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

Democracy 3: balancing the difficulty

cliffski

I have a lot of feedback that the game is too easy. I suspect some of this is because of the following factors:

1) People start with the UK< a fairly easy country

2) People are playing ‘to win’ not to actually mold the country as they wish to

3) People do not spot the difficulty slider :D

However, the simulation DOES need some difficulty tweaking, as it does seem to get into virtuous circles (or the reverse). From, a game POV, these are disasters, but the trouble is, they seem emergent from a dispassionate attempt to build an accurate simulation. Do they exist in the real world? I suspect so.

For example: I read a lot about how entrepreneurs are fleeing Italy and France. This is due to high taxes and corruption and incompetent government / bureaucracy. The net result will be more unemployment, and a brain-drain that guts French and Italian economies, leaving them with the less successful employees and businesses, thus reducing government income, meaning taxes need to go up…making the whole situation worse in a spiral.

On the other hand countries that are doing well, seem to get richer and richer.

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What I am thus on the lookout for are ‘automatic stabilisers’. Not in the traditional government finance sense, but in an economic model sense. For example…

Pollution is a good one. if you have no industry, you have no pollution, but a booming industry (China!) leads to more pollution, which then affects health and eventually lowers productivity, thus reducing industry back down from it’s peak.

on the opposite side, look at wages. The economy collapses, so unemployment shoots up and wages drop to rock bottom, meaning business competitiveness shoots upwards allowing for an export boom and the economy bouncing back.

Yes. it’s MUCH more complex than that. Nevertheless, these sort of things are already in the game, but I suspect their effects are too weak. I shall experiment, in-between talking to reviewers, dealing with advertising, handling the vats rush of online discussions about the game, fixing bugs…and I’ll sleep at some point. BUSY BUSY BUSY.

Feel free to suggest stabilisers I have not thought of…

15 thoughts on Democracy 3: balancing the difficulty

  1. As a first time user getting to know the game I was thinking how hard it was NOT how easy it was. Please don’t make it harder to keep the others happy. Let them use the games difficulty choices. I play Australia as I live here. Maybe each country needs a difficulty slider for fine tuning if your new to the game or a veteran.

  2. If your observation is that people are playing to win rather than to make change . . . LOL welcome to politics.

    RE: automatic stabilizers – national currency is a huge stablizer. not sure if that is reflected in D3 – but economically of course the more successful you are the more you export the more your currency should rise – effectively ramps up the difficulty!. Alternatively if your economy goes to hell the currency and cost of living will drop, increasing foreign direct investment.

  3. That’s a really good point actually. I wonder if it should be implemented? The slight problem is that Eurozone countries are somewhat indirectly connected to their currency in this way (hence many of their problems) so it would have to be something that only took effect fully for the countries with their own currencies…
    Hmmm.

  4. Hello!
    On my first try with France as soon as I bought the game, I just easly managed to solve all major problems following a balanced “socialist” approach with a focus on productivity. I feel like this factor is just too important. Ofc I can now try to model another society with another focus: like a religous one. But I was a bit disappointed to just slide through the game so easly.

  5. As balancing factor: unemployement seems quite easy to tackle. Otherwise, try to give us options concerning wages like minimum salary: it could make this harder.

  6. I would argue you should make Italy easier. After all for a very long time they out-performed the Germans on economic growth and the fiscal authorities have to do some maneuvering and compromises but Italian revenue officials can be just as ruthless as the more ‘efficient’ Germans, British, or French ones. For Italy you should try and reflect the complex and never simple, always varying degrees of links between the State, Commerce and Industy and the Mafia. Italians can be remarkably self-aware and as such know that an argument of “the rich need to have low taxes because” will not fly very well if it is aired in public becase there is little love in Italy for elites so they might maneuver in different ways against a tax hike through varying ways like bluster, cheating or promising the government a favor if they hold off on hiking taxes. Or they might acquiesce to it, provided their industry sees increased State subsidies or guarantees.

  7. Foreign investment? If the currency devalues, people at home can’t import as much and the economy sputters, but that makes the home currency, goods and services more affordable to foreign investment. Don’t know whether that could be implemented, and in any case, you’re the expert. Still–thought it (or aspects of it) might be worth mentioning.

    Conversely, if the currency gets stronger, the economy booms, foreign investment would in theory drop. And those with plenty of money to invest at home might buy more things abroad.

  8. Another thought, probably just as off the chart, but still–what about printing money? If you go too far into debt, the treasury department automatically starts printing more money to ease the burden on the economy. Of course, it also causes inflation. As you’ve modeled so much else so well, I’m not sure how or if this could be shoe-horned in.

  9. Following up on my thought (whether good, or bad–up to you) from last night: if your government is doing far too well, the appointed body that governs the printing of money (the Federal Reserve, here in the Colonies) would ease up on that, causing slight deflation and a cooling down effect. -So a break on things getting too bad, or too good.

    Another thought: have a foreign power step in with a trade deal if you’re doing exceptionally poorly, one that in the short term eases monetary flow. (It all seems to come back to monetary flow.) But that seems too much of a Deus ex machina solution. Perhaps it could be made available, with known drawbacks, from the start: a kind of red button you don’t push except in a last resort.

  10. In my opinion the problem is that the game is difficult only the first few turns when you have a deficit and the productivity is low.
    Then it becomes too easy and consequently boring.
    In the real world people are never satisfied, they want always more. The game should reflect that and this should keep the interest high.

    Then there should be negative feedback loops as others suggested:
    more wages -> more inflation -> higher interest rates -> lower GDP -> lower wages
    more productivity -> less jobs -> more crime/alcoholism/etc.. -> less productivity
    more laws -> more bureaucracy -> more corruption -> less productivity
    more health -> longer lives -> higher pension cost
    lower pension expenditure -> more aged workers -> less productivity
    lower pension expenditure -> higher young unemployment

    Other ideas:
    Trade unions should have a lot more power. If you piss them off they should strike and then strike and then strike.
    Capitalist should have a lot power too. If you piss them off they start a media campaign against you.

  11. Actually capitalist-run media campaigns are already in! It is a very good point that the higher productivity goes, the fewer jobs there are, this is something I don’t think we model at all yet. I may add that and give it a bit of a test…

  12. Thanks for the reply cliffsky.
    You are right, the anti government media campaigns are already in the game, but their effects are so small, than I forgot they exist at all!
    In my opinion a really bad media campaign or a general strike that last for days should have the same effect of an assassination.

  13. lol, so far i haven’t played a single game where i haven’t been assassinated. it’s actually quite frustrating. that being said, in all of my games i go for a very conservative, pro-capitalist approach and of course i can see how that would be extremely unpopular with certain population groups.

  14. Hi,

    I’m a new player from Canada. I only played as Canada for a few games on the default difficulty setting.

    This thread made me wonder why real world politics is so much harder. Here’s a few thoughts.

    – Voters in Democracy are very rational. They consider the pro and cons of every little policy. In real life, voters often focus on 1-2 policies that become Moral causes for them. Like tax, gun laws, environment. If they disagree with you on their specific Holy subject, they will never vote for you, regardless of the rest of your program, because voting for you is Wrong. (In game logic, it a voter is a highly X and X support is below Y, the voter will never vote for you.)

    – In the same line of thought, voters in Democracy have perfect information. They know all policies. In real life, voters know very little and only what’s portrayed in the media gets there attention. (Similar to the argument that free market is better than central planning because the central planner will never be able to gather and process all the information.) I’m thinking Dilemmas, likely getting media attention, could have a much stronger short term effects.

    – I think real life complacency is much stronger. Whatever they have, voters think they deserve and take for granted. For example, university students in my province pay 11% of their study cost, the government covers the rest. A proposition to raise their share to 18% triggered 4 months of daily protest with a request that the student fees be reduced to 0. Similarly, city workers in my town are paid 30% more than the province average (in similar jobs). The mayor proposed to reduce their pay by 6%, to roughly 24% above the average. The workers voted for strike. To pay 18% of the cost or be paid 24% above average are two very good situations. But when they are used to even more, voters will resist any change.

    – Large change in real politics are harder. You could raise sale tax by 1% fairly easily, but raising it by 10% is almost impossible. This is not represented in Democracy, every raise requiring the same political capital. Larger changes could require more political capital. (Although larger change have larger impact on voters opinion and that’s already in the game.)

    – You almost never get 80%+ support in real life, (I can only recall Saddam Hussein getting 100% of the votes a while ago.) I think envy comes into play, meaning if you please group X to much, group Y becomes angry at you. There is a competition among groups. Voters don’t just vote against a political party, they vote against the party supporters. It’s like having two girlfriends, it seems you can never please both. (Not too sure how to build this in.)

    – In my last game I ran a large budget surplus for years, paying back much of my debt in order to avoid a credit rate downgrade when the next recession would hit. This is also a good real life strategy, but I think it would be much harder to do. Voters will demand tax cuts or more services. If a problem cannot be solved, people get used to it. But if it can be solved and you don’t, people get angry. The negative effect on voters of problems that can be solved with money could increase when you are running a surplus.

    Again, I only played the default difficulty setting, maybe some of this is already built-in at harder level.

  15. Hi there. My name is Flavio. I’m from Brazil. I just bought the game and I love it! But it is, indeed, very easy. I just got reelected with a good percentage of votes for the third time in a row, even though I simply don’t care about the opinions of religious and conservative people. I think in the real world that would never happen because these two usually represent most of the voters and I would have to be doing an outstanding job to gain their trust while not caring for their beliefs.

    I play the game according to my beliefs, so capitalists are always angry. =P
    But the problem is that I don’t see this anger reflecting in the game. I mean, unlike religious and conservative people, if capitalists are angry, economy should be going bad, but it is not. In fact, it is going great. That doesn’t make sense and I think in the real world capitalists (as well as the wealth) would have a big influence in the way people see your government because they can pay to use media against you. So I think some groups should have influence over others, maybe through a “Media” blue icon that would reflect over the other groups (specially the ones more vulnerable to the media, like parents and the youth). Also, I think the government should be able to spend money in propaganda (they do this in Brazil).

    Another problem I noticed is that some policies are very cheap and have no collateral effects, so they are just good (some of them have bad influence over the opinions of some groups, which doesn’t really affects me). I think there should be a blue icon like “Free Market Distortion” and most socialist policies should affect it (not only the opinion of capitalists) and this icon should have a great effect over economy.

    Great game! Congratulations!

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