A few QT3 forumites had asked me to mention here when the new one is out, so I don’t feel that bad about pimping it:
http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy2
There’s a free demo for you to try, should you feel the urge. If you played the first game, you know the general concept, except now it has proper artwork and a higher level of polish, balancing and depth of simulation. I’ve kept the release of it pretty low key, because I’m looking for glaring obvious fixes to do before announcing it properly. (already decided to improve some of the policy stuff).
If you didn’t know about the first one, this is basically a ‘virtual; government’ game. You are the president, and its your job to sort out the countries problems and stay elected. As opposed to the real world, where its your job to screw over the electorate and stash money for your retirement :D
It’s a turn-based 2D thing, text heavy and graphics-lite. Feedback always much appreciated from all you talented people :D
One suggestion that immediately comes to mind: When adjusting a policy, you can’t simultaneously see your current spending and earning, so it’s difficult to know how much you can afford to increase spending on the policy.
EDIT: and you get this error when the limited number of demo turns is up “D3DEngineError [Failed to locate texture: upsell1.bmp]”
oh balls. Cheers for that :D
It also feels a bit strange how adjusting policies always costs the same amount of Political Power, regardless of whether you just make a small adjustment or swing the slider from one end to another. My gut instinct in the game was to make lots of small adjustments all around, but this felt completely impossible as opposed to making a few large scale policies.
this is so true. someone else mentioned this, and next week I’m going to fix that. So it will be fixed in a patch basically.
Ok that’s all patched now. basically when you implement a new policy, your first slider adjustment is free and instant (which makes more sense), and there are now differing political capital costs for raising, lowering, introducing and cancelling a policy, so its easier to lower taxes than raise them :D.
Where’s the Evil Overlord option? I tried in Democracy, but kept on being assassinated. I assumed that meant it was broken, because last I checked, MWAH-HA-HA, THEY ALL COWERED BEFORE MY HIGH TAXES AND CONSTANT WARFARE!
I really should do a similar game where you play the role of saddam hussein or similar. I sketched out a design once, even started coding, but couldn’t quite get it to feel right. it was a sort of whack-a-mole game involving resistance fighters, where you had to crack down enough to crush the opposition, but not too much that you encouraged an uprising. I should do it one day…
I really like what you’ve put together here, cliffski. I played through one demo game, and juggling everything is a challenge. One thing that’s kind of tough to determine is exactly how much implementing a or altering a policy will affect your economic balance. One suggestion would be to add some kind of an indicator of your current expenditures vs. income on those screens where you adjust your policy spending. I know it already lists the dollar amount, but that doesn’t really help without being able to see the impact on your budget.
Some other minor things:
Is there any way to get back to the Chancellor after selecting a Minister without closing the window and coming back? There didn’t seem to be.
I think there’s an error in one of the help tips - “some of the listed organizations are generally peaceful and quite harmful”. Did you mean harmless?
lol, I probably did. I better put that on the list for a future patch.
I’m not sure what you mean about the chancellor stuff?
It’s pretty minor, but when you select a Minister on the Cabinet screen, you can’t go back and see your Chancellor without closing the window and coming back. There’s no tab or button or anything to select him.
[Edit]: Somewhat related, but is there any way to see your reserve Ministers without firing one?
Heh, never mind. I thought the Chancellor was a separate advisory Cabinet position. I didn’t realize he was your Tax Minister and it was just starting in the center.
It would be nice to be able to see who’s available in your Minister pool before you fire anyone, though. Weighing experience against loyalty is a tough call, and, it kind of sucks when there aren’t any capable replacements.
Tried the demo. Clicking on the options button takes you back to the main menu with no option to resume your game and no warning. Not cool.
Really? When I tried it, there was a “Resume Game” button in the lower right corner.
I could swear I looked everywhere, I even started a new game just to try it out. But it’s possible I missed it even if it was in plain sight.
this is strange I had 1 other person report the same thing, maybe they just don’t notice it (indeed its on the far right as I recall). Or it could be some hideous bug? Steps to reproduce would be awesome if it is.
I ended up buying the game, only to find out that since I used my gmail account to sign up my order is not going through until someone has manually reviewed it. I was all set up to post about how my instant gratification was thwarted until I noticed the email had appeared in my inbox five minutes later.
Anyway, annoyance. VAT isn’t even mentioned on the first order page. When it says “Total Price: 22.95$” I do not appreciate seeing extra taxes slapped on when I’m halfway through the order. I have no reason to suspect that this was done maliciously but it is misleading.
I picked this up as well. It’s a pretty nifty political sim; I like how it simulates the organized chaos of pleasing as many as possible.
I couldn’t figure out how to stop terror attacks though. Well to be fair neither can our leaders in real life.
The best solution seems to be to really pump up your Spy Agency. It also keeps membership down in violent national groups, which reduces assassination attempts. It can get expensive, though.
I like it a lot. Will probably drop some cash on it when I get done paying for my new laptop.