I also think that when it comes to religious people that you should make a separation between Muslim group, Jewish group and Christian group since that would be more realistic. Reasons why these three is because they are the ones that get most political about their faith. Their faith often decides their political view (not Judaism so much) and it is often quite different at some points. I also think it is kind of exaggerated how mad the religious group gets when you choose to only promote evolution in school too. In America they perhaps would be that mad, but in Europe most Christians accept evolution. Perhaps only teaching evolution could make them that at first, but over time, they learn to accept it.

Some think that Muslim faith schools should not be allowed because they think they go against national values and makes room for segregation. So there should be an option to ban Muslim faith schools as well as a ban for Christian and Jewish faith schools. If a ban on one religious group, liberals would be very mad and it would increase inequality, but decrease racial tension. There should also be option to promote Christian values in the schools (many parties support this so it’s only reasonable to make it in the game). This would make liberals mad and increase the number of Christian groups, perhaps also decrease the Muslim and Jewish groups and make Conservatives happy.
There should also be a separation-between church and state. Making it a church separation from state wouldn’t decrease the amount of Christian people, but it would make them mad and the same with conservatives. Liberals would be happy as well as the Muslim and Jewish population. It would also slightly increase equality, but not by much.

One thing I also think should be optional is to make more policies that would affect international relations and you could also make other countries agree more with your policies and choose to adopt them. For example, one option should be to support Israel or Palestine. There should be a bar showing which of them you support most. Support only Palestine, Emphasises most Palestine, support both, emphasises Israel, only supports Israel. If you support Israel for example, it would cause other countries to have a further dislike for you, but you would please the conservative, patriotic, Christian and Jewish population. It would displease socialists, Muslim population (I don’t think Liberals should be involved because they are split on the issue) and as said, international relations. Since your support for one side is so high, the Media will most likely follow and show your party’s view of the story. If you increase support for mass media and make it international, it would make other countries slowly more likely to support you and follow your policies.

I am a latecomer to D2, but very interested (and entertained) in the educational potential. I also have a background in politics and economics and am certainly a policy wonk.

After about a dozen playthroughs i started modding D2. Very interested in the idea of D3

* the gameplay tension between “fix the problems” and “feed your base / grow your support” is interesting and adds an extra challenge – but support seems to swing around a lot more than it really does in real life. Most elections (i am Canadian) seem to revolve around the %10 of voters who actually do swing. The ideal that I might be down to 8% in support and still in power seems weird.
> what i would like to see is a way to mute down those political dynamics to have a simpler game (for school age kids) where if they make good choices to solve the policy problems they get re-elected.

*my first mod was to take the political cost of everything down across the board. I took everything down to about half. More choice! More Consequences!

*a good number of policies/strategies are way overpowered – e.g. the “drinkers exploit” where removing the drinkng age grows your base by increasing the number of drinkers to most of the population. Community policing also seems to singlhandledly sove all your crime problems for peanuts.

*my next mod was to chop back the probability of all the assasinations and terrorist attacks. These were totally swamping the “fix the problems” gameplay.

*the economic model seems pretty rough and ready – if i understand correctly a fixed initial level, plus a sine wave “economic cycle” (that seems to have a period of only 3 years or so) plus the effects of the events, dilemmas and policies thrown at you in the game. It would be really nice to see an economic model kinda like what you get in economics 101: GDP = consumption + private investment + government expendatures.
It would also be nice to see an actual balance of payments exports – imports = net foreign investment.

Honestly i think making the economics more “real” isn’t going to improve gameplay a whole lot but it will be a boon to modders and wonks who want to drop actual statistics into a mission and then be able to play it through.

I second the idea that the cabinet approach as is seems kinda half baked. No cabinet shuffle? Not being able to move ministers around, and not being able to see their attributes/inclinations when picking policies makes the functionality of having the cabinet almost moot.

Overall the UI is a little difficult to comprehend, and the division of screen space into pie wedges filled with circles seems to make a lot of dead space. I would prefer a dashboard where each section had two levels of zoom. Wherever my focus is should take about half the screen, with the options to add or remove policies visible at the same time. Whatever is not in focus should be shrunk to “icons/meters only” the least amount of space that still shows threats or progress in some way.

Maybe something where you pick like 20-30 big name businesses and as a news piece or a selection button you can see how well they are doing, if they are going into administration?

The option to bail out businesses and offer them interest free loans, but then add this on to the government’s budget. For instance a business may ask for a loan of £500million quid and if the govt accepts then it appears on the budget or something with more leeway so that we can make more choices on what we pay money out to

Something to do with fire fighters and local govt ( don;t think there is anything like that at present)

More options with welfare and benefits. With the current game you can only choose the amount of money you would spend on child benefit. Perhaps a better way would be to do something like the uni fees where it has a bar of 6-8 options . Something like child benefit for all-child benefit for those with incomes above x-means tested-child benefit only for the few- (or select which income groups/types of people you would give certain benefits too)

I would agree that opposition parties and ministers need more of a role within the game as well. If you’re doing well at running the country (reasonably popular, reasonably prgamatic and reasonably minded) you pretty much get a decent victory and clear majority at every election and can win about 5+ in a row which is highly unlikely. It should be harder to hang on in power and the opposition should have more interaction with you so that you can have a bit of a battle with them.

Maybe some election strategies as well so you actually have to compete for your place for 2nd term? At a stretch too- maybe after you get kicked out you could play the opposition and see how the other party makes changes to what your party has done in government?

A fantastic game btw, just a few ideas which I think would make democracy 3 a fantastic game.

The only big problem I felt the game had was that the opposition party never really did anything. Party affiliation in general was pretty strange and didn’t seem to have a lot of clear effects. It would be great if you had to worry more about what your political opponents were going to do (although maybe this is coming from my perspective as an American, where parties in opposition can throw their weight around more than in Britain).

Also, if you’re going to be making ministers more important it would be nice to be able to choose those at the start of the game. That’s sort of how it works in real life, and I always felt more of a connection to the ministers I appointed myself than to the ones I started with.

-T

My biggest wish for version 3 would be a font that’s easier to read and a bit more tweaking for the overall text-appearance (line heights, margins, etc.)

These days I read many ebooks. This made me a bit picky about the way games (or websites) display larger amount of texts.

Thanks!