Democracy 4

Home

FAQ

Modding

Buy now

DLC

Presskit

Democracy 4 Forums

Here are the answers to some questions we expect to get about this game:

How impartial is the game?

We will endeavor to make this game as impartial as possible. Political opinions are held very strongly and its common to see positions criticized from multiple directions at once. This game is a best-fit approximation of the real world, balanced for gameplay. No bias is intended, and this is a game ABOUT politics, not a 'political' game, in that the developers are not trying to make a 'point' about anything. The game is easy to mod and we will listen to all feedback, so hopefully we can strike the right political balance

I am offended by the character portrayal of X

The character art in the game is not intended to offend. These images are of stereotypes and not intended to represent all voters, but that *aspect* of a voter, like their wealth, their age, or their political stance. They are deliberate exaggerations for quick recognition. Also note that the game is a GLOBAL game. What religious people look like in New York is different to Germany, China and Saudi Arabia. We have to make global approximations which may seem strange depending where you live. We do not have an unlimited art budget,. and cannot represent every possible combination of gender/nationality/skin color/sexuality in the game.

How was the game made?

Democracy 4 uses an in-house developed game engine. The whole thing is coded in C++ using visual studio, by two programmers in the UK, Cliff Harris and Jeff Sheen. Artwork, SFX and Music was provided by third parties. We use some middleware just for sound playback, and also to render vector artwork and Unicode fonts.

I recognize some of the ministers / donors...

The minister artwork is original art drawn by our artist, but heavily *inspired by* some real world politicians. Some are likely familiar, some are pretty obscure. We tried to take a range of politicians from all over the world. The donors are all portraits of indie developers that either worked on the game, or are good friends of the developers.

The skin color of characters is wrong for this country.

We are an indie studio with a limited budget. We cannot completely redo all of the character artwork for every country in the game. We have done our best to include a mix of races and genders but this will not satisfy everyone. Its simply not possible for us to do this without vastly increasing our art budget. Decent artwork costs more than you think!

I recognize X from Democracy 3.

There is a vast amount of new content in this game, and we have changed a lot of stuff under-the-hood regarding how the simulation works. We have also carried out massive changes to the way we present the UI and expanded the way you can view the data. All the artwork, sound effects and music are new, as are all of the events in the game. However, in situations where it simply made no sense to change things, we have kept the same text or data from the previous game. The definition of socialist has not changed since 2013 :D We would rather use our time improving the game and adding to it than needlessly rewriting text that already does the job :D.

I keep getting assassinated and this is unrealistic.

Is it though? Often players get assassinated when they try to change their country super-radically overnight. Democracy 4 lets you do this, but also lets you suffer the consequences. Plus if you invest properly in security infrastructure this is less likely to happen. In general we recommend making slow, subtle changes to how the voters feel before introducing radical policies, and keep an eye on those terrorist groups in the Intel screen. Plus... note that world leaders DO get assassinated, even the US president was once shot and killed in living memory.