There are 2 things that bother me about this game…
When you are elected/start the game you have some horrible approval rating. How the hell did I get elected with 15% approval?! So the first term is challenging to get that above 50% to become reelected. But if you manage to do that you can just as well stop playing now because all following elections will just be one big lovefest with getting 80%+ of the votes and the challenge is gone.
So are there options or mods out there to make it a challenge from beginning to the end and still start with a more realistic approval?
There are various options to make the game harder later on. One is the inflation mod, then there is the option of changing the difficulty under options (makes it lots harder). You can also increase cynicism and economic volatility which also add an extra challenge to the later part of the game.
I also thought about this a litle bit and I have a suggestion for a patch/mod/democracy3 or whatever :mrgreen:
As complacency/cynicism increases the groups that are stronger affected could make demands that work similar to situations, start out with litle effect but become a bigger problem the longer it takes to deal with them…
I don’t think this addresses the more basic issue that you start the game with everything stacked against you - yes, you’ve presumably been elected (with the other mob being tossed out) because things aren’t going well - but given that the punters just voted you in, why do you often have a single-digit approval rating right at the beginning? That’s not realistic.
It should also be harder for your approval to get very high or very low - in the real world a 60-40 election result is considered a landslide and a serving President or PM with an approval rating below 40% is considered to be in very serious trouble. Moreover, polls usually narrow closer to the election and this doesn’t seem to happen in the game.
I just tried with the new ‘honeymoon’ option activated and I think it gave me a bit more political capital at the beginning (not sure) but it didn’t seem to address the above problem. I’d just managed to solve a bunch of problems when the election rolled around, my voters didn’t turn out and I had a very low approval rating still (hey, policies to fix homelessness take time kids, you can see the council flats under construction, don’t toss me out because they’re not ready, re-elect me for building them!!).
That’s always the way though. Governments put in place efforts to turn around the Economy, and then get booted out just in time for the next lot to take all the credit!
Point taken on the initial approval though. It’s very tricky to balance the game so that there is a challenge (either upset voters or structural problems) without the approval of the govt being low enough to not make sense.
I guess a solution is to make the starting arrangements of policies more favourable, but to plan more medium term events to destabilise the economy?
Yes and no. Governments come into office with a certain amount of goodwill behind them, and the opposition party is generally thrown into disarray and goes through a period of bloodletting and so on before it can pose a serious alternative. So right at the beginning of the game, you should have an approval rating around 60%, not the 5% I seem to have…
I agree. A 55% approval rate, with a 2 or 3 turn period where it stays there, should work. After that, of course, you could just let the real approval rating take over. It would be, IMHO, more realistic. Making lovefests and 5% approval rate impossible in general would be good, too.
A solution I though of for the last issue is to make it work this way. Instead of each group affecting an individual equally, it should affect it exponentially for the negative, but linearly for the positive. For example, take a liberal, socialist, that is a parent and middle class. If socialists, liberals, and parents were at 50%, but the middle class was pissed off, he should be pissed off. How I see it working is this (with whatever value the game actually uses).
Rating with the group: 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Affect on a person: -16 -8 -4 -2 -1 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6
What this would man is that no given group can be completely ignored. Perhaps this is a bit harsh and should be toned down, but you mustn’t forget that people are quick to forget the good and to point out the ugly, especially in government.