Review: Democracy 3

[Hottentot]

OK, liberals, conservatives, socialists, capitalists, moderates, independents, communists, marxists, keynesians, spaghettimonsterians and whatnot: here's a challenge for you. Stop bitching on an internet forum how much your government sucks and try out your own political Utopia in a sandbox simulation, Democracy 3. See how many terms you last without getting a bullet in your head from some other know-it-all who wasn't content to just spamming various forums with his political agenda anymore.


Democracy 3 puts you in charge of one of six countries: The UK, the USA, Germany, France, Canada or Australia. Your humble task is to make decisions affecting the lives of only several hundreds of millions of voters. And unfortunately for all of us wannabe dictators, you can't just talk about "voters" in Democracy 3. You will have to deal with 20 different interest groups ranging from motorists to parents to capitalists to religious and the poor. Each of these have various reasons to be either mad at you or like you.








This is further complicated by the fact that the voters are not just blocks. A liberal might be a socialist and a parent. A patriot might also be religious and middle class. Technically the game tracks even individual voters, but in practise you can concentrate on dealing with the interest groups as blocks.





As you might imagine from real life, the voter groups do not like each other. If you want to please the conservatives and the religious, you are going to piss off the liberals. The environmentalists don't like it when you give the motorists and commuters more roads to drive on. And they are actually fairly good at seeing when you are just trying to appease them before the elections or giving a quick fix to hide a much bigger annoyance you created elsewhere. These groups will not be happy with just electing you out of office: they will turn into terrorists and rather blow you out of there.


The game mechanic is simple: fix their problems or become a problem someone else is going to fix. Problems vary from obesity to organized crime, and the ways to eradicate them are therefore also various. On the plus side, the game gives you a fairly good summary of what is causing the problem and therefore an idea of how to fix it. Of course, you may still end up creating a completely new problem while fixing the old one. When I needed money once to fund some social reforms, I raised taxes so much that the most skilled and talented people in France packed up their stuff and moved to Germany. Oops.





What is common to all the problems, and decisions in Democracy 3 in general, is that you won't see the effects immediately. The game is turn based, and often it takes at least several turns before your decisions really start showing their plus and minus sides. Therefore politics in the game is a little like being at the helm of a huge ship: once you see that iceberg ahead of you, it's already too late.


Managing your country is done through policies. You can either adjust already existing ones or make completely new ones. The game offers nice array of possibilities in both of these. You can make big decisions such as what you want to tax and how much, but you can also decide whether drugs and alcohol are prohibited, whether prostitution is legal or if either the creationism or evolution is taught in schools. Some smaller decisions will pop up regularly as events where you will either take a positive or negative stance. These include, for instance, euthanasia and freedom of information, and usually resemble hot political topics from real life well.








Whatever you decide, it will have an impact not only on the voters opinions, but also their numbers. If you start teaching only creationism in schools, the number of religious people will slowly rise. Introducing harsher immigration laws will leave you with less ethnic minorities. And of course, the policies will have either positive or negative effects on each other. For instance, changing education laws by favoring technological advancement may make your voters more productive and therefore effect the GDP, but such higher productivity and necessary skills may mean that more of your people will become unemployed, turn into alcoholism and become criminals.





As the game is completely based on the system where everything effects everything in long term, one of the best sides of Democracy 3 is its very easy and helpful interface. Having gazillions of balloons show up and arrows streaming back and forth might seem intimidating at first, but the game is actually really easy to learn once you get the basic idea.


Unfortunately Democracy 3 is not only easy to learn, but it is perhaps a little too easy in general. Part of this problem is caused by the choice of available countries: all of them are affluent Western countries which are really difficult to screw up. Gamewise there is actually not much difference between playing as France or the United States. They start with different policies and different problems which reflect the real life again fairly well, but there is no real crisis to solve. It takes perhaps one or two terms to fix the problems and then what?


Latest at this point the game becomes a complete sandbox where you can experiment. Some like it and some don't. If you are a type of gamer who wants to only complete the objectives given to you, then Demoracy 3 doesn't offer much in making you solve fairly trivial problems like pollution or obesity. If, on the other hand, you would like to try if you can turn Germany into a socialist theocracy or something similarly weird, then Democracy 3 offers you some very nice possibilities. As a nice feature it also offers a political compass where you can see after each election where your country is within the liberal/conservative and socialist/capitalist axis.


Still, it feels silly that the game's mechanics is like tailored for complete catastrophe states waiting for a skillful politician to turn them into prosperous countries, yet it doesn't offer any such states as starter countries. Fortunately Democracy 3 is also very moddable and there are already various additional states being added by the community, along with new policies and other content, but as a design decision using only affluent Western states still feels fairly weird.


Also, while the game also comes with plenty of policies already, it feels lacking in some regards. There is no foreign policy to speak of, for instance. The press and TV as well as freedom of speech are pretty much omitted. The division between capitalism and socialism gives some nice opportunities, but it's really difficult to go into extremes in either of them and most likely you will end up using a mix of both. This is weird considering that in some regards the policies are very detailed and extreme: you can install a CCTV camera system, have spy drones flying over your country and have the police do racial profiling.


With good moddability, a fairly active looking community and a developer engaging in dialogue with the players it remains to be seen what Democracy 3 will become. I won't be giving it a score therefore. At this point it is a funny little tool which promises a lot and may turn into a great political simulation one day, but for the fairly steep price its being sold ($25 at GOG), you may want to wait for a sale unless you want to test your favorite political theory in a fairly deep and well designed political sim.

[Penguin]

Thanks for the review, Democracy 3 hasn't even been on my radar, have been an avid player of the second part though. Loved to change a countries direction, e.g. making Sweden some capitalistic sweatshop country, or turning the US into a socialistic worker's paradise - like 'bama , ye know?
Is there any way to change the UI to the nice darkish tone it had in the previous part? Looks a little too sterile for my taste.
Also regarding the second part: Is there any notable difference towards its precessor, some stuff added/changed? I see they added party names, so is there maybe more than 2 parties(yours and the generic opposition?)

Fragen über Fragen...

[CCIP]

Cheers, thanks for the review! I was hoping to get something like this, and you really delivered some great shots and explanations here

Sounds pretty deep!