Category: democracy 4

I’ve blogged about this a few times in the past, but basically I use a lot of staring at data and charts to evaluate how well balanced my game Democracy 4 is. Its a ludicrously complex game, and balancing it perfectly, so it plays like chess, is actually pretty much impossible (maybe something for deep mind to tackle next), but its always worthwhile chasing that goal as a more balanced game will mean more replayability, and more player satisfaction, so here we go again :D

The last time I collected stats on the games late game balance was in January and some of the headline numbers are here:

Its pretty clear that there is a problem in that everything gets solved as things go on, and things are too easy in the late game (3 terms on…) so lets look at the data for the current shipped version:

A pretty trivial improvement to be honest. Sure, popularity in term 3 is a BIT harder, but health and education are still pretty much solved problems, and crime is still relatively under control. Unemployment is *not* solved, but this doesn’t seem to be holding people back in either economic or popularity terms :(. Stronger, or more creative measures are called for… But first lets compare the other stats. Old:

and new:

Again, not much change to talk about here. In fact equality has got better! Lets look at the voting stats. Old:

New:

‘Winning’ is an internal hidden measure I use that scales some difficulty-related measures, so the increase there is a *good sign* and shows that some internal hidden difficulty-adjusting systems are working more strongly now./ This seems to have resulted in a bit of a drop in votes in later terms, which is a good thing. Winning with 72% of the votes is still not ‘fun’ but its more fun than winning with 75%. Still… I am being too meek about this.

One statistic of interest is complacency. Its modeled in game based on the happiness of each voter group. If they are massively happy, then complacency creeps in. They take the policy decisions you made for them for granted, and start to expect more. The trouble is, a canny player can keep all the voter groups happy… but not too happy, resulting in an electorate that keep voting for you, because they prefer you to the opposition, without any complacency having an impact…

In the real world, there is definitely a phenomena where people get just ‘sick of’ politicians and political parties. Eventually, the long list of dumb things a specific politician has said, or crisis that happened on their watch, becomes so long that the electorate becomes tired of them, and starts to want change. Here is some data from UK elections:

What I find interesting is that we don’t have many cases where a party wins one term, then gets kicked out. Its almost like once you win an election, the next win is pretty guaranteed, and then it gets a bit harder from then on. The 92 conservative win was pretty narrow, for example.

Obviously there are ‘events’ which influence each election outcome, but it does look like British politics is basically a sine wave, oscillating between center left and center right governments fairly regularly. The US picture is fairly similar:

Basically a regular swing from red to blue and back again, with actually pretty small swings. It really does feel that there is this big block of ‘swing voters’ who are very susceptible to a ‘I am tired of this team, lets back the other team’ mentality.

I guess this could be coded into the game by a steady increase in complacency of the ‘everyone’ group, but that feels a bit hacky. I also think that doing so would really just be papering over the problem, which is more simulation-model based, rather than political. In other words: The player keeps winning, not because the voters are not sufficiently cynical, but because things are actually going really well for them.

In the real world, this is not the case. The US/Germany/UK/Italy have not all collectively solved healthcare, or solved education, or eliminated crime. What has happened is that either the goalposts have moved, or the causes of the problems have mutated, but they are definitely still there.

For example: Mental Health. This is a much bigger deal in 2020 than in 1940, but are we pretending that there were not mental health issues in 1940? of course! but other problems were so bad, we didn’t pay much attention. Gender dysmorphia is not a new phenomena, nor is anorexia, nor is depression, or related conditions, but there is a much stronger focus on these issues now, probably *because* so many other health issues have been improved upon.

The game frankly does not model this. We model education just as badly. Its a 0->1 scale, that never changes, and if you improve education to 1.0, you are done! but the real world is different. The world has become more complex. The understanding of modern economics, modern electronics, modern physics involves a lot more stuff now than in 1950. Go back to when I was at university, and economics was simply macro/micro. Then along comes behavioral economics and we all have to go back to school.

Medicine is another area where the goalposts are in constant motion. As our lifespan increases, and technology advances, the demands on healthcare race upwards too. People who in 1950 would already have died, are now living relatively healthy independent lives….but at a great cost in terms of pharmaceuticals and technology.

I really need to improve my modeling here. Right now, the game *does* have some of this, because for example, technology does boost healthcare demand (by up to 22%), but maybe this needs to be on a curve, and more pronounced. Lifespan also boosts demand, but again, not by much. Maybe this needs looking at, and a review of other similar effects. The only design dilemma is how to represent this. Currently the entire game is coded around a system where voters look at the current state of affairs, and judge it against an arbitrary value like this:

“Healthcare is at 60% so I am 60% happy. When it was 62%, I was 62% happy”

Whereas in reality people probably think:

“Healthcare has fallen 2%. Things are getting worse. I’m voting for the opposition, they might be better?”

I REALLY do not want to change any core mechanics of the game, especially now we are no longer in early access, but I am continuing to think of ways in which to accommodate this phenomena into the way the game already works…

side note: I use WordPress (An absolute trainwreck piece of software btw), and as of the last update, the font it shows in post editing mode is totally different to the one the actual blog uses, with seemingly no way to change or fix this. presumably this is just some stupid new bug introduced by a pointless update I never asked for. Is it too much to ask for software developers at big megacorps to give a damn about quality? The almost weekly complete redesigns of their UI apparently do not trash their users productivity enough, so introducing dumb-ass bugs like this has apparently now become a priority. Absolutely useless…

My current game: Democracy 4, currently has very good steam current reviews and all reviews scores. As I check right now it sits at 90% positive recent, 85% positive all reviews. However, 90% is not 95%, and any improvements to the game are bound to translate into higher scores, longer play times and better sales, and as balancing the game requires a huge amount of data analysis and thought, and is therefore what I consider fun…lets do some more!

Because it is a ludicrously complicated game, the only possible way to ‘balance’; the game is statistical analysis. There is no way I could hire a team of QA people to give me feedback on where the game is unbalanced, because the number of play styles and strategies, and political opinions, and then the different countries, difficulty settings and other options would mean even if I had 100 people analyzing 20 games a day, its still ludicrously trivial compared to the actual ‘problem space’ that the game represents.

Thankfully, the game sells well, and if I pick yesterday as an example, we clocked up a total of 3,754 games played by players in one day. These are proper paying customers whose stats don’t lie, so analyzing the data from these playthroughs is invaluable. I do not collect ALL possible data (that would strain even my dedicated server, whose current database size is 14 GB), but I do collect some interesting snippets (anonymously).

I rely on my own intuition and feedback in reviews (good and bad) combined with forum posts to give me a feel for areas where the game needs improvement. A topic that seems to come up a lot (with justification) is that the first term of a game is pretty well balanced, but if you ‘survive’ to a second term, things get easier and easier and the game loses its challenge. To check if this was really true, and look at some possible causes, I collected stats by each term and got this:

T1 Wins = 54.19 %    T2 Wins = 79.23 %    T3 Wins = 83.97 %   

Thats term 1,2 and 3+ win rate for game version 1.45. Its pretty clear that the intuition is correct. The game gets easier the further you go. The big question though is exactly WHY does this happen. In order to collect relevant stats I needed to think about what factors could make governing a country too easy. Maybe GDP gets high and stays there? Crime gets solved for good? Technology gets ahead and stays there? Unemployment solved for good? I collected player stats at the time of each election and plotted them over 1,2 and 3+ terms to get these stats:

and also…

So it seems that the stats do not lie. Multiple things seem to get good and… stay good. Education seems a bit easy to raise after 2nd term, but maybe thats because a booming economy allows for infinite spending on state provision? Sadly I do not have data for that, but its clear that GDP has an inexorable rise. Its also interesting to see that crime steadily declines, especially violent crime.

Stats like these are invaluable. Democracy 4 has a bunch of self-balancing mechanisms that are not artificial game constructs but based on what appear to be real-world auto-balance phenomena. It does seem to be the case that skyrocketing GDP in the real world can drive massive inequality (relative poverty…. even if actual absolute poverty declines). This rise in inequality can give rise to higher rates of crime, and also to political dissatisfaction.

Higher GDP and Technology can be a sign of increased industrial automation, which should really cause big spikes in unemployment, and thus also ineuqlait6y, but these do not seem apparent. Luckily, I have control of every equation in the game, so after reviewing all these stats I could make a bunch of adjustments and hope to see a budge in the direction of a more balanced (ie: more challenging) late game. Lets look at the new stats for build 1.46:

T1 Wins = 54.54 %    T2 Wins = 76.46 %    T3 Wins = 83.06 %   

Ok… so slightly better T2 (a bit harder…. 76% win vs 79%) and very marginal improvement from term3 and beyond. How did my actual core stats change:

If anything WORSE for GDP, although I did make unemployment worse, and a slight term 2 boost to crime, but fairly trivial. second row:

Ok… so equality IS now harder to raise in later terms, which is a slight improvement, but basically I have been way too meek in my adjustments and need to ramp those changes up. I also started tracking some additional stats:

This is new data for build 1.46 without prior data to compare to, but I felt it important to start measuring. Winning is the value of a special hidden variable I use in the game to adjust difficulty. That percentage DOES go up over time, which makes sense, although its clearly not hitting the upper 90s, so I could simply take into account consecutive election wins as some input into calculating its value?

Turnout is more of a curiosity, but vote percentage is much more interesting. In the *ideal* game of Democracy 4, the player scrapes narrowly through on each election, excited to view the results, and relieved to know they won another turn. 52 and 58% feel about right, but averaging 74$% is pretty worrying. Perhaps cynicism is not a strong enough effect here, especially given that it clearly drops between terms 2 and 3! (in the real world show me a president who people did actually become less cynical about over time…).

So the main thing is that I have useful stats and a system to compare them and check I am heading in the right direction. The game clearly got a bit more balanced between games 1.45 and 1.46, so here is hoping that being able to spend more time post-release on balancing versus features will allow me to improve that even more…

Democracy 4 is a game, but its also my attempt at a fairly accurate political simulator, given the limitations that are to be expected when you do not delve into the individual mechanics of voting systems, and constituencies and different systems such as primaries, mid terms etc.

One of the things that may feel unrealistic to you if you play the game and get good at it, is that sometimes you will win with a laughably high share of the vote. 80%, maybe 85% maybe even higher. In the real world, in true trustworthy and secure democracies, this is super rare. Why is this? and how can I fix it in Democracy 4?

The most obvious answer is probably that ‘differing views on politics exist…duh!’ meaning that no party is ever going to win over everybody. This is obviously true, but there is definitely a phenomena where political debate shifts focus over time, and either takes the electorate with it, or is dragged BY the electorate towards it, depending on your POV. This is often called the ‘overton window‘ and is the space in a theoretical political compass that contains the ‘theoretically electable possibilities’.

For example right now in the USA, segregation of the races is most definitely not inside the overton window. No serious party would suggest setting up apartheid in the US. Similarly, the forced seizure of wealthy peoples second homes by the state is not considered. This is also clearly outside the overton window. But there are policies that move in and out of that window over time. Is socialized medicine now in the US window? perhaps obamacare suggests it is, but thats a fairly recent inclusion.

The point I am making is that mainstream political opinion can shift over time, so in theory, if a government does a really good job, it could shift a LOT of people towards supporting it. There may remain 5% hardcore racists and 5% hardcore communist, but its *feasible* that a centrist party could get 90% of the vote, based on policies.

So why does this not happen, ever, and why does it feel weird if it happens in Democracy 4?

The trouble with letting a computer programmer like me design a voting simulation is that we act like classical economists, who have a concept of a rational consumer. Rational consumers have a price at which they buy product A. If the price is too high, we don’t buy, if its low, we buy. Thats classical economics. The problem is, it turns out that classical economics is horseshit.

Read up on ‘behavioral economics’ and you will find its a crazy world out there. It turns out that ‘free’ is a magical price that behaves totally different from $0.01. It turns out that sometimes we will buy more if the price goes up. Sometimes we will value a product at a higher price than we paid for it…for no reason at all other than psychological feelings of ownership. It turns out that we get confused between $2.99 and $3.01 and think the first price is WAY cheaper. If we buy a product for $9,500 and we see an option to add biscuits worth $5 to the price as an add on, we happily pay $20 for the biscuits. In other words, we are dumb, irrational chimps!

The same is true of voting. We do not look at all of the impacts of the various policies proposed by the various manifestos and then make a rational choice. We vote for dumb reasons, in dumb ways, for animalistic and pyschological and completely irrational reasons.

Democracy 4 models some of this as best as it can. Voters are individuals that have a sense of elasticity of opinion, based on age. In other words old people stick to their views and loyalties, young people chop and change. Actual chance of voting depends partly on party membership, partly on strength of feeling, partly on the campaign effectiveness by the likely party we normally vote for, partly on their innate tendency to do things like vote (randomized at birth).

Once a voter actually votes, we base their choice partly on rational policy evaluation, partly on their perceptions of the leader (strong/compassionate/trustworthy?), partly on how fed up with the ruling party they are due to its time in office (inverse political honeymoon), partly on the appeal of the ruling party’s ministers, and the amount that party spends. And a lot of this is mitigated based on how educated the voters are. Poorly-educated are more manipulated by this, and less by policy.

And ultimately this super-complex bunch of code spits out a decision by each voter… and sometimes 90% vote for you.

I just today realized what I’m missing. Tactical voting and protest voting. Basically people actually supporting you, but voting for someone else.

This is a big thing, especially in ‘safe seats’ or ‘non-swing states’ for US readers. If you live in a state where the democrats get 75% of the vote every election, and you are hard left…why vote for the democrats? You can safely vote for a third party harder-left candidate safe in the knowledge that the message will be received…but there is no risk of you letting a republican in. And the same vice versa.

LOTS of people clearly do this… but the game does not yet handle it. Not only that but the *chance* of someone voting is probably also influenced by this. I know 100% that where I live, our next MP will be the same Tory MP we have had here for decades. Its a super safe conservative party stronghold. So in theory, if I was a natural Tory voter, I could safely ‘use’ my vote to send a message to him that he should not be complacent…OR I could just stay at home that day, safe in the knowledge that he doesn’t need my vote and will win anyway.

I need to include this in Democracy 4, and I am just working out a way. Clearly some people are likely to vote tactically and some are not. I could simply give it a percentage and say 10% of the electorate are susceptible to these thought processes, then assign some other thresholds. For example if the polls show >70% approval for the ruling party, then scale in a chance I don’t bother to vote if I support them anyway, or scale in a chance I vote for the closest party to the ruling party that is *not* them (could be one of two opposition parties…).

I need to code this, and test it, but also hopefully find a way to represent this in the game. One way might be to make up a bunch of small protest-vote parties with fringe views, and represent them as another column of ‘smaller parties’ on election day. This could effectively be the ‘protest vote’ column… Still thinking about it, but I think it does need to go in…