OddballGreg - Democracy 3 (Country Management Simulator)

The wonderfully utilitarian menu screen for a rather effectively utilitarian game, welcome to Democracy 3.

 Do you believe that you could be a great leader? Don't answer that. But on the chance that you do, or are just extremely weird like myself, then you may find the delightfully intricate country management simulator that is Democracy 3 from Positech Games to be a rather interesting use of your time.

What is Democracy 3? If you want to be particularly deadpan about it, you could probably call it a spreadsheet simulator, snort at the idea of that being fun and move on with your day. Of course, if you happen to have megalomaniac-like tendencies, or simply enjoy the idea of trying to see how various things can affect a large body of people, (Like myself), then Democracy 3 may be worth more than a simple passing glance to you.

Ooooh. Buttons and bars. I'd like to nominate Democracy 3 for best graphics ever. Snarkiness aside, this is a relatively effective way of finding your way to all the statistics, issues and policies of the country.

Democracy 3's gameplay is somewhat passive, and it's fun is fairly self-made. There's no campaign, no grand scheme, no action and explosions, and about the minimum amount of graphics that was necessary to make this game functional. While that does not sound very positive in terms of reasons to play Democracy 3, I haven't mentioned it's positives.

First and foremost, Democracy 3 is perhaps one of the most positive societal simulators out there. While it's not showing you people going from building to building in real time leading their lives, it is giving you a fairly logical and interesting representation of the issues and conditions under which your chosen country, (Britain in the screenshots), is currently functioning. Factors ranging from CO2 Emissions, to GDP, to the Global Economy and the constituency of your countries population all hold far reaching effects on all the other various parts of the country.

For example, at the beginning of the pictured game as Britain, I was suffering from a couple issues ranging from deficit spending, to Organized Crime, an Uncompetitive Economy, Technological Backwardness and far reaching homelessness. While you might think "oh well, set up the taxes and your deficit spending will be solved" if you're thinking in practical terms, the problem is that if you set the taxes to highly you can do everything from provoking wide-spread tax-evasion to a brain drain of your skilled workforce and make your economy even more uncompetitive depending on which taxes you choose to apply.

GDP, possibly the single-most important factor for your machinations. If it collapses, chances are good that the country will too.

 The solution is somewhat more long-term as you would expect. Considering that the existing taxes such as "Capital Gains Tax", "Corporation Tax" and "Income Tax" already exist on a percentile basis, it would make sense that improving the base amount of domestic product would in turn result in increased tax revenue. Which it does.

So while you would think that solving the deficit spending issue first would be the priority, you would do so by solving the other issues. In my Britain game, I maximized science funding to remove the technological backwater as time passed. (The ingame turns take place in intervals set before you starts, usually quarters of a year.) After 16 turns, the new Science Funding would be fully implemented after gradually increasing and would result in a few things. 

Firstly, it would directly improve the technological and educational status of the country as obviously, having people doing sciency things inspires more people to do sciency things. Of course, better technology and educated workers leads to a highly productive workforce which directly improves the country's GDP. Even better though, the better technology serves to eliminate the technological backwater issues, (Issues are depicted as red buttons), which leads to a further increase in productivity which again boosts the GDP. Even better though, is that this additional productivity ends the Uncompetitive Economy issue, which again helps to stabilize the GDP and cause a positive balance between governmental spending and expenditure, despite the global recession at the time. And all that without increasing taxes. 

Recycling. While it's affect on the actual environment is somewhat negligible compared to other things, it is a great way to make the Enviromentalist people in your country happy... it also makes more of them.

Of course, the massively boosted GDP does come with it's own issues. Specifically, pollution and Oil dependency, both of which are linked. Obviously, the larger your economy, the more people there are doing things. More factories, more cars, more refuse. You get the picture. Suffice to say, that additional tax income suddenly had a use as the degrading environment was causing an Asthma epidemic in the populace, which was deleterious to the health of the workforce, which then damages their productivity and ultimately, the GDP. 

By starting a national monorail, subsidizing bus lanes, railways and free bus rides for the elderly and students, as well as initializing a telecommuting initiative, the countries CO2 emissions were dropped quite extensively, while the subsidization of micro-generation and various other environmentally minded policies helped to improve the country's energy efficiency. This resulted in an decreased oil usage and dependency which served to minimize the world economy's affect on Britain's own, as well further reducing pollution and ending the asthma epidemic. It also helped improve the GDP as the decreased oil demand led to lower prices for the little that was still being imported. (On the extreme side of things, public transportation eventually became so efficient that I banned the use of cars in cities altogether, at the outrage of motorists... well, the 3 of them that still existed.)

Ethnic Minorities are an interesting group in that they are often not the cause of many issues barring a decrease in average wages due to high immigration and maybe race riots if you, for some reason, think that racial profiling and not passing the racial discrimination act sounds like fun.

Phew. All that, and I haven't even told you about the politics. (Irony is sounding like politics is a fun thing.) Essentially, this game is based on the idea that you have been elected as the President/Prime Minister/Chancellor of your country and are obviously responsible for solving it's issues. As you may expect, the "solution" to some issues, is not exactly the same to everyone, and you have to to carefully handshake your way around all kinds of issues specific to these various peoples while you solve the actual economic issues.

As an example, I mentioned earlier that Britain starts out with an issue of Organized Crime being a problem, with regular and violent crime being similarly bad problems, if not to the same degree. Community policing, while expensive, is one of the better solutions to the latter two due to the fact that it works with the people and keeps them happy, which further helps avoid racial issues down the line as well.

The institution of additional policies does eventually become very necessary in a whole bunch of regards, especially if you like the idea of having a very education and patriotic Space Program. Or if you simply want to ban all forms of private education and healthcare.

Of course, community policing is hardly enough to solve everything, luckily, our GDP improvements are fantastic for providing the funds necessary to exponentially expand the police force to the "patrol car on every street" status. These two things effectively ended all crime and violent crime in the country in the space of a few quarters. (Turns) Unfortunately, Organised Crime is a little craftier than that and is not as easily fixed by mere police. By increasing funding of intelligence services to the maximum and providing them with "Spy Satelites", we're able to mostly take care of the Organized Crime issue, but it's necessary to institute Wire-Tapping "by Judicial Order" to finally push it over the edge and end it. I indicate "by Judicial Order" because obviously, people living in a liberal society do not like secretive spying things like intelligence services and invasion of privacy. While making a full on Big-Brother state does sound like fun, that comes with it's own issues.

Turns out, even a game that simulates the management of country governance knows that political figures get killed... Who would've guessed?

As you might expect, governing a large body of people can be a somewhat precarious, (and fun), thing to do. Consider my favorite people to piss off; The Religious. (I will point out that this is in game only, and will explain my reasoning now.) Quite simply, the religious are good and bad at the same time. While religious people will tend to be satisfied with things like the banning of Sunday shopping and prayers at school, they tend to become a little problematic if you're looking to make a scientifically minded, (and productive), society, since their insistence on the teaching of creationism in schools and their moral disgust at stem cell research tends to make doing those things difficult.

While you could simply ignore them and do all that stuff anyway, you'll soon find that your governance become condemned by the religious community who define you as a morally corrupt leader who should step down. Continue on that track for long enough, and you're probably going to start finding bombs in your office as compliments of the "Crusaders Of The Lord". (This has a habit of ending your governance prematurely if you're wondering.)

What I did in my game as Britain however was left them as they were, and proceeded to boost the Science Funding and eventually start Britain's very own Space Program much later on. The resultant existential questioning caused by all this science stuff going on leads to a fair number of people giving up their religious beliefs. (In the game that is. Please do not lynch me.) Given enough time, their pull as a group becomes small enough that you can start exclusively teaching evolution at schools and pretty much eradicate the religious as a political group in the country, which leaves your free to make a very science focused community.

As you would expect, the removal of a group of people that don't like you is pretty handy for ensuring your reelection at the end of your term as the President/chancellor ruler guy. Of course, doing things like solving bad economies and making people less homeless is also pretty handy for that. So is ending organised crime and asthma epidemics. Basically, rule number one: The customer is always right.

The fun of Democracy 3 is that most times, you get to choose who the customer is. There are Capitalists and Socialists, Liberals and Conservatives, Environmentalists and The Self Employed, The Religious, The Youth, Parents, Commuters, Motorists, The Poor, The Middle Class, The Wealthy, Ethnic Minorities, Trade Unionists and Farmers. (There may be some that I missed.) Pleasing them all is a task worthy of an actual in game achievement, but it's often better to just focus on the largest population constituencies, or, if you're up to the challenge, simply change the constituency to something that suits you more. Communist America? Sure. Police State France? Why not. Free Market Britain? Go ahead. Religious Holy Land Germany? You're crazy, but sure. (You get the picture.)

Manage your country right, and you'll be able to make anything happen. Or you'll end up assassinated, which also tends to come with it's own hilarity depending on what kind of absurd things you were trying to do when it happened. In any case, it's pretty clear that in politics the only wrong move is the one that gets you killed if this game is to be understood. (There's no corruption factor ironically enough. Perhaps that would have been too hard to simulate. Who can say?)

The end of every in game turn is met with a screen that details the overall progress of your country as according to the six most important statistics even to real world countries.

In any case, that's about as much as I can say about the awesome game that is Democracy 3. Perhaps you think that I'm really weird and play some very odd things, or maybe you just want to share your own story of world manipulation. If so, do be sure to let us know down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear your feedback. And of course, if you enjoy finding out about awesome stuff on the web and world then do please be sure to like the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left to get all the latest posts as they're published. Also, do be sure to share posts you enjoyed with your friends as it helps us out a great deal. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Happy politicking my friends.