DEMOCRACY – User Guide
Democracy is a political strategy game that puts you in the position of President (or Prime Minister) of one of twelve different real-world countries. The objective of the game is to stay in power for as long as possible, by keeping as many of the voting population happy as possible.
Democracy lets you take the individual decisions on government policy that determines the state of your country. You can build a socialist state, a business-centric country, a liberal or a fascist society. It’s up to you. Great care has been taken to make the game politically neutral. You can be a successful socialist or capitalist leader, depending on your choices.
The interface for Democracy is ‘abstract’, different areas of the screen represent different areas of policy, statistics about your country, or groups of voters. Lines connecting areas of the screen are used to show the effect that your policies have on people, and the effect they have on statistics such as unemployment.
Main Menu
The game starts at the main menu. From here you can load previous games (not in demo), go to the options screen, or start a new game. You need to select new game in order to access the games tutorial.
Game Basics
Democracy is a ‘turn based’ game, with each turn representing 3 months (one quarter), The number of turns between each election depends on the term of office that’s used in the country you are playing.
The green progress bar at the bottom of the screen shows the months to go until the election. The Button above this with the arrow on it is the ‘next turn’ button. Once you have made all your decisions (or run out of political capital), you click this button to move ahead 3 months.
(note : not all countries represented actually used fixed-term election in the real world, however, for simplicity, Democracy assumes fixed terms for each country).
At the start of each turn, you will get an executive briefing on the last 3 months in politics. This will include what changes have occurredin the polls, what intelligence services are reporting, and possibly an update on the next election.
The Voting System
The centre of the screen has a grid of boxes representing the voters in your country. For the sake of simplification, it’s assumed that everyone eligible to vote does so, and if people do not like your party, they vote for the opposition, so you need to get 50% of the voter in order to stay in power. A distinction is made (with the two columns drawn within the voters boxes) between peoples satisfaction with government, and their voting intention. These two numbers may be quite different.
For example, if everyone in the country gives you an approval rating of 49%, that means you will get 0 votes, as they approve of the opposition party more, and will vote for them. And if everyone gives you a 51% approval, you will get 100% of the vote.
Of course, in the real world it’s not that simple. Some people may give you a high approval, and others a low approval, and often the two bars (approval and voting intention) will be closely matched. The important thing in the game (and in real life politics) is to make as many people vote for you as possible. Once a group of voters give you a 51% approval rating, you are guaranteed of their support. A politician with fanatical support from 25% of the country will never be elected.
Voter Polls Menu
The graph icon button launches the voter polls menu. This shows a historical view of each voting groups approval rating for you over time, with the present value on the right, and older values going to the left.
This screen can get a little jumbled, so by clicking the names of each group, you can toggle display of each line on and off to see them more easily.
The Voter Groups
Each box in the central grid represents a group of voters, such as ‘Poor’ or ‘Liberals’. Not all voting groups are the same size, as some of the group sizes vary between different countries (different ‘missions’ in the game). The percentage of the electorate that belong in each box is shown by the light grey shading on the background of the bar.
The small coloured strip inside each box shows the current approval of that group of voters. The strip is colour coded, with red being very low, yellow slightly low, and green being a high level of approval. This is what they think of you right now. A small red arrow shows you the direction in which your support within that group is moving. In a perfect world, all the bars would be full and green, indicating total approval by everyone.
Where the game gets complex, is that all the thousands of individually modelled voters in the games ‘engine’ belong to different combinations of groups. So, for example, a voter is not just a liberal. He may be a liberal farmer who drives a car and goes to church. In this case, he will be affected by policies that impact each of those groups. The impact of this ‘multiple group membership’ is that you can’t just make one voter group your ‘base’ and keep them happy, because they will always be open to influence from the other groups in which they belong. The extent to which voters from group A are also in group B is carefully organised on real-world lines. So, for example there are no people in the Poor and Wealthy groups, and there are more wealthy capitalists than poor ones.
There are certain policies that over time can alter the membership of groups. So a strong clampdown on smoking, through taxation and restrictions, will actually move people out of the smokers group. Thus it is possible to eradicate smoking.
The ‘Everyone’ Group
There is a special group called ‘everyone’, into which (obviously) everyone belongs. This group lets you observe policies and events that sway the opinion of every voter, regardless of group membership. For example, a celebrity endorsing your policies will affect the everyone group, as there is no special ‘people swayed by celebrity endorsements’ voting group. (Perhaps we should have a ‘gullible’ group?:D)
Policies
Policies are the ‘bread and butter’ of playing Democracy. The many round icons scattered around the screen represent your government’s policies. Some of these policies cannot be cancelled, just adjusted (like your stance on drugs), whereas some can be cancelled entirely, and new ones introduced. You start the game with a number of policies in place, but you can introduce more from a list as you play.
In order to view details on a policy, and make adjustments, you simply left click the mouse on the policy icon.
As well as cancelling and introducing policies, they can also be adjusted. Every policy has a ‘slider’, which represents the ‘intensity’ of that policy. With different policies, the intensity can mean different things. For example, with the drugs policy, the slider can adjust from a total ban on all drugs, through various compromises, up to total legalisation. With a tax policy, the slider will adjust how high the tax rate is set.
Some policies (mostly taxes, but also fines and levies) bring money into government, and some of them cost the government money. You can see how much money a policy earns or costs by the data underneath the slider.
Before you make changes to a policy, you might want to look at the effects that your changes will have. By selecting the effects tab, and dragging the slider bar, you will see some coloured bars that show how different groups react to changes in the policy. A red bar indicates a negative effect (the policy is unpopular), a green bar indicates a positive effect. Only those voter groups or country statistics that are affected by that specific policy are shown. There are also a number of special hidden effects that are not shown.
As you adjust a policy by dragging and sliding the indicator with the mouse (you can also use the arrow keys for this), you will see that a semi-transparent ‘ghost’ slider is being dragged, rather than the real one. This slider represents your policy ‘intention’. Over time the actual effect of the policy will move towards that intention, until the policy is working as you would like. With some policies, the changes are quite quick (like taxes), with others, especially those involving major investment such as road building or railway investment, the effects can take a long time, even years.
Country Data
As well as keeping the voters happy, you will have to keep an eye on the various statistics that describe how your country is doing. These are the boxes at the top of the screen. They describe such data as the literacy rate, the life expectancy of citizens, and the level of unemployment. Clicking the boxes with the mouse will give you more information. The boxes represent quite broad area, so for example, the literacy rate is not just a simple measure of literacy, but a general measurement of academic performance and education throughout society. One of the most important boxes is the ‘GDP’ box (Gross Domestic Product). This box represents the general health of your economy, and also shows a line representing the global economy, which will also have an impact.
The policy decisions you make affect these country statistics, and in turn they can also affect the opinions of voters, and even the level of government income (because the level of GDP affects tax income). A low level of poverty will cheer up socialists, for example. Country data also affects situations, and events. (Generally, in Democracy, everything affects everything else, making it a very difficult game to truly master).
Events
Events are isolated occurrences that are sometimes random, and sometimes directly caused by your decisions, and the state of your country. An example of an event would be a religious leader criticising your government. This might be triggered by policies that upset the church, and would lead to an even lower level of support for you among the religious voters. The effects of events often trail off over time, so after a few months voters may forget about what happened (although if events happen just before an election, they can have dramatic effects). Sometimes, events are useful ways of drawing attention to problems (or achievements) that are getting forgotten by a busy President.
Events are indicated by a black icon with an ‘i’ symbol that appears over the top of the voter group grid. Clicking on the icon will show you details about the event, including which voting groups it is likely to have affected (but not how long the effects will last).
Situations
Whereas events are sudden, and cannot be affected once they are triggered, Situations are ongoing and can continue to influence voters and country data. A situation is announced by an icon above the voter grid, but is also represented by a diamond shaped icon mixed among the policy icons. Clicking the diamond icon will show details on the situation, a timeline showing how bad (or good) things are, and the option to click a button and see suggested remedies. Also, like policy icons, hovering over a situation icon will draw coloured lines showing what effects it has (outgoing lines) and what is affecting it (incoming lines).
Some situations (like a debt crisis) are clearly bad news, and you will want to fix them. Others are good news (such as Tourism boom) and you will be actively trying to trigger them, and to keep them going.
Dilemmas
Dilemmas are decisions that need to me made immediately. They are partly randomly triggered, and partly influenced by other pieces of data. A new dilemma is indicated by a question mark icon appearing over the voter grid. In the standard set-up for Democracy, you have to make a decision on each dilemma before you can move to the next turn. You can turn this feature off using the ‘options’ menu by clicking the ‘ignore dilemmas’ checkbox.
A dilemma will have two choices, and you need to select one or the other. Each choice will have a number of effects, but unlike policies, the effects are not shown. You need o carefully read the description of the dilemma, and its choices to determine what will be the impact of each choice. The effects of Dilemmas last a very long time, so make sure you make the right decision.
Election Promises
A few months before each election, you need to put together a platform for your party to fight an election. In practice, this means making some promises to the electorate. A dialog box will appear and ask you to choose two promises that you are prepared to make to the electorate. Which choices you make have no effect on the upcoming election (although you must make them anyway), but what really matters is the following election. (Presuming you get re-elected) At that point, if your promises aren't kept, the voters will be less likely to vote for you again the next time. The button with the boxes and cross launches a screen which lets you keep track of your promises.
Voter Cynicism
Voters have long memories, and if your decisions seem to be a cynical attempt to scam the electorate, they will remember this, and vote against you. You can cause voter cynicism by dropping taxes just before an election, or raising taxes immediately after re-election. It takes a long time for cynicism to die back down, so try not to upset the voters this way. You can see the current level of voter cynicism at the bottom of the voter polls menu.
Voter Anger
A voter whose approval of you is low simply will not vote for you, but if you really upset a voting group badly, the consequences may be more severe.
Some voter groups have a history of being more militant than others (retired people aren’t likely to storm government offices), and some can be outright dangerous. The intelligence services will warn you of any likely terrorist attacks or assassins, and providing you have funded them well, can even prevent most attempts on your life. However, it’s often not a good idea to strongly upset socialists, capitalists or the religious.
Restricted Powers
An optional feature of the game, that is enabled by default (you can disable it on the options screen), is the restriction of powers. When enabled, this prevents you from making too many changes in a single turn. Each adjustment to a policy or cancellation or introduction of a new policy counts as a single action. The number of actions you can carry out each turn is decided by how heavily you won the previous election. The restriction doesn’t prevent how much time you spend looking at other policies, or events, it just limits the changes that are made. The fist icons under the voter grid show you how many actions you have remaining this turn.
Achievements
Being re-elected is a major achievement in itself, and as the game has no term limits, you can carry on running the country as often as you like, but Democracy also sets you other goals. The icon near the bottom of the screen with the gold trophy launches the trophy screen. From here you can view a number of achievements that you can strive for, The exact requirements for each trophy aren’t shown, but you can guess most of them form the titles. Be warned, they are not easy. You will be notified mid-game by a firework display and a message if you achieve any of these goals.
Game Options
Clicking the button with the ‘tools’ on it from the main screen will take you to the games options menu. From here you change the screen resolution to match that of your computer. You can also opt to play windowed or fullscreen. In a nifty feature, you can always use Alt + Enter to toggle between windowed and full-screen mode, even mid-game. Handy for checking your email.
Also under options, you can change the games difficulty, the interest rate paid on government debt, and the level of economic volatility. (This makes the game harder).