably why the game has it like this.
I definitely hope Cliff adds some greater variation in the countries here. As far as “made up places” go, I think it would be best to leave that to the imagination of the modding community to add
100% agreed! It is too easy to simply reduce military spending to fix your deficit. There should definitely be some more drawbacks, or maybe adding more positive effects that could be negated by lowering military spending (such as the VR industry in D3, which I don’t think exists anymore in this version, or at least I haven’t seen it).
That’s a really good idea. Maybe not necessarily the same costs, but perhaps only make them scale slightly, so that it is definitely a bigger investment for a smaller nation, but with huge payoffs? Oooo that would be exciting!
Reading this it has just occured to me that high military spending should boost technology. In fact I read a whole book on this topic, about basically how silicon valley exists because of US government military spending to compete with the soviets after sputnik, and was located somewhere remote (ha!) so if it was nuked it wouldnt take out major population centers… so you had all this radar and rocket tech spending fuelling a private tech boom eventually leading to silicon valley.
so…
if i reduce base tech, but boost it with high military spending, there is a tangible loss of reducing that high US military spending, because of the tech fallout.
