Democracy 4 video blog #1 January 19, 2020 cliffski YES! I’ve started doing these, and here is the first one. Enjoy :D
Game’s looking fantastic! Really hyped! Just a couple of pet peeves. Some ways in which policies influence group membership should definitely be fixed. Having 100% ethnic minorities after 8 years of not even open borders or 100% state employees after 8 years of well funded schools and hospitals should definitely not be a thing XD. Just like having 100% capitalists or socialists should not be a thing, effect strengths of that kind should be much lower, in my opinion. Also, what do you think about simulating how much of a given economy sector is privately/publicly/cooperatively owned (kinda like the online simulator ‘filteries’ does)? Would be interesting and immersive, but probably not very important from a gameplay perspective though. Best of luck in any case!
I agree that we need some limits on those voter group sizes… i will look into it. Regarding th public/private stuff, this will be a thing. The last version only really did this with healthcare and education, but we are expanding that to model private/public telecoms, water, rail and other industries.
The ability to bring a single group to 100% in a playthrough might not be realistic but was hella fun in D3, and brough a lot of replay value to the game. I would be sad to see it go away. :(
I think it will be possible, but only if you don’t have any negative modifier on happiness of that group. 100% happy would mean even most extreme of extremists are happy.
I’m so glad to finally see some footage of the new game! I love the auto-resizing zones and icon sizes. As someone who’s played around with modding D3 a bit, I was wondering if there are any new modding capabilities planned in D4? If I had to restrict myself to a few major ideas, I’d love to see better support for custom voter groups, policies that can require or conflict with others, and, most of all, the ability to add a second slider or even other input methods (such as checkboxes) for some more nuance. Thanks for the video, keep up the good work! :-)
A ‘small’ UI suggestion: I can see that sometimes when you mouse over a policy, connected icons and their labels can overlap. I think it would be cool to animate them so that they shuffle around a bit to fill the space in their sections more evenly (and return to their original positions when you move the cursor away). Not too much so that it’s harder to notice where they were originally but enough to get rid of the overlap. Just an idea. It might end up looking irritating or too flickery, I don’t know. And a pain to implement too. :D But if done right it’ll look fancy and lively, and kind of fit the whole modern/material design theme that D4 seems to have.
It looks pretty good. I hope we’ll see some more new policies later on. I think one big thing that this game and previous games miss is demographics. One of the biggest issues countries in both the rich world and poor world are facing is a global slowdown in population growth. It might not seem like a problem at the moment since our recent history was one of very rapid population growth, but it’s true. First-world countries are going to have significant difficulty growing their economies without workers, as well as with funding pension systems. The US is the only major developed economy with good population growth due to immigration, and even then it’s slowing down. Even China’s rise will be undercut massively by their rapidly aging population, to the point where the U.S. will likely surpass them a few decades after they surpass the U.S. You already have some policies like immigration, one child policy, childcare subsidies, maternity leave, etc. that should affect demographics. All that’s really missing is the ability for the population to grow and a simulation for the demographics of things like age distribution. It would also be nice to have a few new policies like paternity leave.
Will there be inclusion of First Past the Post for the UK, I feel slightly annoyed at the UK elections in D3 as they’re like US Presidential Elections to me, perhaps you could incorporate a model like Electoral Calculus do to come up with number of seats for parties. HOWEVER, other than that, I love the new look of the game and I predict it’ll be splendid upon release.