Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Democracy 3: Clones & Drones

cliffski

So, with great pleasure…after an incredibly long wait…I’m happy to announce we have a new expansion pack for Democracy 3, called ‘Clones & drones’. First…. the trailer!

A little explanation: This is an expansion that adds in the challenges of the near future. I’m not talking space battles and attacks by aliens, but more the kind of thing we might expect in 2020, 2030 maybe 2040. So we have to start worrying about stuff like Food Prices rising, rare-earth metals running out, technology causing unemployment, climate change (of course!) and the impact of stuff like driver-less cars, maybe even flying cars (oh yes…), longer lifespans and human cloning. Plus more depressing things like the collapse of effectiveness of antibiotics (we use them too much, basically), the danger of another, much bigger, flash crash. There is also the eventual problem of population rise (would we ever condone a one-child policy I wonder?) and hopefully one day, a trip to mars.

For deep tedious psychological reasons, I tend to be a pessimist about the future. I worry about climate change, the ease with which weapons of mass destruction (not so much nuclear, but biological) can be delivered by future terrorists, the almost inevitable erosion of privacy by technology, the further concentration of wealth and rise of corporate superpowers. For the record, I think Climate change trumps all of them, for the potential to really fuck us all over. However… your mileage may vary. Maybe you see an Iain M Banks or Star Trek future of abundance,  shorter working weeks and eventual lives of recreation with a robot workforce, extended lifespan and nuclear fusion providing limitless energy!

Whether your future glass is half full or empty, you will probably have fun trying to navigate the world of Democracy 3 through those years. Keep an eye on Food Prices and global temperature, it can be a real pain. I hope I’m around in 50 years to look back and laugh at what I thought would be the political issues of the year 2064.

The expansion works just like the others, so you can grab it direct from the developer(me!) here, which gets you steam keys too, or you can obviously buy it from steam, or the humble store, and soon, on GoG. It comes in Windows Mac & Linux flavors. I hope you enjoy it. ONLY YOU CAN SAVE OUR FUTURE!!!111ONEONEONE

Obviously the best thing you can do to save the future now is buy the DLC and the second best is to tweet about it, share it on facebook, or up-vote it on whatever social sharing site you people can access from your hover cars in the year 2050.

I will leave you with this:

5 thoughts on Democracy 3: Clones & Drones

  1. Great news ! I already bought it from the positech website and activated the steam key succesfully. However, it seems to me as if Steam wont supply a Mac-Version of the DLC…I start the game, but it isn’t recognized in Mods Menu.

    Also, while in the Library -> Democracy 3 -> View Downloadable Content View there are Check-Boxes for (Extremism, Extremism Mac, Social Engineering, Social Engineering Mac, Clones & Drones….but no Clones & Drones Mac).

    It seems to me as if the DLC for Mac is missing atm on Steam.

    Could you kindly take a look ?

    Thank you very much and keep up the good work !

    Cheers, Tom

  3. Couple notes about the flash crash and what I have learned studying day trading.

    Normally the price is between the buyers and sellers thoughts of good price, and the less “dumb money” around / more computerized things are, the more the mid-price is going to have to do sudden moves to provide liquidity to those with longer term objectives or insight.

    So all the flash crash really was, was just selling through some limited amount of buyers. As long as the event doesn’t change what what people think their holdings are worth, then it’s really a non-event. (only those using margin at certain “auto-liquidation” brokers would be forced cover at what ends up being the low because the computers would notice such sell-low activity – in the flash crash some computers bought low and then sold lower but ultimately the price found the real buyers)

    Today my research was into algo-prediction of where price is going to go when news happens and whether to buy or sell the news. How this could possibly work you ask? It’s sort of self-fulfilling prophecy deal : If no one else cares to read the news either (“too depressing” or “hard to play with the HFT around” or “unpreditable”) and act similarly, instead of becoming random, the price movement becomes predictable.

    Another predictable deal : When you buy, then price is either going lower or stops going up**. That’s why 95% of day traders lose. Why? Well since the price is always at the mid-point – when you buy, the bigger dude sells, and as they are bigger they can pretend they want to buy/sell more than you did and that has effect on the mid point – they move the price to your loss exactly until you exit (buy high/sell low). There was recently a regulation introduced that effectively bans market making (as that is exactly how all the market makers work and have no losing days). Atleast from those who can’t afford to buy the regulators.

    So what do the 5% of non-losers do? My guess is they see a range forming in a trend and step in front of some longer time frame players attempting to get filled. When that player notices this, they move their bids lower cause “mini-crashes”, prompting the day trader to exit at loss as they know that the price is going to go against them until even bigger timeframe buyer comes along. So how do they win again you say? I’m thinking the only way to win in day trade is to have unlimited leverage so you can beat the market makers with the same tricks they use.

    So how can a retail trader be profitable at lower than monthly time frames that Nobel winner article claims to be random? Probably with a reversion to mean system, as long as you can figure out what is mean and when the reversion is unlikely. Todays Bank of Japan QE announcement trade might be one that doesn’t revert ** (rare days that I saw the entering in full 50x leveraged trade only slowed down the move instead of making it go against).

  4. I share many of your concerns for the future. It’s my opinion that the next 200 years or so will decide humankind’s future. We will either have a massive population crash and lose our ‘modern’ civilisation, or we will find a way to meet the challenges facing us and head in the direction of a Star Trek or Ian M Banks future.

    Don’t forget the possbility of a gamma ray burst or some other cosmic disaster wiping us out. We need to put our eggs into more than one basket.

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