Screenshot Democracy 3, an LP: Serenes Forest flies the Commonwealth of Australia into the [heavens/ground]

[Rehab]

Don't ask how, (because I have no idea what happens to get the player elected into office when the game begins,) but each and every one of us has simultaneously been elected Prime Minister of Australia. Congratulations! (And God save us/AUS)

NOTE: after actually writing this damned thing, I realized how impenetrable it looked. Know that you don't actually have read the vast majority of this shit to participate, just find the other bolded section halfway through this post.

An introduction: Democracy 3 is a political strategy game I've been having maybe a bit too much fun in getting acquainted with over the past week (or at least it was when I started writing this bloody thing). On finishing a successful term in the 4th of the 6 starter nations so far, I remembered that we have some Aussies on SF, so thought a playthrough of Australia where I ask for their input (and yours as well, even if you aren't Australian) might be fun. So let's get to it!

(Also, a new DLC, Clones & Drones, came out while I was in the middle of making this post, so this will also be a blind test run of the new stuff in that)

To wit, some explanations of the game itself, its abstractions/mechanics, and the odd self-imposed restriction we'll be taking on: Democracy 3 can be thought of as a sandbox in which to try to simulate your personal ideal democracy, but you're probably all better off thinking of it in gamier terms, at least to start with.* What that means is that while, say, going straight to legalizing all drugs, near-completely defunding the military, totally outlawing abortion or other such extreme shifts in policy (depending on what the policies are to start with in the nation you're playing, of course) are all things you can technically do almost as soon as you please, and they make for a special sort of fun to deal with, there's a strong chance that:
A) In many/most cases this will see much less material benefit to your country than you'd probably be hoping would be the case, at least not in return for taking the risk of getting a lot of people pissed off at you (at least if you're "playing to win"),
B) Indeed, depending on the sizes and attitudes of the various political factions in the game's not-always-100%-accurate version of the chosen country, you may piss off one of them badly enough for them to get it in their heads assassinate you! (Factions I've yet been assassinated and nearly-assassinated by so far during my play time, in roughly the order of most-to-least-frequent attempts: Religious, Capitalists, Socialists, Ethnic Minorities, Liberals, and Environmentalists.)
And, C) Every one of the countries starts off with both a sizable budget deficit and a bunch of other specific problems of varying financial and social costs, designated Negative Situations, which are already making your constituents more unhappy and screwing with your finances. If you're not careful about it, your preferred social reform could just make those situations worse, or, maybe even more damningly, it could make implementing the solutions to the country's ongoing problems just plain take more time than you can spare.

E: *When you're just picking up the game, that is. Don't feel like I expressed this well in the earlier versions of this post- for the purposes of the LP, you guys can feel free to do tell me to do whatever. If you want to have our first order of business be to ban divorce or something, you may be my guests.

[spoiler=THAT OUT OF THE WAY, LET'S GET THIS PARTY STARTED]The game's selection screen and some factoids (the accuracy of which I have neglected to check):

Our settings:

First overview screen after starting the playthrough. Despite, as we'll soon see, our abysmal popularity, we apparently managed to get ourselves elected. Democracy, everybody

The screen Democracy 3 players probably spend most play time of any looking at, a gateway to all current policies (grey), problems (red) and specific statistics/measures of our success, like "Car usage" and "Education level" (blue). Note the bright, candylike colors. They are all enemies of the state. Except green. Blue is neutral.

There's no limit to the number of 5-year terms you can serve by default in Australia's standard settings, but we'll be limiting ourselves to 2 terms, just to challenge ourselves. We will also be cranking up the difficulty to 200%, because we're hardcore like that, and what could possibly go wrong anyway really. We'll be leaving the rest of the settings on the defaults for Australia. (Did you know Australia doesn't experience earthquakes? Me neither.)

Unless and until somebody comes up with a suggestion for any replacement names to kick their asses, I've named us The Serenes Party, and kept the random opposition party name initially handed to us, The Jehovah Party. (If you're gonna suggest replacements, lay em on me as soon as possible, I'll have to start another game to put them in. Not a big deal to start with, but if it happens after we get going, it'll necessitate undoing progress) Note that Democracy 3 doesn't actually even try to simulate how an antagonist political party would actually behave; our opposition party's just assumed to be against whatever our position is on every single issue (attempting to quote Democracy 3's tutorial/manual as close to verbatim as possible here). *ABSTRACTION ALERT.* *ALSO MAYBE A BIT OF SASS ON THE GAME'S PART. JUST KIDDING REPUBLICANS DEMOCRATS EVERYONE.*

[spoiler=PAGES AND PAGES OF SHIT ABOUT THE MECHANICS THAT YOU REALLY DON'T NEED TO KNOW, EITHER TO PARTICIPATE OR TO FOLLOW ALONG, BUT WHICH I'LL PUT DOWN FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO KNOW WHAT SORTS OF THINGS I'M DOING TURN-TO-TURN UNDER THE HOOD]How the actual meat of the gameplay works:

A bunch of different figures used to measure our great society, like GDP and unemployment and education and poverty and the state of our environment and crime and the list goes on basically, will start out at certain levels to begin with which are correspondent to the policies that are already in place. Some of these aspects have generally desirable consequences to raise, like GDP, education, and the state of our environment, and some of these we will generally be desiring to lower, like unemployment, poverty, and crime.

We will accomplish this by passing some new Policies, and altering (and perhaps cancelling) state funding for some others which are already in place. (Unfortunately, this game doesn't represent quite every policy issue you policy wonks/regular human beings with strong opinions about certain things in politics out there could possibly desire to see the game touch on, and you may find some of the ways that it portrays what is there to not be to your liking, but we must soldier on regardless. Also that may be what mods are for. Steam workshop support baby)

We will accomplish that by spending "Political Capital" points. *ABSTRACTION ALERT. ABSTRACTION ALERT.* Political Capital is a measure of the amount of legislating we can justify and get done in a period of about 3 months, according to the game. We get a certain amount each turn, and enacting, altering, and canceling policies requires us to spend certain amounts of it, generally a different cost for all 3 with regard to a given policy- enacting, increasing funding for, decreasing funding for, and canceling a policy can and generally will have different Political Capital costs for each. (Yeah, this is long-winded, but you're the one who wanted to peek under the hood, boss.) Some policies cost a small enough amount to alter for our purposes that we can pass 5 or 10 of them in a single turn, and some policy implementations may have us sitting on a fair share of that sweet PC for a turn or more. *ART IMITATES LIFE ALERT*

SHIT THAT'S EVEN LESS NECESSARY FOR YOU TO KNOW IN ORDER TO FOLLOW ALONG, BUT WHICH HAS YET MORE BEARING ON ACTUAL TURN-TO-TURN GAMEPLAY DECISIONS:

Our Total Political Capital points per turn are "generated" by our cabinet of ministers, or rather each minister generates their own amount each turn. There's a discrete pool of candidates from which to choose ministers (although I've seen more generated over time each playthrough, perhaps in some kind of response to resignations/firings, changes in minister happiness, or just time), and at the outset they each generate a unique amount of Political Capital, which vaguely corresponds with the level of their beginning Loyalty stat, which can also just be thought of as Happiness. We have one minister for each of the 7 spheres of administration.

TRANSLATION, FURTHER EXPLANATION: each ministerial candidate has a few unique stats (other than their name, gender etc):

-Loyalty, which determines how much Political Capital they generate per turn (maxes out at or around 5.3), and will go up or down (PC generated bottoms out at 1.0) from its starting point, depending on how happy the minister is with our decisions (it can only go up or down gradually, over time spent in our cabinet). If a minister's Loyalty gets low enough, they'll warn us that they're thinking of resigning, and if it gets much lower than that, they will!

-Two political factions that they're sympathetic towards, one primary and one secondary, whose current happiness level with our government will determine whether the amount of PC the minister generates each turn (again, basically their Loyalty stat) slowly grows, slowly declines, or stays level. The given factions will get a happiness bonus for each minister in our cabinet who sympathizes with them as long as they're with us, but if those ministers are either fired or resign, the faction's approval will get take an equivalent hit! (One of my first bright ideas was to hire ministers who liked factions I was already on bad terms with in the beginning, and/or with whom I assumed my relationship would deteriorate over time because of the policies I planned to enact. Didn't go so hot then. Probably wouldn't recommend, at least not to beginners.)

-Experience, which determines the size and direction of small modifiers to: the time needed to implement (changes in) a policy, the magnitude of its effects, and the costs of implementing it, for all policies in that minister's sphere of administration. Each minister has a different amount of experience to start with, but the only way to increase it is with time. This also caps out eventually, though I forget what the policy modifiers are when exp gets maxed.

-Preferred Jobs; which 3 spheres of administration they'll be most happy to administer, most-to-least. Another thing that affects loyalty.

Spheres of Administration (we have a minister for all of them, and all policies fall into one of them):
Foreign Policy, Welfare, Economy, Tax, Public Services, Law and Order, and Transport.

[spoiler=EVEN MORE SHIT ABOUT MINISTERS]At least up until the most recent DLC, there's a fully-selected default cabinet which always picks the same ministers for the same jobs (oddly, the initially available ministers are always listed in the same order and have the same portrait/stats, just different names depending on the country. if we recreate the file to give the parties new names, our ministers may all suddenly get name changes), but the 26 Political Capital per turn they give is a bit mediocre, especially if we want to get the big PC spenders (which includes a lot of the substantial tax increasing options) out of the way first. (and also especially if we assume that the amount they generate per turn is going to go down over time, as tends to be the case when I play this game, for, uh, some reason.)

Also, I'd prefer to personally pick which factions we have to worry about our ministers betraying us for.

Side note: the maximum number of PC points we can hold at a time is equal to double the PC we get per turn, except for the period right after we're elected, when it's 60 no matter what. The game doesn't have an enormous lot of options that are absolute must-takes which cost over 40, and even that's setting it a bit high, so this won't be of that much consequence, but on the other hand there's a couple of policies that we may find ourselves unable to even save up for if we piss our ministers off by enough. (Australia may be the only country in the game that starts with one of my pet favorite policies IRL, stem cell research, which costs a whopping 45 PC to enact, so. Lucked out there.)

Choosing to reshuffle the entire cabinet at once costs 10 PC itself, and docks us a similar, brief happiness hit with all our constituents (noted as the "Everyone" faction) (which does indeed include Everyone) similar to firing one of them, but I've generally found the extra PC per turn gained early on to be worth it (although I haven't actually worked out the math, zzzzz etc). Along with the other benefits of choosing my own noose.

ON THOSE NOTES, YET MORE SHIT, ON POLITICAL FACTIONS:

I was gonna try to give a more robust description of the IMO impressive voter system in Democracy 3, but it was taking way too long, so! Something close enough to the gist:

Each "simulated voter" in the game is influenced by different factions to differing degrees (as in they may care about both the Farmers' concerns and the Capitalists', but care more about the Farmers'), each faction influences different percentages of the population depending on which country it is, and the happiness of each faction (based on their overall opinion of our policies, generally those which they feel affect them) which affects a single voter adds up to whether or not that voter is happy with, and will vote for us. *ART ATTEMPTS TO IMITATE LIFE, MIGHT ACTUALLY DO AN OKAY JOB ALERT*

[spoiler=AN ILLUSTRATED EXAMPLE, WHICH I HOPE TO GOD EXPLAINS IT BETTER THAN THAT GRUESOME RUN-ON SENTENCE]

The implementation of the factions' relations to assassinations, on the other hand... oy.

[spoiler=OH GOD DO I HAVE TO]

Rough, rough, rough version of how assassinations work in gameplay: when a faction [which I'm assuming must actually have a certain level of prominence in our country- I had Capitalists perpetually in the red in my France playthrough just because of the policies in place at the beginning (Socialists have an overwhelming share in the game's France), but they never tried to kill me then. I just got a couple "angry newspaper" events, while they killed me plenty of times as the U.S.] gets pissed off enough at our decisions and the status quo, more of the population will join first the interest groups in the top part of this screen, then (after I'm-not-sure-what-else happens) will start joining the corresponding terrorist group on the bottom, one of the groups with the pistol by the name. When the group has enough members and its bar on the bottom fills up, that faction tries to assassinate us. The assassination is more likely to fail if we've jacked up the spending on our country's intelligence agencies and armed forces (one policy each), but we can generally avoid anybody even trying if we just pay the country's strongest factions their due diligence. (That is absolutely not a guarantee that I'll play well enough to avoid it, though.)

Good news: warnings generally pop up when one of the terrorist groups is about to try to kill us. Bad news: depending on how pissed they are and on your available measures to placate them, that warning can easily come too late. Best to enact conciliatory policies ahead of time, especially because many policies/policy changes can take multiple turns to go into effect.

[spoiler=NEW RULE: EVERYBODY GETS ONE (1) RANT ON SOMETHING THEY THINK DEMOCRACY 3 DOES WRONG. HERE, KNEECAPPED AND STUFFED IN A CORNER, LIES MINE. (RIP)]

I really want to rant here about how one can be assassinated in this game while plainly moving mountains to try to please whichever faction, and "how fucking pissed and/or brainless would a bunch of capitalists in particular have to be to think assassinating their G20 country's head of government would be a good idea and/or do anything at all to make their situation better, Jesus Christ," but I do have to admit assassinations may keep the player more on their toes trying to keep various sorts of constituents pleased than would be politically realistic if they weren't part of the game as-is. (although it would be nice if different factions being pissed off had more grounded and differentiated effects)

To help decide how we'll govern, I ask each of you to submit 2 things:
-Which of the currently ongoing 8 Negative Situations (those big red buttons on the main screen) to tackle first, and/or to give general priority to fixing
-Preferences regarding what you'd like to see happen during our tenure.* More general things will be easier to address, but feel free to get specific, too.

You may also suggest a name for our party, and for our opposition.

*For example, when I asked Ike-Mike, AKA Bigguss Bossuss, what to prioritize during The Ike-Mike Party's tenure in a previous two-term playthrough of Germany, his defining start instructions were: to remedy the national debt situation without slashing public funding for either education or health, and to relax border controls against immigration. Since it happened that all these instructions were directly represented by the game, each directive was executed with distinction. I won't always be able to guarantee that what you want to see happen will be something the game can successfully simulate as easily as it could for those requests, but I'll do everything in our power to take it on!

(For another example, Parrhesia had the awesome suggestion to close the real world's ~8 year average life-expectancy gap between Australian Aboriginals and the rest of the population, but Democracy 3 tends to couch the gameplay in broad terms that don't change the basic situations much between specific nations, and we're not going to get a popup for that or anything. What I can do on that front, however, is to push extra hard to increase the happiness of the Ethnic Minorities faction, and Australia's scores for Health and Equality, while decreasing its Poverty and Racial Tension scores. Feel free to suggest as much specific reality-inspired stuff as you'd like, just be prepared for its accomplishing to require some creative license to interpret.)

At the same time as I'm addressing The Serenes Party's concerns, I will also be working to address the deficit between our Income and Expenditures figures. Whether for the sake of gameplay or thanks to the positions of its creator(s), Democracy 3's portrayal of the consequences of budget-wrangling are maybe less than completely true to reality (as are plenty of other things in the game, but I've had my rant already), if still arguably somewhat analogous to it.

Basically, in my small share of experience playing Democracy 3, spending deficits of any size are Bad News, and the longer we have one the more likely it is that our credit rating will be downgraded. This will piss off the Capitalist faction a bit and decrease our GDP, which will decrease our income, which will grow the deficit unless we take more drastic action to compensate, which could lead to our credit rating getting downgraded again, and thus the cycle may continue until the sea reclaims everything (or more likely until the Capitalist faction decides to assassinate us), etc. And if our overall debt (also tracked by the game, though only shown in a backroom chart) gets high enough, the Debt Crisis negative situation (if I remember the name correctly) will trigger, and that's another, even more massive hit to GDP and basically everybody's opinion of us and our ability to balance your budget right there, and basically any time I've ever had that fucking thing trigger I've spiraled into the depths without a prayer of reviving right quick, SO. Unless and until you guys expressly tell me you'd like to see this shit run into the ground, fixing the deficit is going to be roughly as strong a priority as translating Serenes' directives into action.
(This is probably gonna require at least some nasty tax increases. Sorry fiscal conservatives, but this game never met a tax it didn't like.) (Except for the ones it kinda doesn't)

CONTENTS OF THE NEXT POSTS, CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION: more overviews of The Situation, including a list of our incumbent policies, a list of the ways in which our country is measured, a list of policies we can enact, the Negative Situations, and political faction demographics. I know, I can't wait either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeKxx-Pq1hk

Edited January 16, 2015 by Tangerine

[Rehab]

Have I mentioned this game's a bit cheeky?

State of the Commonwealth: bugger

Let's go back to our main screen and talk a bit more about how to read this monster. Starting with the, uh, easier stuff.

-The bar on the top of the screen shows current Political Capital in the top left corner, symbolized by the little FIGHT THE POWER fist graphic, followed by our quarterly Income and Expenditures. (the toolbar icons lead to a buncha stat screens, eff those for a minute)

[spoiler=ON THOSE, THE BUDGET, GDP, AND HOW BIG A PART THEY ARE OF GAMEPLAY. AKA MORE UNDER-THE-HOOD STUFF]

To recklessly simplify things, the ways we increase our Income in Democracy 3 can be pigeonholed into one of two categories: Increasing taxes and increasing GDP. Problematically for us, enacting and increasing taxes, though they generally raise us fair amounts of money in short order, also tend to both piss off the vast majority of political factions (except for the Socialists and sometimes Environmentalists), and to have undesirable side-effects that sometimes actually compromise our income (mostly in slight penalties to GDP and, if we fuck up badly enough, more particularly nasty Negative Situations). A lot of the more profitable taxes also tend to cost a lot of Political Capital to either enact or raise, so if we're not prudent enough spending PC to leave enough to raise them the next turn, we could spend a lot more time watching our Credit Rating decline than we'd like.

Increasing GDP, on the other hand, typically requires us to either lower taxes or to enact policies which increase either GDP itself or which affect factors which have a part in determining it, such as (but not limited to) Productivity, Unemployment, Technology, Tourism and International Trade. Unfortunately, those policies tend to themselves cost money to enact and continue to fund, and their benefits only kick in over time. In most cases I haven't found a minor hit to GDP to outweigh the increase to income from enacting a tax, but then again I haven't really done the math.

On that note, and to continue to recklessly simplify, (almost) every non-tax policy enacted increases Expenditures. It's difficult to close the gap in the budget just by increasing taxes, because pleasing political factions and combating negative situations (which themselves almost always somehow cost us money as long as they're going on, from small bites to a fair chunk) tends to require enacting new policies and raising funding for existing ones, which leads to expenditures inevitably bloating and requiring more taxes to try and catch up.

The other extreme, trying to close the deficit just by reducing expenditures, is just as problematic, though. A lot of policies being funded at the start of the game have some sort of desirable effects on income, again prevent even more costly negative situations, and/or serve to placate some political factions. Completely defunding any big state services and calling the budget a solved problem can have negative consequences in Democracy 3 comparable to jacking a big tax into the stratosphere.

The money side of the game is pretty much always on the player's mind, but in my experience the early phase is especially based around trying to close the gap as far as possible, while not doing so much in the wrong ways that it gets the player assassinated (unless they elect to just reload the autosaves every time they die and bulldoze through like a cheeky cunt, or turn them off entirely). The way I've played, it tends to mean enacting as many big tax increases for tens of billions or more as I think I can get away with, while at the same time enacting programs that only cost in the millions or couple billions maybe to take the edge off as necessary, trying to even the budget before the credit rating gets shot too far to hell (and certainly before that fuckin debt situation triggers).

It's actually kinda fun! I think. Sometimes.

-The faction box shows each faction's happiness level, of course, and the size of the grey bar in the backdrop for each of them equals the portion of the population each one constitutes. Examples here: the Socialists have a very dominant share and could go either way on us, the Religious are really scarce and those that exist are unhappy with us, and the Conservatives are almost as big as the Socialists and loathe us, which could be a problem. (To explain the "Everyone" faction, some taxes and negative situations, particularly ones related to crime, effectively give us small penalties with, uh, everyone. They also just don't like there being crime in general.) Again, each citizen is influenced by more than one faction, but some factions are mutually exclusive- somebody who's a Socialist won't also be a Capitalist (AFAIK), Liberals won't also be Conservatives, and each individual is in only one income level faction, Wealthy, Poor or Middle (again, AFAIK).

[spoiler=A MORE PRECISE, AND FAR LESS COMPREHENSIBLE FACTION SCREEN (THE BAR GRAPH ICON ON THE TOP TOOLBAR)]

Height of line denotes opinion, percentage of population noted on the side. Why show you this? Because it was there

-If you hover your mouse over any of those buttons, you can see what that issue/measure/situation is affected by, and what it's affecting.

[spoiler=FOR EXAMPLE]

I at least can't see it in the screenshot, but I'm hovering my mouse over the Uncompetitive Economy negative situation. Arrows going to it, from other buttons show what buttons are factors in it existing and what buttons are factors in driving it down- green means up, red means down. In this case, the green arrow from Corporation Tax shows it's "increasing" the Uncompetitive Economy situation, and the red arrow from the Productivity stat shows that Productivity is "decreasing" it. The situation is in turn having a negative effect on both Capitalist happiness and on our GDP.

This might be a bit confusing, but basically the higher the Corporation Tax rate is set, the harder it is to get rid of the Uncompetitive Economy situation, and the higher Productivity is, the closer we get to getting rid of it, which will mean the Capitalists lighten up and GDP increases.

(this was kinda in the realm of shityoudon'tneedtoknow but the screen was right in front of me and I got carried away, sorry)

[spoiler=CHARTS AND STAT LISTS AND STUFF. BASICALLY MORE SHIT THAT IT ISN'T NECESSARY TO EVEN TRY TO UNDERSTAND TO FOLLOW ALONG, BUT THAT IT WOULDN'T FEEL RIGHT TO NEGLECT PUTTING IN SOMEWHERE]A look at the economy. The light blue Global Economy and dark blue Debt lines are what I tend to look at most turn-to-turn, because GDP goes down no matter what we do when the global economy is down (and it looks set to take a dip ) and because we hit the big fuckin debt situation roughly around when debt gets to two thirds of the way up the graph (don't quote me on that, I just really want to see that fucker taper off basically), respectively.

Also of note: our Credit Rating starts out at the highest grade it can, which isn't the case with most countries in Democracy 3, even the U.S. Curious. This probably seems good, but the only place it has to go is down. If you start with a low credit rating and manage to get something of a surplus for a few turns it can be upgraded, and you can eventually get it above where it started, which might be considered like getting increases in GDP and income for "free." Might be hard to tell how much of an impact it'll actually have, but I'd wager it's gonna fall before the deficit is fixed and we'll need to get it raised again.

[spoiler='SHIT EVEN I DIDN'T CARE ABOUT]Our expenditure and income figures, pie graph of doom etc. Hope you guys like income taxes

(I'm not rightly sure what "Government Borrowing" is, as Democracy 3 doesn't touch the topic of quote fiscal policy unquote (how much money to print, to woefully simplify it. justbondsthings) with a 39.5 foot pole. I'm used to looking at this chart and seeing Income Tax being the biggest moneymaker by far)

All of the incumbent policies already in place at the start of the game for Australia in Democracy 3, from most to least popular (though this doesn't explain their effects). Ask me about our tasers. (Seriously, feel free to ask me for a screenshot of the actual summary for any of these, but fuck if I'm doing each one individually)

I actually haven't found policy popularity to be all that important, given I've often enacted really helpful policies that had like 0% popularity and experienced no backlash, but sometimes I'll enact a tax if I notice it's somehow in the green or something. (The superstore tax is sometimes kinda disturbingly popular.)

All the litmus tests for our performance in the game. I can put these up as the playthrough goes along if you guys want. (Bad stuff, like poverty, is red if it goes up, green if it went down. Good stuff's vice versa.)

"Jiminy Fucking Cricket, I don't understand or care about any of this," you might be saying (you jerk). Don't worry, we're at the tl;dr:

Finally, (one of) the part(s) where you guys come in: Negative Situations

Everybody pick which situation you want us to try to get resolved first. Some are costing us more than others, but some of the less costly ones are easier to deal with. Feel free to go with your personal real-life preferences, as opposed to powergaming or whatever. Or go ahead and try to powergame, up to you!

(Didn't put these in any intentional order here, for the record.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6ESHZPGx54

A WARNING: I make absolutely no guarantees as to how realistically any of these situations are represented whatsoever.

Ones we've had since the beginning:

[spoiler=SITUATION 1: ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR]

Contributing factors: high level of alcohol consumption, religious faction membership? I'm not sure if it's saying that the Religious faction being quite small is a contributing factor, or if the few actual members are indeed helping to cause it. Either way, we can at least help tackle this by lowering alcohol consumption.

Treatments: the more funding we put into our CCTV Program policy (Liberals don't like that policy) and into our Police Force (would make Conservatives happy, decrease the Crime figure at large, and put a tiny dent in Unemployment), the closer the situation will get to ending. Unimplemented policies I happen to know would also help: Community Policing also hits both this and Alcohol Abuse pretty hard, and nobody dislikes it, though it costs a couple billion to fund fully.

Ongoing Consequences: our tourism rating is taking a minor hit, which means a small hit to GDP/income in addition to the actually-kinda-puny $161 million expenditure bump, and crime is up. The part that I like the least is actually the sizable hit to Conservative happiness, because it's not as easy to find policies to please them with left and right as with some other factions, IMO. It also hits the growth rate of the Liberal faction a bit.

Notice: Solved, as of turn 13!

[spoiler=SITUATION 2: VIGILANTE MOBS]

Contributing factors: the biggest thing is just the current crime level's kinda high, apparently. Racial tension also keeps it going.

Treatments: again, more CCTV cameras and police force funding helps this end quicker. I think the Community Policing policy also hits this? (Community Policing might be a pretty good policy in this game, you guys) E: while Community Policy might be a pretty good policy in this game, it does not in fact affect Vigilante Mobs. nvm

Consequences: Similar to Antisocial Behavior, hits conservative happiness and tourism, doesn't increase expenditure at the same time as decreasing income though. Also boosts growth to Conservative membership.

Notice: Solved, as of turn 11!

[spoiler=SITUATION 3: ORGANIZED CRIME]

Contributing factors: I think some of these just have a high start value, but Australia's stance on legalizing gambling (boosts GDP and pleases capitalists at the cost of pissing conservatives off, and this) isn't helping.

Treatments: Increasing funding to Intelligence services, increasing the prevalence of wiretapping, and arming more of the police will all help fight this situation (the Liberal faction doesn't care for any of these policies, but Patriots like them, and more spook funding dents crime in general), as will increasing the extent to which prostitution is legal (like legalized gambling, doing that gives us a boost to GDP at the cost of Conservatives and Religious (IIRC?) being livid). Legalizing more drugs will also take a bit of a bite out of it. (this will also increase our "legal drug consumption" rate, which is a mixed blessing, and will please liberals and piss offfffff conservatives. later we could also enact a tax on the stuff for more income, but that and the alcohol and cigarette taxes all slightly reduce equality and increase poverty)

Consequences: Increasing crime can make the Everyone "faction" unhappy and drain tourism income at the least, and the situation also costs us $179 million, though IMO that kind of money only matters very much when one's this close *squints, pinches pingers* to fixing the deficit.

Notice: Solved, as of turn 27!

[spoiler=SITUATION 4: ALCOHOL ABUSE]

Causes: So sizable poverty and unemployment are contributing factors, but what this doesn't show is the factors making for a stonking huge alcohol consumption stat.

Treatments: Increasing police funding and enacting community police would hit this directly. Increasing the drinking age and alcohol tax rate would hit alcohol consumption and the latter would increase revenue, but alcohol taxes hit the poor a bit, and the liberal and Young factions would be upset. The Alcohol Awareness Campaign is a policy that costs less money and PC than any of those to put a little dent in alcohol consumption without pissing anybody off.

We could also just fight poverty and unemployment but where's the fun in that am I right guys

Consequences: $7+ billion cost? Jesus. It also increases the cost of state healthcare and hits our Health stat, which hurts productivity and therefore income, and also boosts crime which hurts happiness and eventually income again. (All that shit is cumulative, I think.) This situation makes for a nice fat target, but it could also take a long time to halt, because its intensity is at the top of the charts and it's a long way down.

Notice: Solved, as of turn 40!

[spoiler=SITUATION 5: ASTHMA EPIDEMIC]

Factors: High start value maybe, also the fewer people use cars and the more policies there are that benefit the environment the less intense it gets.

Treatments: This motherfucker is a pain in the ass to treat, because car usage goes up at the same time as the Environment stat takes a hit as GDP increases, but we generally want GDP to increase because we don't want to go fucking broke, funding all our policies costs money if we don't want to go broke, and we need our GDP/income to be higher than our expenditure to not go broke. There's a ton of policies that help the environment and decrease car usage, but most of them cost a few hundred million at least and tend to piss off the capitalists, and almost everything that decreases car usage pisses off Motorists (these guys aren't really dangerous assassins compared to other factions, but they influence a lot of the population, so they can be a problem during reelection). We can also lower car usage by increasing bus usage and rail usage, which tend to slightly decrease unemployment, increase equality and are better for the environment, all of which will please Commuters and environmentalists, but there's a million policies to enact to really get that stuff going and it also requires money that's hard to get without, y'know, raising GDP (and they still piss off motorists). The petrol tax, carbon tax and car tax are exceptions in that they raise some money instead of costing it while helping the environment (the petrol and carbon taxes are pretty high up there in tax moneymaker rankings in general), but they still piss off the poor beleaguered motorists and the less-poor-but-often-still-beleaguered capitalists.

Consequences: $322 million costs hurts a bit more than some of the other situations, at least directly, and the productivity hit's no help, but frankly the Parents faction ain't shit. The situation's a pain in the ass, but it's a pain in the ass I once went two whole terms without fixing, because it seemed like the goalposts kept shifting as fast as I tried to meet them. (I wasn't meeting them very quickly, in retrospect.)

Notice: Solved, as of turn 34!

[spoiler=SITUATION 6: HOMELESSNESS]

Factors: this situation can creep up on you when you don't pay enough attention to poverty and unemployment. Property tax and higher immigration also boost it a little, but those are what really set it up in Democracy 3.

Treatment: Just enacting policies to tackle unemployment and poverty (there's a lot of these) has stopped this situation for me before, but we can also increase funding for state housing to close the gap, though funding for public housing can decrease the share of the work that private housing ends up doing. We can also increase funding for the Unemployment Benefits policy, which hits both the situation intensity and poverty cumulatively, but is also a mixed blessing in Democracy 3, because it actually increases unemployment a little (along with making the capitalists grumble and costing a couple billion maybe). It'd probably help overall, though.

Consequences: the poor aren't one of the strongest factions in the game, but this has enough of a negative impact on opinion that it can still hurt our chances of getting reelected (also I know of like 3 or 4 things at most that actually make the middle earnings group happier, and 1 of them is decreasing income tax, the most lucrative one in the game). The crime increase and the lost $35 million might actually be less dangerous.

Also, being homeless ranks pretty high on the list of things that suck. Objectively speaking. IMO.

Notice Solved, as of turn 27!

[spoiler=SITUATION 7: UNCOMPETITIVE ECONOMY]

Factors: a good share of the countries seem to start out with this one, despite the Corporation Tax not being that high or having that big an effect. Australia seems to starts closer than most of them to the stop trigger anyway, though.

Treatment: we can decrease the corporation tax a little and see if that nudges it over the edge, which wouldn't be too big a deal since it's not the most lucrative tax anyway, but we can also stop it just by increasing productivity a smidge, which is already on the agenda to improve.

Consequences: we definitely need as few GDP hits as possible, and the capitalists are already hard to please. My usual strategy tends to involve doing stuff that reckons with this situation. so really the vote might be more like "vote for the situation you want to focus on at the same time as/after we finish off Uncompetitive Economy."

Notice: Solved, as of turn 8!

[spoiler=SITUATION 8: POLLUTION]

Factors: just the state of the environment that's causing this one.

Treatment: Pretty much the same stuff that treats the Asthma Epidemic- car usage doesn't affect it directly this time, but less of that still tends to be good for the environment stat anyway.

Consequences: pisses off Environmentalists while boosting their membership. Fun! Also, the health hit effectively lowers income and raises expenditure, and the direct $1.79 billion lost is up there for situations. Unfortunately, it's again similar to Asthma Epidemic in that merely handling our finances adeptly will just keep moving the goalposts. I think this is the only situation I've ever stopped, only to have it trigger again later in the same game. Compared to Alcohol Abuse, the direct cost is closer to the realm of "last-stretch fiddling before surplus is reached" than "equivalent to some fair-sized tax increases," so I've tended towards tackling it a bit later. *SAD TRUTHS RE: THE ENVIRONMENT ALERT*

Lest you guys think "caring about the environment" seems too underpowered in this game, though, Tourism income and International Trade grow when proper care is given to the environment, and I think the Clones & Drones DLC may have also added some new reasons to worry if we ignore it (Temperature Change and Food Price are new statistics).

Notice: Solved (for now), as of turn 24!

And the ones which kicked in during our tenure:

[spoiler=SITUATION 9: WATER SHORTAGE](this one popped up in turn 17)

Factors: it appears to get more likely to trigger every year, which means every 4 turns after the start (every turn is a quarter), and it looksl ike it's exacerbated by how many Farmers we have and the Average Temperature stat, which is also affected by the number of years passed, and by the size of our CO2 Emissions stat.

Treatment: I have so far found one policy that deals with this directly at all, one Climate Change Adaptation Fund. It costs 15 billion to enact even the cheapest version, and goes up to a my-jaw-dropping 57 billion at the far end. And the only thing it appears to do, aside from decreasing the severity of this situation (but not on the lowest setting! have to spend like 27 billion to do that), is to make Farmers and Environmentalists happy and to decrease Unemployment (before this situation triggered, I didn't see it affect anything except those 3 things. I was like "at least 15 billion just to hit unemployment? Yeah, right. this is a situation-fighter, huh"). Although I can imagine there may be other as-yet-unrevealed Negative Situations it might help with and/or prevent... tricky stuff, D3.

Or, maybe we could just improve our Environment stat by a fuckload, which would probably take us on the same path as attempting to solve the Asthma Epidemic or Pollution. Either one is gonna take some serious investment...

Consequences: Almost a billion is a relatively high direct cost for a negative situation, the farmer happiness dock is respectable, and a higher Food Price stat in addition very slightly (so far, it's almost at the bottom of the chart now but it's creeping up) decreases Poor Earnings and Middle Earnings, which is likely bad for our Income overall, as well as Health, which has little effects on things like productivity and the cost of our health policies. And also Immigration. Huh.

Notice: Solved (for now), as of turn 24!

[spoiler=SITUATION 10: INTERNET CRIME]

Factors:

Treatment:

Consequences:

Notice: Solved, as of turn 32!

[spoiler=SITUATION 11: OBESITY]

Factors:

Treatment:

Consequences:

Notice: Solved, as of turn 29!

[spoiler=SITUATION 12: CYBERWARFARE]

Factors:

Treatment:

Consequences:

Notice: Solved, as of turn 24!

DESCRIPTIONS FOR NEGATIVE SITUATIONS 10 THROUGH 12 COMING SOON.

Note that the "stop trigger" level is below the "start trigger" for all of these. *#MAKESUTHINK*

Updated list of all our currently-in-place policies, as of turn 30:

And finally, as if all that shit wasn't enough to get through, for your entertainment and edification: all the policies we could possibly yet enact, listed by name and administrative sphere, just in case any of you guys see something you like and would like to fit in regardless of its effect on the budget or the situations, at some point. Or that you loathe enough to comment on. You absolutely don't need to look at any of em though, feel free to consider this last spoiler more under-the-hood stuff. Updated as of turn 30:

[spoiler=IF YOU ASK ME TO PREVIEW EVERY SINGLE ONE I'M GONNA GIVE YOU SUCH A PINCH]

Red background means we don't have enough PC to enact them this turn. They tend to cost more PC and in some cases get more and more out there the further they are down in each section, but it's not a one-to-one relationship.

Got it? Good. It'll be on the test no it won't

(A recap: pick the negative situation, which you may find in the 8 labeled spoilers above, that you'd like to see tackled first, and give me some general instruction to go on on how we runnin things. Also feel free to browse the available/incumbent policies and yell at ones you do or don't like)

I'll call, say, about 36 hours a deadline? 12:00 PM EST, it being about 10:00 PM for me now.

Edited December 18, 2014 by Rehab

[Baldrick]

wordssssss

They could easily make it consistent to Aus by changing "Assassination" to "Backstabbed by your own ministers"

I humbly suggest our party be called the Palmer United Party. Opposition party should be the Economic Girly Men.

For policies, since you're probably already going to tax the rich, reduce the carbon footprint with plenty of environmentalist policies, and keep education excellent. (Green means excellent, right?)

[Tryhard]

I don't even understand politics in real life, how do you expect me to understand this?

I think I'll need at least one reread over my initial skimming before I can input anything of worth.

straya straya straya

Edited November 1, 2014 by Tryhard

[Rehab]

Oh god that really looks pretty badly intimidating, doesn't it.

(You're also allowed to give input with absolutely no regard for its value whatsoever, for the record)

wordssssss

They could easily make it consistent to Aus by changing "Assassination" to "Backstabbed by your own ministers"

I humbly suggest our party be called the Palmer United Party. Opposition party should be the Economic Girly Men.

For policies, since you're probably already going to tax the rich, reduce the carbon footprint with plenty of environmentalist policies, and keep education excellent. (Green means excellent, right?)

sorry

Taken into deliberation, can do, and it sure does! Or good, at least.

Edited November 1, 2014 by Rehab

[Parrhesia]

I humbly suggest our party be called the Palmer United Party. Opposition party should be the Economic Girly Men.

vetoing this with all of my fucking power

(Anyway, if we're going to ironically cling onto the name of a far-right renegade it should be Katter.)

I don't really have any suggestions of my own, though, tbf.

[Rehab]

Not that I have any problems with this, but at this rate we're basically gonna be the Green Party. I'm assuming Parrhesia's not going to be happy with this

(I'll settle for projecting your pet issues onto the game without having any idea how they'll be addressed)

Edited November 1, 2014 by Rehab

[Rapier]

Uncompetitive economy.

IIRC, we'll have more money to spend through that way.

[Parrhesia]

http://youtu.be/WH_MBwQhGgA

[Rehab]

Only you can prevent this from unironically coming to pass. (unless you want to encourage it)

[Tryhard]

As someone who previously had asthma, I have to vote for ASTHMA EPIDEMIC.

that's probably like the worst one considering, perhaps interchangably with uncompetitive economy early on since you seem to have trouble treating it from what I could read (?).

as for the rest, there's really not much I can say apart from BAN SMOKING really, I have no idea what I could possibly suggest apart from a good-nature attempt to focus generally on economy and welfare - tax the rich, not let the poor die in the gutter, standard stuff I would imagine.

I am not witty enough to come up with a suitable name, please forgive me

Edited November 2, 2014 by Tryhard

[Klokinator]

I strongly considered getting this game recently. Looks way fun '3'

[Parrhesia]

imo the us party should be the Sky Blue Party and the vile enemy should be the Maroon Party

literally every australian should understand what i'm driving at here. expect resistance from anyone from queensland.

[Rehab]

As someone who previously had asthma, I have to vote for ASTHMA EPIDEMIC.

that's probably like the worst one considering, perhaps interchangably with uncompetitive economy early on since you seem to have trouble treating it from what I could read (?).

as for the rest, there's really not much I can say apart from BAN SMOKING really, I have no idea what I could possibly suggest apart from a good-nature attempt to focus generally on economy and welfare - tax the rich, not let the poor die in the gutter, standard stuff I would imagine.

I am not witty enough to come up with a suitable name, please forgive me

Don't worry about it, gut-based involvement deciding what you'd like to see us try >>> trying to powergame a new game that you aren't the one actually playing, by my math at least.

[spoiler=AFTER MUCH DELIBERATION]

Our name is The Sky Blue United Party, and we are here to kick the ass of The Economic Girly Maroon Party.

And chew sugar-free gum.

Our first orders of business are to balance the budget, to make our economy competitive, and to end the asthma epidemic.

We will do this partially by increasing taxes which target the rich and which benefit the environment, partially by preserving and improving education, partially by improving GDP, and partially by taking better care of the environment and reducing car usage.

In the long term, we will seek to increase GDP, to continue to preserve the environment, to not get assassinated, and to not eat the poor.

We will also get reelected by any means necessary.

Our party's current slogan: "God save AUS."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wYloDDlMjA

Any of you watching, or just wanting to make a suggestion, may pipe up at any time, of course.

I'll update either when we get asked to decide which position to take on a certain issue, when we solve a negative situation, or after enough has happened that it feels like it would be best for the pacing of the LP, if those 2 are slow in coming.

Edited November 3, 2014 by Rehab

[Rapier]

I love how our first order of business contradict each other. By benefitting the environment, we can't balance our budget (because we're spending more money). By increasing the taxes on the rich, we don't make our economy competitive (because investors are leaving the country and all). But that's the fun of it, isn't it?

[Rehab]

Geez, that was fast. I forgot how many of these the game tends to throw at us.

Legislators of Serenes Forest, prepare to vote!

-Option 1 will possibly cause a tiny decline in GDP, irritate the Capitalists, and please the Socialists and/or Liberals.

-Option 2 means vice versa- tiny increase in GDP, soothe the Capitalists, and ruffle the Socialists and/or Liberals.

(we're gonna get a million of these, so I'll just take until about midday tomorrow to wait for you guys' decision. know that I can probably roll with whatever you guys decide, so feel free to vote with your gut)

[spoiler=THE LITTLE THINGS: OUR FIRST TURN'S ORDER OF BUSINESS]First among first things: our cabinet.

A minister generating less than 3 PC per turn at the start is kinda shit IMO, and Law&Order is that guy's least-preferred job. I think we can do a little better than that.

Friggin cutoff makin me do a fourth one

The number of ministers who prefer to do each job, uh, varies. Before the last DLC was released, only one had Welfare as the top job, and she gave sub-3 PC and wasn't even too skilled to try and make up for it. Now with Clones&Drones, not one minister has Law&Order as their top job. I can understand welfare, because who the fuck wants to grow up to be the minister of welfare, but law&order? Would've thought half of everyone would be all over that one.

Booted the sub-3's (and the sub-3.5's for that matter, though these guys probably won't all stay like that for long), put everybody in their most-preferred job (except Eliza Evans in Law&Order, who had to take her second), and generally put in people from factions that we plan to mollify as soon as possible.

[spoiler=EXPLANATIONS GOING BY EACH MINISTER. MSYDNTK = MORE SHIT YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW.]-Foreign Policy: Ashley Scott gives the most PC of the FP choices at the start, and while the Liberals are in the red at the moment, our first policy will mollify them a little and they're generally easy to throw bones to. And the Environmentalists start out not too bad with us, and they should like our agenda anyway.

-Welfare: Travis Hill also gives the most of his job's choices, and though we're a little in the red with the Trade Unionists that's mostly because of the high unemployment, which is high on our list anyway. And the Socialists start out okay with us, we should be able to avoid pissing them off, and there are some easy bones to throw them.

-Economy: Anthony Brown isn't the econ candidate with the most starting PC, but both that guy's 2 factions start pissed with us and it could be a bit harder for us to please Conservatives than some others. There's another alternative with more PC that could be argued for, and the Farmers are mostly easy to work with, but he's also with the Religious, who start hating our guts and can also be damn hard to please. The greens should like us, and we'll end up pleasing the Capitalists eventually (though they'll probably get a bit worse before they get better).

-Tax: Oliver Price is the only dude who really wants to do this job. I'm a bit more worried about his factions than some others, but the Capitalists should come around, and the Ethnic Minorities faction has some easy gifts/doesn't get pissed by that much, though we might need to come back to them later. (also: it's a good idea to please them even when they're a really tiny faction, as they are in Australia, because IIRC no matter how big they are they can attempt an assassination in Democracy 3, sometimes when they're not even in the red). He's also one of the only candidates with a yellow starting Experience stat.

-Public Services: Maddison Collins I might be the least sure about- I basically picked her because has a great experience stat, but she gives a full 1 PC less than her biggest competitor. Her primary faction also starts a little in the red, but again the unionists should come around on us, and the farmers should be easy for us to please (Biofuel Subsidies and Rural Development Grants are powerful policies in Democracy 3, last I checked). Patriots and capitalists on her competitor are a little more ambiguous- the patriot faction likes the Space Program policy and basically anybody we can give a gun, but they dislike a lot of other things in Democracy 3. Feels kinda like a diceroll on this one.

-Law&Order: Eliza Evans is the only one who both starts with over 3 PC and puts this job as high as even second place. Environmentalists and State Employees should also be a really easy combination to please.

-Transport: Mitchell King has a cool name, gives decent PC, and isn't with the Conservatives. Some Organic Farming Subsidies should wet his beak.

:

Unfortunately, we didn't start out with enough PC to change the big moneymaker taxes, so we'll have to save most of our PC for next turn. We will get to pass one policy, however.

2 PC and $34 million is peanuts in Democracy 3, and it'll bring us out of the red with Liberals and Ethnic Minorities. There's a hit with the Conservatives, which we don't need at the moment, but it's tiny and also screw them on this occasion.

Turn 2's intro screen without the policy question covering everything:

Yup, global economy's slipping. Harsh waters ahead, fellas. (might be kinda lucky they didn't already downgrade our credit due to the deficit, not that we probably could've fixed it in a single turn anyway)

The cabinet report basically confirms that our ministers suck at everything but providing PC at the moment. Also how the hell did we get elected, a technicality?

Turn 2 main screen: libs and minorities out of red!

(note the Income and Expenditures figures are both up despite us not altering them to that extent. We ain't seen nothing yet.)

Finally, a peak at the security screen. put that camera away

The communist party has declared the government to be illegitimate and urged it's supporters to oppose it "in every way."

Edited November 3, 2014 by Rehab

[Parrhesia]

'prevent discrimination based on race; 52% approval'

straya

[Tryhard]

I love how our first order of business contradict each other. By benefitting the environment, we can't balance our budget (because we're spending more money). By increasing the taxes on the rich, we don't make our economy competitive (because investors are leaving the country and all). But that's the fun of it, isn't it?

You have a point, but we'll see where the amalgamation takes us.

I'd say allowing agencies to operate (in this case) considering gdp but if it's a small increase I suppose it doesn't matter either way.

Edited November 3, 2014 by Tryhard

[Rehab]

Doh, it was the Poor and Socialists who the debt decision irritated, not the Libs. And GDP didn't actually get a boost from it! Those rascally Capitalists, making it sound like their choice was the better one financially.

Anyway, there's already a new situation on our plates, this time something that will test our principles (which, as has already been noted, might be a bit contradictory in the first place, not that it'll stop us)

-Option 1 will likely hit GDP a tiny bit, please Environmentalists and irritate Capitalists. It's less than totally clear if it will actually benefit our environment stat, though. It mentions greenhouse gasses, so it might also cause a drop in our CO2 Emissions stat, which is good for foreign relations, but we have to get those pretty low just for the stat to stop being a net negative modifier on FR. then again, minusing a minus is basically adding a positive, basic math etc. what am I on about

-Option 2 will likely have the opposite people pleased and irritated, but it's unclear if it will actually raise GDP a mite or just avoid lowering it. There's a good chance it could hit our environment stat and/or raise our CO2 emissions stat a little, and if we read into the wording, it's possible that our refusing to ratify the treaty after having drove a hard bargain for economic concessions will be seen as a dick move internationally. So both options might reduce our income a smidge, but option 2 will probably do it less and a little more indirectly.

Before making your decision, you may wish to know that we are a heck of a lot closer to getting our income out of the red than we were last turn, if at a hefty little price...

[spoiler=TURN 2: YOU MIGHT FEEL A SLIGHT MACE TO THE FACE]We are about to have a higher income tax than Denmark. Hold onto your asses, cuz we just might tax em.

the cutoff strikes again

[spoiler=IN WHICH I EXTOLL THE MECHANICAL BENEFITS OF THE NORDIC MODEL, BASICALLY]

Okay, so income tax is really good in Democracy 3, you guys. Not perfect! But it's really good. I think.

There are negative situations that are kinda nasty that can happen if we raise it high enough, including Tax Evasion (multiplies the income of a bunch of taxes by 0.87, nasty little thing) and Brain Drain (hit to both productivity and GDP, I think? also nasty), but they can generally be avoided, either by holding off a little or by enacting the Public Tax Returns policy (costs nothing but the 14 PC to enact). With the latter, you have to wait a few turns for it to implement, whereas income tax changes come into effect in just one turn so that can fuck you up a bit, but I've briefly had the tax above 70% before. It is disgustingly lucrative- I'm assuming it's the single biggest one in the game. And no direct hit to our GDP, even!

You may have noticed, however, that it is catastrophically unpopular with the Middle Income faction, especially when jacked up like so, and those guys are over 50% of the electorate! What gives, you may ask? What gives is that those dudes don't assassinate people, and because the tax comes into effect in one turn, we can just wait until the election is getting nigh and lower it, which costs much less PC than raising it. What's more dangerous is that at this level it starts to really make the Capitalists look up in anger, which could well kill us, but then again we can invest the income in policies that both please them and boost GDP, so it comes out a bit of a wash if they don't decide to kill us too quick. Then again, as of Clones&Drones income tax appears to have received a probably-deserved nerf in that the higher it is, the more people will start using bitcoins and such, which reduces the multiplier of the income a bunch of taxes have below 1.00. It's still fuckin cash as hell though.

I was a bit conflicted in deciding whether to use it here, though,because I wasn't sure whether it really fit our directive of "increase taxes on the rich" as we had envisioned it. It is technically a progressive tax, though! And we can definitely lower it over time as we boost income in other ways. /rationalization

I could've grabbed even more, to be sure, but I settled for another 60$ billion in revenue, which brings us to just a couple tax increases (combined with a robust set of GDP increases, hopefully) from financial safety and even domination.

Spent 10 more PC after that this turn. One way was increasing funding to Technology Colleges by a bit over a billion, which gives a fantastic benefit to Education and Technology (and therefore Productivity and GDP) for the buck in the mid-long term, at the cost of decreasing equality slightly and displeasing the Socialists, but I just raised income taxes by like 120% so frankly the Socialists can fuck off.

Also funded one Telecommuting Initiative for another billion, decreasing car usage and getting the Parents and Trade Unionists out of the red. Lousy Environmentalists didn't seem to appreciate it directly, though.

Turn 3's main screen: 2 factions out of the red (unionists and parents) for 2 into it, capitalists and middle-incomes. They'll appreciate our work soon enough. Hopefully. Like if they don't kill us first.

Almost-something-like-good news: the global economy's bottoming out! Meaning, the hits to GDP have stopped accelerating. Haven't quite, uh, stopped altogether yet, though.

Security peek, not much new:

Next time, if we don't get another policy question: a petrol tax increase evening us out and cozying up to business, probably

Edited November 8, 2014 by Rehab

[Rehab]

Our representative was up all night reviewing the proposal alone, expecting word of our decision to arrive at any moment. After hours of waiting, he fell asleep at his desk, and he awoke the next morning with the back of his pen pressed up against his face and some squiggles marked across the signature line. "Welp."

We ended up ratifying. The good news is that our CO2 emissions stat dropped (although our environment stat wasn't touched either way), and none of our economic stats like productivity or GDP even took a hit! And the greens were pleased, of course. The bad news is that the Capitalists were angrier about it than I've ever seen a policy question decision make them before, they're even more angry about it than they are about the Uncompetitive Economy situation. The babies.

[spoiler=TURN 3 AND 4: BANDAGES AND :SALT:]Unfortunately, we don't have enough PC to enact what will probably be our next-largest tax increase, so for this turn we'll just make nice a little with the Capitalists and save our strength.

Happily, making nice in these cases also gets us things we want anyway. Technology Grants is a fantastic policy in particular, but we're still a bit far in the red for me to fund it fully- we'll come back to it later.

Turn 4 is our first one with no policy question, our first with an event, and our first credit downgrade. Whoop

Sometimes we get stuff like this with random effects, which tend to have some relation to whatever else we have going on. I kinda doubt we'd get this one if we had no crime, for example.

Took long enough (not that we're celebrating). Hopefully, we're close enough to getting in the black that this will be the last dent in GDP/bugbear for the Capitalists of its kind.

Better news: we finally have the PC to raise the petrol tax.

This is another tax that's perhaps a little too good, aside from it costing more PC to raise than even income tax. Car usage is generally something we want to bring down, we can crank the tax up pretty high without really pissing anybody off (much less anybody who matters), and the GDP hit is almost nonexistent. More ambiguous is that when we tax a thing, people tend to get less of that thing. This may seem obvious, but what it ends up meaning is that if, for example, we raised the alcohol tax too high, we'd get a ton of income for a little bit, but it would eventually get to the point where nobody was drinking anymore, so the income would actually go away.

In terms of car usage this isn't really a problem in Democracy 3 imo, as people will mysteriously always be able to get around even if car usage decreases and none of the other forms of transport usage increase, but people's income decreasing remains a nebulously worrying factor. Though I'm not sure just what that effect has on GDP and things. Basically it's not enough to prevent us from enacting the tax, though.

God damnit, the global economy decided it wasn't actually done slipping. Ah well, at least the debt increases are leveling off.

Turn 5 starts with a new policy question for us to resolve. Prepare to vote!

I think this is just a decision on who to piss off, not something the economy will be affected by. My guess is that Option 1 will rankle Socialists and Liberals and please Conservatives and Patriots, and Option 2 will do the opposite, though there's a chance Foreign Relations might get hurt/helped, respectively.

[spoiler=CURRENT AFFAIRS]Turn 5 main screen: No points for guessing who's still grumbling.

The current economy:

Maybe I'll avoid using the words "bottoming out" from now on. GDP's on the rise, though!

Checking up on everybody's favorite negative situations:

Nyerrrrgh we're so cloooose, it's like 2 turns away tops

On the other hand,

Well, at least we're making some progress. More than I expected for how little we've actually focused on it so far, actually.

Finally, another peek at the NSA quarterly report:

Really not much doing, aside from The Human Rights Society overtaking The Communist Party's spot as the most significant interest group to watch out for. Capitalists might be out of fucks to give at the moment

Edited November 5, 2014 by Rehab

[Rapier]

It is harder to please patriots and conservatives, imo. So let's throw them a bone.

[Rehab]

Well, crap, our Foreign Relations stat indeed dropped by 9%, heftier than I was expecting. Mercifully, the Liberals and Socialists are only a little bit more angry, and the Patriots are pretty pleased for the moment, but the Conservatives merely decided not to get even more angry with us- no happiness change. The jerks.

[spoiler=TURN 5: MORE SLAP KISS KISS FOR THE CAPS]We have just a little more to go before we hit financial safety, when we can really get down to tackling the Asthma Epidemic. What might be the last tax necessary for the road:

Pros: the Tax on Superstores is fairly lucrative for a middling 14 PC, and can be a lovely help when you get as close to an even budget as we are now. It even lowers car usage and pleases more factions than not (though none of them are particularly difficult ones to find presents for, to be honest).

Cons: though not awful, the GDP hit might make this less obviously worth it later on, and it can be dicey when you're already on thin ice with the Capitalists. With this we're down to the point where a couple billion or even hundred million extra can help get us the rest of the way to a balanced budget, though, so I'm willing to take the risk.

Or rather, I'm willing to take the risk whilst simultaneously throwing the Capitalists some scraps.

These policies don't actually do much other than placate some factions a little, which is about right for less than 0.6 billion, but hopefully they'll at least counteract our latest finger-in-Capitalist-eye.

Aaand another policy question at the start of Turn 6. Vote, prepare to!

Capitalists versus Environmentalists (and maybe Liberals?), round googol. Or at least I think that's who the options respectively please. I wonder if as of Clones&Drones, it may also have an effect on the new Food Price stat, which I haven't seen be affected by or affect other things much yet. Choice 1 also might be the healthier one for our bottom line, but then the Capitalists will always say that about their preferred choice.

[spoiler=CURRENT AFFAIRS]Turn 6 main:

The Self-Employed and Environmentalists are officially okay saying they like us in public. The Capitalists are stubbornly grumpy, though, and the Liberals might be getting a bit more resentful.

We're on the precipice of achieving better financial health, but we're also almost out of cheap and easy goodies to throw the Capitalists, and there aren't many taxes left that hit the sweet intersection of "gets sizable income, doesn't require we save PC for multiple turns, and doesn't have too many negative effects that aren't easily dealt with." Cmon, economy, pull up just a little more baby

Both Debt and the GE are flatlining! Woo! Kinda.

My guess is the Liberals are a bit sulky over our UN rep choice, but it's nothing major. (yet)

Edited November 5, 2014 by Rehab

[Parrhesia]

Kaytii-Lynn 'Kaitlyn' Morgan steps up to the UN podium, and clears her throat. She is a large Queenslander wearing a stained singlet, an akubra and ugg boots.

"I, the newly-appointed UN Ambassador Kaytii-Lynn Morgan, have one objective. It is elegant in its simplicity. I will stop the fuck out of the boats."

Enthusiastic applause from entourage. Someone shouts "GO ON YOU GOOD LITTLE SLUT, GET IN THERE"

"Furthermore, I would like to point out to those assembled that they can fuck off, as Australia is, in fact, full. In order to make this more clear to any of the filthy cunts who want to get into our pristine white Australia, I aim to remove the line 'with boundless plains to share' from the national anthem. In summary... Straya." Morgan shuffles papers. "Cunts."

Silence. Then one man rises, tears in his eyes, and slowly claps, as others follow to a standing ovation giving out hunderous applause.

The next day, Australia is thrown out of the UN.

---------------------

Meanwhile, let's ban GM foods for the sake of our farmers.

Edited November 6, 2014 by Parrhesia

[Rehab]

Ban it is. The Capitalists have reacted with a bit more restraint than before, they're just a little more pissed, even though GDP actually took a tiny hit this time. Maybe they saw it coming? The Environmentalists are doing victory laps, though.

[spoiler=TURNS 6 AND 7: NIGHT BY NIGHT]A pretty nice positive event to start us off:

This seems to trigger when our education stat gets really high. Not a terribly large impact, as probably befits a random event, but it helps. Straya rising

And more trying to brown-nose the Capitalists/push things over the edge in the right direction:

I'm trying to tread lightly here, since our surplus is rarely going above the billion mark, while still enacting programs that'll bring us more and more income as we invest more funding in them. It's possible I could stand to play it more loosely, but it would be really nice to see our credit rating get bumped back up and get an injection for our GDP.

Also, trying to keep up pressure on the Asthma Epidemic, within our means of course:

Turn 7: it's happening, y'all

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFWTFrx3Mmk

That wasn't quite as big a GDP boost as I was hoping for, though. Let's stuff in one more policy that's good now, and will be even better when we can fund it fully.

I hold off on spending more PC, part because I'm running out of budget and part because it'd be really nice if I could save up for one more pro-environment tax that could net us a couple billion more.

Dang it why can't the world just stop turning for a second

The old familiar sort of song and dance. Prepare to vote!

Not sure if GDP takes a hit if we prevent drilling (or if not drilling means a boost), but the Capitalists and Environmentalists are knocking heads as usual. Stats this might also impact: the state of our environment, the Oil Price and Oil Demand. I'd bet on our income getting bumped and our environment paying for it somehow if we allow drilling, to simplify it.

[spoiler=CURRENT AFFAIRS]Unfortunately, our PC is currently at max, 2 short of what we need to enact the Car Tax, which means that our ministers have been growing pissy. Saving up more will just be wasted until we please some of them through their factions a bit (or fire the offenders, but that will upset all of our other ministers and could further lower max PC). It's hard out here for an autocrat

Bloody Ollie's hit rock bottom PC per turn. The Capitalists can really be a pain regarding our ministers, and our anti-car, pro-environment agenda won't endear us to them much, but we also intend to continue to raise funding for policies that simultaneously please them and increase GDP over time, gradually paying for themselves, so I'm still fairly confident our Capitalist ministers won't end up having to leave or anything (unless you guys would like that). It would just be nice if we had a tiny bit of extra funding so that we could max out all those policies they like so much, like if there were some kind of tax we could wring a few extra billions more out of if we had literally two more PC god -damnit- Ollie.

Standard looks at the economy and security:

Fuck's sake, GE, make up your mind already

and by that I mean preferably do so in a way that doesn't have you flapping about in a pit any more

...Hm. That's new. Stand by for further analysis.

Edited November 7, 2014 by Rehab

[Rehab]

Dang it, saves got fucked up a bit, didn't lose much but the refugee policy question got lost, and replaced with another one. Please stand by Fixed. Not sure if it's quite as Straya as the other one, sorry about that

Since I have this post taking up space here, I feel like talking about an aspect of the game mechanics which I'm not entirely sure what to think of.

[spoiler=LOOK UPON OUR WORK, SOUTH KOREA AND SCANDINAVIA, AND DESPAIR]So, our Education stat is at the absolute peak of peaks. It can literally go no higher:

This is fucking awesome, obviously. It's also weird, though- no matter how much more funding we put into any policy that boosts the stat, like Public Libraries or University Grants or State Schools, the beneficial effects, an increase in Productivity and a decrease in all Crime and Racial Tension, will never grow any larger than they are now. (Although if we were to put less funding into one of them while funding another, the stat would stay maxed, and all those policies have more than just the boost to Education among their positive effects, so there's that.) This is also the case with any other stat in the game, good or bad: Equality can only go so high and Crime can only go so low before successive programs which affect them become at least partially redundant in Democracy 3.

On one hand, I guess this could be seen as a representation of some kind of "diminishing returns" effect- I can imagine that, say, if we put into place all those policies that boost education and give them max funding, the quality of our Education may still be improving, but that maybe it has improved beyond the point where it has more of those noticeable positive effects. Maybe it's just "as good as it's ever going to get for Straya in particular." Or maybe it's just supposed to occur to us that all that money spent is administrative waste after a certain point, or something. That would be pretty cheeky of the game.

But on the other hand, our GDP acts the same way- the stat can only go so high before putting more funding into policies that raise it will only increase Expenditures, without increasing our Income. We could again suppose that it's "as high as it can get relative to all other things in the case of Australia" or whatever, but it requires a lot more extrapolating to explain than it simply being a limitation of the game.

It makes me wonder how much the developers actually thought about it. I can't imagine they didn't at all, because if the player uses all the tools at their disposal it's generally not too hard to get any stat in the game to a limit. Did having no limits on the stats make the game too breakable?

Unfortunately I don't feel like I'm all that well-equipped to speculate, either on what impacts the issue has on Democracy's representation of reality or on what impact it has on gameplay, but I can't help feeling it robs the game of some replay value- that after a few terms in office, the player's country can easily hit a bunch of walls that it's not practical to try to break.

Don't worry, though, we're nowhere near a point like that ourselves yet.

Edited November 8, 2014 by Rehab