After a brief period of thinking about writing AI that plays Democracy 3 (I am still going to do this one day), I took to doing some cunning data mining, and then did a lot of play-testing, and musing, and staring at graphing calculators and came to a few conclusions as to what improvements could be made to Democracy 3 to make it a more accurate sim, a more fun game, and a better balanced game. The conclusions I came to are in the beta patch I’m releasing today on steam, meaning that you need to right click the games name in steam, go to the properties tab for it, then betas, and opt in to the pc beta (no password)

. That gets you the following changes:

Version 1.26

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1. Unemployment now contributes towards obesity

2. Increased impact of car usage on traffic congestion

3. Increased base likelihood of a teacher shortage.

4. Unemployment now reduces the chance of a teacher shortage.

5. University Grants now increase the chance of a teacher shortage.

6. Reduced impact of CCTV on Armed Robbery.

7. Added impact of low inequality on Armed Robbery.

8. Changed equation for GDP impact on Alcohol Consumption to be non-linear.

9. Added impact on doctors and teachers strikes from trade union membership

10. Adjusted impact of state school funding on teachers strikes.

11. Added effect of wages on Teachers & Doctors Strikes.

12. Added effects of science funding and the environment to contagious disease.

13. Arts subsidies, Bus subsidies and community policing now reduce unemployment.

14. Adjustments to triggers for various events.

15. Increased impact of refugee crisis event.

16. Effects of corporate exodus event worsened.

17. Increased impact of Unemployment on CrimeRate.

18. Impact of religion on antisocial behaviour now linked to membership, not frequency.

19. Unemployment now linked to antisocial behaviour

20. Trade union and Socialist group memberships now contribute towards general strike.

As you can see there are some new links which should have been in there but I never thought about them (unemployment causing obesity is one), plus some tweaks to simple numbers and influences on events. It was really interesting to look at stats and realize how some events and situations were simply not triggering for many people, so effectively they were missing out on part of the game, and the numbers now mean that they are m,ore likely to experience the whole range of events and dilemmas etc. I feel such a fool for not having done this analysis ages ago, but I guess you live and learn. I felt like a fool for never having multi-threaded the ‘next turn’ bit of the game until recently. (BTW thats why its so fast).

Hopefully a bunch of ambitious tweakers will opt in to the beta (you can always go back to the original game at the moment), and give me feedback on if this marks an improvement on the basic game. I’m probably going to leave this beta for a while to see what the consensus is before I set it live, or maybe do some more tweaking.

In the meantime I have 2 big announcements about other stuff coming up. Oh yes.

Oh and if you are confused and wonder what democracy 3 is. click here. And if you have any opinions on these changes feel free to post them here, I read them all.