Category: game design

I took some time over the last few days to go through some real world numbers on stuff (specifically government income and spending) and apply them to Democracy 4. The base country for the game, like with earlier versions, is the UK, and we then edit the data and scripts to better represent other countries as we add them.

Its been about five years since Democracy 3, and a lot has changed, so I wanted to make sure the starting scenario for the UK in Democracy 4 was vaguely realistic. We cannot ever be 100% realistic, because the model is obviously a simulation, and one that has to be fun, plus the starting date of the game is left deliberately ambiguous.

Also… we are not starting every country in the middle of a global pandemic, as that would seem super hard, and also fix the game in time in peoples minds. We DO have a virus outbreak event that is quite severe, but may have to introduce an even more severe global event at some point. Anyway…

I had to make some noticeable changes to the amount that certain things cost in the game. I was amusingly almost spot-on with the cost of the BBC, but the cost of some things like disability benefit, and the NHS in general (State Health Service) were almost comically low. Also. OMG national insurance (payroll tax) brings in a lot of money. I found a great source for this stuff here: https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/ Here are some charts:

In this chart the first thing that leaps out at me is ‘other’. 14% of spending! that is a big lump of money going somewhere nebulous. Here ius the breakdown:

Which just goes to show there is clearly a LOT of government spending on tiny, tiny things. Democracy 4 doesn’t really have a ‘fisheries’ department costing anything, or street lighting, but I guess eventually all those little thingsd add up.

The next big scary thing is that 6% of government spending on interest. This is us paying interest on our UK government debt. Some interesting charts:

My immediate response to such a chart is ‘yikes’. People often look at debt to GDP, but if government spending as a chunk of GDP is low (heavily capitalist), the debt/GDP can be low while interest/public spending is massively high. I would suggest that the best metric to look at is interest payments / public spending because this is the opportunity cost of debt, in other words, all the stuff you could be funding if you didn’t have to pay interest on debt. Right now we pay 6%, the same as the defence budget. Just for fun, here is the interest / GDP chart anyway…

Of course we live in times with stupidly low interest rates, although that varies massively by country.

Some economists say as a general rule that countries default (which is economically speaking REALLY BAD) when interest/GDP reaches 12%. If our current interest is 6%, then we need a simple doubling of the interest rate to hit that (assuming we balance the budget tomorrow and stop adding to the debt…)

Democracy 4 does not have an option to default on debt, mostly because that seems unthinkable for the USA, UK, Germany, France and other countries we will likely include. But maybe we should? Anyway….lets move on to look at where government income comes from…

I guess the big surprise here is how tiny the business taxes are. The Uk has fairly low taxes on companies (19%), but then we do not have the more generous and complex system of rebates and exclusions a lot of other countries have. Positech is a company, and we pay a simple 19% of our profits, with the only complication being if we get to claim video games tax relief on some portion of our expenses. We don’t qualify for anything else.

Indirect taxes are surprisingly large. I find the breakdown on that site to be pretty crap, so wen to the independent ‘office for budget responsibility’ and got this instead:

		2019-20	Percentage
Income tax1		195.2	24.40%
of which:	Pay as you earn	163.2	20.40%
	Self assessment	32.8	4.10%
National insurance contributions		140.6	17.57%
Value added tax		134.6	16.82%
Corporation tax2		56.7	7.09%
of which:	Onshore	55.3	6.91%
	Offshore	1.4	0.17%
Petroleum revenue tax		-0.6	-0.07%
Fuel duties		28.9	3.61%
Business rates		31.6	3.95%
Council tax		35.8	4.47%
VAT refunds		14.5	1.81%
Capital gains tax		9	1.12%
Inheritance tax		5.6	0.70%
Stamp duty land tax3		13.4	1.67%
Stamp taxes on shares		3.6	0.45%
Tobacco duties		9	1.12%
Spirits duties		3.6	0.45%
Wine duties		4.4	0.55%
Beer and cider duties		3.8	0.47%
Air passenger duty		3.7	0.46%
Insurance premium tax		6.1	0.76%
Climate change levy		2.2	0.27%
Other HMRC taxes4		7.5	0.94%
Vehicle excise duties		6.3	0.79%
Bank levy		2.1	0.26%
Bank surcharge		1.8	0.22%
Apprenticeship levy		2.7	0.34%
Licence fee receipts		3.3	0.41%
Environmental levies		11.7	1.46%
EU ETS auction receipts		0.7	0.09%
Scottish and Welsh taxes5		1	0.12%
Diverted profits tax		0.3	0.04%
Soft drinks industry levy		0.2	0.02%
Other taxes		6.9	0.86%
National Accounts taxes		746.2	93.26%
Less own resources contribution to EU		-3.4	-0.42%
Interest and dividends		10.3	1.29%
Gross operating surplus		43.7	5.46%
Other receipts		3.2	0.40%
Current receipts		800.1

…which goes to show some very interesting stuff. Mostly…UK tax revenue comes from Employees, Payroll tax, Sales tax and a bit of Corporation tax, fuel duty and business rates. The rest is just the remaining quarter.

So a diverted profits tax (basically the google tax) brings in virtually nothing (0.04%) compared to corporation tax as a whole at 7.09%. It looks like I should be tweaking some of the policies in Democracy 4 a lot.

For example right now UK payroll taxes in the game have a max input of only 25% of income tax, they should be 75%! Tobacco and wine taxes should bring in less than they do, and air passenger duty (airline tax) should bring in MUCH less. Also, maybe I need the UK to start off with a few of these policies already in place but super low. For example, we *do* have a pathetic diverted profits tax and a laughably low level of environmental levies…which is sort of a carbon tax. maybe these need to be implemented but at 1%?

Anyway, I guess the interesting point is that most of us voting citizens who claim to be aware of the world have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how much the government owes in debt, what it spends, and where it gets its money. In a pop quiz would you KNOW that (in order) the top 3 sources of UK government revenue is Income tax, National Insurance and VAT? Would you guess that the amount of money we raise each year in corporate taxes is only slightly higher than we pay out in debt interest? (56 vs 52 billion).

I find this stuff interesting, and despair at how badly our press does the job of educating us. We need more stats, more pie charts, more line charts, more numbers, and less pontificating about what an MP said on twitter today.

Maybe Democracy 4 can help focus peoples minds of the actual numbers behind politics?

An experiment for Democracy 4. The game now differentiates between <10%, <25% and larger policy slider moves with differing political capital amounts, indicated on the slider by red/green if achievable right now. Very happy with this :D. #smallerchangesareeasier

It makes sense that a 5% tweak to income tax (just an example) is easier to get agreed than a 50% rise or cut, and it also makes people stop and think about the various positions they can put sliders on some of the smaller and less dramatic policies. I think the green/red lines surrounding the chunks on the slider are self explanatory?

Here is a screenshot from democracy 4 that I am not happy with, and I’ll explain why:

This is the parties screen in a 3-party game, and shows details of each party. The data presented is members, activist (real dedicated members who help get-out the vote, and then a scatter graph showing ‘approval of the party’ by every voter showing how close or far away they are from becoming members.

That third chart is the one I added today, and am thinking it kinda sucks. Its supposed to help the player understand fluctuations in party membership by giving them more than the ‘binary’ data of whether a voter is a member or not. This is because in the real world, people can be moderate members (they joined once, but don’t read the newsletter, and don’t get involved beyond just paying membership fees), right up to passionate members who become activists, hand out leaflets, attend rallies, and volunteer to help with fundraising and phone-banking.

The distinction is important, because you can have a party filled with extreme loyalists (unlikely to quit if you upset them a bit) or with moderate ‘soft membership’, where they are already disillusioned and the slightest policy shift will cause a collapse in membership.

BTW party membership matters because membership raise funds (used in campaigning), and members ALWAYS vote, regardless of usual turnout figures.

The problem is, I don’t think those charts make much sense to anybody who didn’t code the game… They shows party ‘approval’ on the Y axis (the X axis is random plotting), and approval depends on how close the voters opinions are to the parties position, and how close it has been over a period of time. This is complex and vague.

I think I might replace it with a single, taller graph that works differently and shows the range of approvals from zero (I HATE the government) to 1 (I LOVE the government), and plots everyone on that axis. We already have that (in a different axis) for the popularity analysis on the ‘everyone’ screen:

So I can do that but tilted anticlockwise 90 degrees. How does this help? Here is my magic idea:

I give each party a color (green, red blue) and I use those 3 colors to colorize the dots for each voter, showing how close they are to each parties platform. Voters who are members get colorised, others just get plotted in grey. I think this will work tons better, and it will make more sense… maybe. I’ll try it and post it tomorrow.

Ok…I couldnt stop and eat until i tried it. I think its better (needs some formatting tweaks)… thoughts…?

So I am still busy working away on Democracy 4. I am currently at the ‘play lots of games, find stuff that seems broken, or not correct, or improvable… …and just work through that list’ phase of development. The game is perfectly playable, but has the odd crash, and a lot of little tweaks that are needed to make it reflect the reality of politics in 2020 instead of 2013.

The majority of these tweaks are super-minor, but they make the game so much better. Some of them are tiny UI things that people will only subconsciously notice. For example, we have ’emergency powers’ in the game now (a boost to political capital), and during that mode the central political capital icon now turns red :D. Something I coded just an hour ago was a change in the UI color of the policy slider to remind you when you cannot raise (or maybe lower) a policy slider due to lack of political capital. Its right there in the UI on the right, but coloring the actual slider bar is also a nice reminder I think:

I’ve also been going through a lot of the policies and tweaking the starting values for the UK, and making sure the numbers make sense. We added a policy of ‘state broadcaster’ for the UK, and some research showed me that I was vastly overestimating how much the BBC cost in comparison to total government spending. Stuff like that all needs a lot of tweaking.

Another thing you can see in that screenshot is the background color for minister profiles now ALWAYS shows the color that represents how happy (green) or sad (orange, then red) they are, so you subconsciously are always aware of their loyalties.

Plus there are a ton of links between policies that need tweaking, adding or removing. I have concluded that foreign investor tax breaks should improve foreign relations. This makes sense. You tend to be fairly kindly disposed towards governments that are helping you grow your own economy, and giving your companies good deals on investment. I had to vastly alter the equations for the ‘air strike’ event too. I had too many playthroughs where seemingly randomly some foreign country accused the UK of having WMD and bombed us. Oh dear…

Some things come as sudden inspiration in a ‘Why didn’t I do this before way’ like adding illustrative socialist/capitalist characters to the political compass:

Anyway… something I need to consider very soon is what to do about some old data from democracy 3 that I might like to include, but worry about players response to. For example, one of the policies in the game is the governments approach to handling automated trading on the stock market. Basically this makes GDP go up a bit, capitalists love it…but there is a slight risk of a disastrous ‘flash crash’ if its too lax. This is already a policy in ‘clones & drones‘, part of democracy 3, and thus its now in democracy 4 too.

BUT!

To include that, means it will HAVE to mean including the ‘flash crash‘ event. This would be (believe it or not) the ONLY event that I am copying from D3 to D4. All the others are new. I sort of worry about this, because some people are bound to complain about ‘re-using content’, but TBH I’m reusing a bunch of content in other areas of the game already.

Frankly, the dictionary definition of socialist has not changed since 2013, so why rewrite it? Same for the basic descriptions for stuff like income tax, or police force. We ARE adding a ton of new policies, and all the character and event art and UI art and so on is entirely new, as are all the SFX & music. The game is overwhelmingly new content… so I really shouldn’t feel bad about including just ONE event from D3…

I think the problem is that 1% gamers are louder than the other 99%. Its my belief that society online has become much worse in the last five years. Social media has ramped up peoples urges to be abusive, to criticize, to complain, to accuse, and to general act like a dick. Part of me really dreads being accused of just ‘reskinning the old game’, which is not what the last few years of work has been about… But on the other hand…

…I am clearly NOT re-skinning an old game. The OVERWHELMING majority of players will see that, and in any case, the really angry obsessed 1% who disagree can refund their steam game if they really genuinely are not going to play it… so why should I feel so worried about upsetting them? especially when even if every single byte and pixel of game content was created anew in a clean room, they would still cry #lazydevs! at me for daring to even release a new game ;D

I guess I am just sharing typical developer angst. Its a pity, because I LOVE early access, and player feedback, and sharing design debates and concerns and ideas with players. However, I am not someone for whom really angry criticism just washes over me. It *does* get to me, both depressing me and angering me, in a way I know it shouldn’t.

Not *that* long now until we have a playable alpha that we get into the hands of actual customers who can tell me what a horrible game i’ve made :D

BTW we now have forums for the game where you can tell me how much you hate me and everything I stand for. Here they are.

As discussed in an earlier blog post, I think what democracy 4 needed was a way to bring home the true consequences of actions to the player. This has always been an area that was missing from the democracy 3 design. You can give the police machine-guns, you can legalize heroin, you can put in place all the apparatus of a police state, or a religious theocracy, and the only real consequences you see are some numbers going up and down.

Of course, the democracy games are known for being interesting complex simulations, not for whizz bang visuals or for feeling like ‘yuo are really there’. Thats a deliberate design decision, in that I would rather spend the time (and money) making a complex like graphics-lite sim than making a shallow, simple game with some 3D people doing limited things. Its a foolish indie developer indeed who thinks they can ever compete with triple-A studios in terms of graphics.

However, I think I can have some of that feeling of emotional resonance, just by using text, if the text is worded right, and if it fits within the style of the rest of the game. As a result, I’m introducing this new ‘media reports’ feature into the game. Here is an example:

These are new things that crop up on the next turn screen now and then. They are not called ‘events’ internally, so I’m avoiding that term here. An event is something like a change in your credit score or a factory closure, which has actual measurable consequences wwithin the simulation. They can be great news or disasters and can shift the simulation in a way you have to respond to. Here is an ‘event’:

By contrast, the media reports have no consequences whatsoever. They are simply putting into words the impact of decisions you have made (or in some cases not made, such as policies not implemented). The idea behind them is that they make you stop and think about the choices you have made, and have to accept thoughts like ‘Yeah, shes going to die because of my policy, but I guess thats acceptable’.

In the real world, this sort of stuff does happen. The media is generally rubbish at doing analysis and taking a broad view and educating the citizens on what is going on in an accurate way. I would be astonished if one in a hundred UK citizens have any idea what our GDP is, or even what our current unemployment rate is, or be sure if they knew if crime, and violent crime had gone up or down in the last 5 years, ditto pollution, or productivity.

Basically the media knows most people will not choose to take in data that way, so they pick ‘human interest’ stories that they think reflect broader trends. This is the classic case of the war reporter zooming in on a child’s teddy bear in some rubble. it tells us nothing about a war, apart from reminding us that children are affected too, but that can have a huge political impact.

So anyway, I now have a system for adding this to Democracy 4. Its basically a folder full of text files that contain data that describes the circumstances under which it triggers, and some text templates I can populate with citizens names (so they will be suitably local). Example:

[config]
Name = labourlaws
Text = "A special report tonight on the closing down of one of our oldest manufacturing 
businesses.
between her tears, CEO [FEMALEFULLNAME] tells us how heartbreaking it is for the family 
firm to close down.
'Its just impossible to run a business in this country with
the state of our [POLICYNAME]?' She told us. 'The unions are
running us into the ground. We cannot compete any more'."
Policy = "LabourLaws"
Type = MRT_POLICY_CONSEQUENCE

[conditions]
LabourLaws,1,0.65,1.0
GDP,1,0,0.6

This is a media report that triggers if labour laws is a policy currently implemented, and if its set somewhere between 65 and 100%. It also requires GDP to be below 60%. This is so that we don’t have a media event about a business closing when the economy is going super-well.

All thats required to add these is just some time and imagination, and some spell checking :D. Its just text, and there is no problem adding hundreds of them. The only reason the game is unlikely to actually ship with hundreds is that it means HUGE translation costs, because a proper professional translation is maybe $0.10 per word. So that media report is $6.70 to translate. This probably seems reasonable, but if we have 100 of these, it means $670 to translate them…

…into one language.

If we do the bare minimum for a strategy game (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish). Thats over $2,500. We definitely want to add Chinese, Russian, Portuguese to the game, and this pushes it close to $5,000 just for this feature. Its probably a tenth of the games text at most, and I anticipate a proper paid translation of the game to my target languages is going to cost $50-60,000 at this rate.

maybe I shouldn’t care about this, after all its a mostly text-based game, isn’t that an acceptable chunk of the games budget? Also I do know that a lot of indies (even big name successful ones) rely on fan-translations. I am tempted to consider this, because the professional costs are just crazy, and I’m not sure the quality is any different. My only concern is liability. I need to know the translation is correct, not some random angry political rant snuck into my game by someone else…. hmmm…

Oh BTW yes, we will eventually support this being trivially moddable too, so people can add their own :D.