Month: November 2020

One of the biggest challenges in designing and balancing Democracy 4 is having a single simulation model work over all countries. In theory, if *everything* is modelled, then you have a perfect model of human society and behavior, and feeding in the correct settings to each country will produce the required results.

Because I am neither superhuman or crazy, I don’t think this is really feasible, so we limit the simulation to that subset of variables that I think makes the game playable and fun, and reasonablyt accurate, and then I am left with the task of working out how to fudge that simulation to fit real world experience.

An example of this in the game is productivity. In the game, worker productivity is quite an important simulation value. The player can see its value, a chart of its history and view its inputs and output:

Of course the simulation is assuming that the list of inputs and outputs to this value make sense over all countries, or in other words, in all cultures, but this is a very simplistic view. Whast actually makes one country more productive than another? there can be a million things, many of which we do not model. For example:

• Extremes of temperature in a country may require a mid-day siesta where less/no work is done.
• A culture of extreme deference to authority may reduce productivity due to a lack of suggestions/criticism of bad practice
• Highly variable and extreme weather may mean that work is regularly interrupted as a result
• A cultural expectation of strong work/life balance may reduce the tendency to do overtime
• A cultural work ethic may encourage overwork and unpaid overtime by default

We do not explicitly model any of these things as tracked variables. You could argue that it would be possible, but in some cases they have historical roots that are now just cultural norms and cannot easily be explained. For example here in the UK, the British people tend to have a general distrust of, and dislike of politicians and authoritarian figures. ID Cards are NOT a popular idea here. The reasons for this are hard to discern, but its certainly rooted in the past and not something you could easily model with numbers.

Similarly there is a deferential attitude to age and rank in many Asian countries that works in a similar way, and likely has both positive and negative outcomes. I watch a lot of Korean dramas these days and its fascinating the extent to which people seem both obsessed with education and status, and also massively invested in the minutiae of office politics. Why is this? very hard to say.

It might be hard to model this stuff, but we certainly cannot ignore it. For example Germany IS a very productive country, especially at manufacturing. It has decent holiday provision for workers, and strong unions, yet its productivity is super high. why? A lot of it can probably be put down to the cultural work ethic. Take this article, for example:

“In German business culture, when an employee is at work, they should not be doing anything other than their work. Facebook, office gossip with co-workers, trolling Reddit for hours, and pulling up a fake spreadsheet when your boss walks by are socially unacceptable behaviors.”

Because I need to model Germany as accurately as I can, I have blatantly included this as a script that runs and generates extra values for Germany to represent German Culture. in this case, a free bonus to worker productivity:

Adding this may seem like a 2 minute job, but NO. It triggered a boost to GDP that resulted in traffic congestion caused by the emergence of a gig economy (uber!). This has high regulation in Germany, so I had to boost labor laws, which then results in a corporate exodus away from germany…

I am currently considering whether the German language should act as impediment to corporate exodus (Companies tend to prefer to relocate to a country with the same language as them, and German is not as popular as English)… and so the balancing continues…

There are similar scripts for each country, and I’m gradually amassing as much feedback as possible and tweaking the values to make each country feel authentic, while keeping the same basic economic and political model. Lots more tweaking to come over the next few months!

I’m currently balancing Australia in Democracy 4, and its tough as almost any starting condition seems to result in a depressingly small number of people supporting the current party. I have been fiddling with the numbers for this for hours, and its occurred to me that its SO much harder in a 3 party system, and the game may be having trouble conveying this…

Take this screenshot:

Thats the current voter breakdown at the start of the Australia mission. Actually a few people are quite clearly over the 50% mark (to the right) and thus are more happy than unhappy, and in a 2 party election, things here would be looking bad…but not catastrophic.

But in a 3 party system, only people who have happiness of 66%+ are going to vote for you. Your polling numbers are going to be an absolute nightmare. But on the other hand, you do NOT need 50% of the vote to win, only >33% in order to be the largest party in a coalition.

This leads me to another conclusion… The current system has the opposition party taking a 100% opposed view to you on all issues. A 3rd party, if it exists, will take a position between the two, meaning its generally going to be trying to please socialists & capitalists plus liberals & conservatives.

Put another way… the 2nd opposition party will always be pretty moderate. That gives them a bit of an advantage, as they can vacuum up votes from all over the spectrum.

I do NOT plan on actually modelling all the political stances of opposition parties. This is a HUGE undertaking and outside the scope of this game. However, I would like to improve the current situation.

One thought running through my mind is that the 3rd party perhaps should be assumed to be suffering from some sort of ‘small party disadvantage’. So instead of happiness mapping onto votes like this:

0-33% opposition
33-66% 3rd party
66%-100% player

It could map like this:
0-40% opposition
40-66% 3rd party
66%-100% player

…or something similar. I am just brainstorming this right now. I think that there are basically 2 problems apparent here:

1. The game is maybe a bit too hard for the player in 3 party systems
2. The simple display of voting intentions on the main screen is perhaps a bit pessimistic in 3 party systems.

Feedback and suggestions are most welcome.