Water shortage

Democracy 4 General Discussion
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This event has a few issues. I find it odd that “year” is an input, implying that a nation wide water shortage is somehow inevitable regardless of policy. Certainly many policies in the real world have lead to water shortages in places like California, which is relevant to my current game as the United States. Also, for context, I did away with term limits and have no idea how many decades I’ve been president for, so the “year” driven events are really starting to bite. The warning on an impending water shortage has “year” at a +35.50% input.

My second issue with it is that the climate change adaption fund does not reduce it. Water reservoirs are specifically mentioned in the description of this policy.

My third point would be that there is very little regulation available regarding this crisis, short of nationalization of the water industry. I can subsidize vertical and organic farming, but not actually regulate the non-vertical non-organic farming industry. Outside of agriculture, on the topic of water itself, I can’t subsidize the industry to help develop it, and the industry itself has no impact on this crisis. With health care and education, I can take steps to ensure equal(ish) access without outright nationalizing these service, through tax credits and vouchers. No such methods exist for water.

Now, before anybody gets into matters of opinion, I do personally see that delivery of a necessity of life such as water should be a public service, not a private industry, but that’s not the point. The point is that there should be modeling of different methods available, and it’s player’s choice which to use. It is possible to herd a private industry into delivering service, so long as there are profits for them to chase.

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Yeah it’s a known issue (both the Water Shortage and the Year factor). But the former is going to get addressed at some point according to the trello of the game. And the Year factor already have a limit if I remember correctly, but this will also probably get changed as it kinda dooms endless games.

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I believe the year simulation tracks the march of global pollution, the kind you have no control over. One of the Democracy 3 mods which introduced carbon capture actually turned the year simulation back slightly, to simulate the reversal of climate change that effective capture would bring about.

Otherwise all good points. I’d love to see more regulation policies. There was talk such a thing would be introduced to deal with a new “monopolies” situation a while back.

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Yeah really hoping the monopolies and near-monopolies that are real issues today will see some representation. And also liking the general idea of more choices, and, importantly, more uniform choices.
Because, sure, it’s true that adding, say, a voucher policy to every single thing adds a lot of theoretical complexity. But in practical terms, for the end-user, that’s not really true: It’s really fast to learn “oh ok vouchers are generally a thing I could do for whatever I want”
Like, adding similar policies for different situations is very easy to wrap your head around. Much easier, in fact, than having them for some issues where they would potentially make sense, but not others. Remembering which ones have these options is harder if the answer isn’t simply “all of them”, and figuring out why they don’t have those is also confusing.

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