Introduction
Welcome to Democracy 4.
It is time to see if you can do better than a politician and still keep your personal moral code intact.
Good luck and try again if you fail.
Required disclaimers (Only because I think you should be aware...):
1) This guide is not to be considered the best way of playing Democracy 4.
2) I am only a casual player of Democracy 4 and do not have full understanding of the game.
3) This guide is not designed for any achievement runs or country specific games.
4) You will need to adapt your play using this guide.
5) I am likely to add thoughts to this guide over time.
So what if I was looking for a detailed guide?
Sorry, I do not plan to add a lot of details to this guide.
Fortunately, the developers wrote a steam guide as well. It might be advised for you to check there if you unsure how some part of the game works.
Link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2242836711
I am hope that this guide will encourage others to add guides to the game.
I will try make note of other useful guides when I can.
Victory! Wait, Define Victory?
The core of this game is Roleplaying
Democracy 4 is a roleplaying simulator!
There are no victory conditions other than those you set for yourself.
This presents problems for the unaware.
First, you will stop playing this game when you get bored. This is okay. You should stop at this point or any election that will happen soon. This why a politician normally theoretically resigns.
Make sure you throw a "party" for yourself when resigning by checking out the changes you made to your country.
Secondly, Elections are not the goal. You likely started playing and focused on winning an election. The problem is what do you do then, win another? This will get boring quickly. Think of elections as an additional challenge to overcome while trying to achieve your actual goal.
Third, You need a goal when starting a game. This is important. There are many options from creating your Utopia, getting achievements or paying off the USA's massive debt. You are going to need to choose a goal each game. This is so important that we need a new heading!
Goals And Who Are You.
So you need a Goal.
This is really something you need to answer yourself. However, I have some advice.
Means and Ends
There are two parts to achieving a goal, the ends and the means.
What do you want to do? How do you want to get there?
The first question is the simplest. Pick something that you think is cool or challenging.
Please, don't forget the second part. It basically, will be your personality during this game. It will add extra challenges and give weight to your choices.
Real Life Examples
I suggest you think about real politicians or political movements.
Do you what to play the game like someone you like or hate? Did you want to try to Save the Planet or overthrow this democracy? Did you want to prove that either the ideas of left or the right leads to a better society?
Using real life examples as ideas can really get your game going. It will also give you advice about what to do when a problem appears.
Roleplaying
In each game, you will have a personality. Now, that means you will be judging your actions in terms of your personality. This is the "means" part. Now what your personality is up to you.
I could talk about how morality, you and your personality interact here but this is a more
philosophical part of roleplaying, that it is unwise and unfair for me to add.
Remember that this is a game and focus on having fun!
So I have some suggestions,
1) Try to keep your personality relative consistent during the game. This may be a frustrating challenge sometimes but it makes every success sweeter when you find a different way to solve the problem or a "bad" decision.
2) Please realise that trying to amass as much power as possible or find an optimal way of play are distinct personality types and may not be in line with the game you originally planned to play.
Good decisions and gaining power will be part of every play through but these should be in addition to your goals and personality.
3) A party name that describes your goal or personality is a good way to start to get into the right mindset.
Planned: Advice For The Beginning Of The Game
So this was the core of the guide I originally planned to write. Alas, I kind of got caught up with the early parts that sort of started just flowing.
At the moment I will make some quick notes to come back to later.
Early Priorities
Deciding on objective for the short and long term.
Getting back in black. Stopping bleeding money to debt.
Popularity and getting more political capital to work with.
Solving some quick crisis.
Making sure that you don't get assassinated.
Surviving your first election.
Managing your ministers.
Moving on to long term objectives
Changing demographics.
Doing the stuff that seemed out of reach.
Building Utopia.
Sorry that these bits have not been done yet.
Sample Game: United Kingdom
Getting Back In Black
Money and running a surplus
You basically have three resources in this game: Time, Political Capital and Money.
We will be addressing Money initially.
The Problem
Most governments in the game are running a deficit and have a debt that they have accumulated.
Like all loans you must pay interest on the debt. This sucks but is not the actual problem.
Look at this screenshot and you notice I have highlighted the interest rate line.
The problem is the amount of money your pay on your debt can and will increase as your credit rating is downgraded.
After two turns and a credit rating downgrade, you can see the increased costs to your budget.
In the Beginning. (5th item in brown)
Just Add Time and bit more debt. (Now increased to 4th item in green)
As you can see our debt interest costs have increased by 5 Billion. While there are a few more factors to this process, it is mostly caused by having a deficit. This can and will start a downward spiral if unchecked.
Note: You likely can manage a deficit for short periods during when the global economy is not doing well.
2nd Note: Technically, credit rating downgrades are based on you Debt to GDP ratio. However, my advice remains the same. Just remember that in some cases you can get away with high debts or deficits.
Action Plan
I advise you to early on consider getting to a surplus soon. Now this needs to be balance against your other priorities and political capital you have available.
My personal options that I consider initially:
Some countries have a few policies that cost a decent amount, provide very little benefits and do not need much political capital to cut. These are gifts if you find them.
Examples: Australia has Oil drilling subsidies and America spend a lot on it's military.
Income Tax is your likely to your best cash raiser. Increasing to around 50% is painful to the middle class but will net a decent chunk of change.
Search your expenditure screen for high cost policies and see if it is worth cutting them.
Check your other tax policies to see if there are any options that could get you close to a surplus.
Check your new policies for more options.
See if you can easily increase your GDP through new policies. This likely will take time and more effort to pull off.
Hopefully, you can get close enough. You will likely not be able to do it with one turn's worth of political capital. Hopefully, you can make a serious dent in the problem in your first year.
It is important that you don't solely focus on this. Politics is a juggling act and your have other priorities to work on as well.
Finally, these measures will likely hurt your popularity. This is our next serious problem to address.
All For The Ratings
Pleasing People and Political Capital
In our example above, you will note that we are getting 15 Political Capital (Blue circle) mostly from minister loyalty. This will not last and while could be improved through Cabinet reshuffle, our minister's loyalty will likely decay due to the unhappiness of our voters.
If you glance at the popularity bar in the top left. You will notice we are basically hated at this point and tax changes likely made this worse.
The more popular we are, the more Political Capital we will have.
So we must address this soon as well.
On the plus side, improving this means our next election should be easier, we are less likely to be assassinated and if we are lucky our ministers will become more loyal as well.
That is a lot of benefits.
Where to start
In the image, I have ordered each sub groups of people by population size and this will be our best approach.
We are looking for looking for policies that need relatively low amounts of political capital that improve the largest groups happiness. Ideally, there will not be other bad effects as well (unlikely).
We can find most of the policies by hovering over the group and following the lines or by clicking on the group. Play around with the sliders to see what changes you will get but make sure to revert changes before checking out other options if you don't like that one. Some policies might be best to cancel outright.
Don't forget to check the new policies menu but remember you will not be able to see the numbers of the effects before you have bought it. Use caution and if you have do have access to the sliders, then you have bought it now and you should choose the best results before you leave the screen.
If you can make note of policies that might only use less than 5 political capital as you might be able to squeeze these changes in during later turns while doing other big policies changes.
You can not please everyone, try to keep the unhappy ones to being the smaller groups.
Finally, Be very wary of group that are red. These groups are likely to try assassinating you and ending your game. Improving them to orange might help you defuse this. But you should consult your intelligence screen to see who actually is dangerous.
Low Hanging Fruit
Resolving some easy situations early.
So by now you have noticed the red bubbles in your country and possibly realised that these a bad things happening to your voters.
Also, in this guide, we have not had much time to focus on roleplaying your personality. It is time to fix both.
First, scout out each of the situations. Have a good look at what is causing them and figure out if you are interested in solving this problem. For each situation, check out the policy tab to see if new policies might effect them.
Ideally, you are looking for a situation that might be quick, simple and cheap to solve.
Most importantly it should be something that you could imagine your personality would be proud to stand up in front of a press conference and claim that you solved it.
My personal favourites are the some of the crime situations. Alcohol Abuse is often a common favourite as it has a few easy solutions but I can also tax it out of existence to help improve my budget at the same time. But it does anger the poor so that is a problem.
Anyhow, look and see what interests you.
Avoiding Wicked Problems Initially.
I need to add some words of warning, some problems can take a long time and a lot of effort to solve. These problems a called "wicked problem".
You should avoid these initially and then work on them when you have the resources and are confident you will be reelected.
Common wicked problem include environmental, economic and health situations. Two good rule of thumbs for identifying these problems are: if they seem difficult to resolve in real life then they are a wicked problem, or if you are unable to directly effect the causes of these problems.
Resolving a problem.
To end a situation, you need to get the blue line below the green line for two turns.
It is useful to note that each horizontal line on the grid on the graph is roughly a 10% change.
Pick a combination of solutions that you think will get you there.
Remember, that any changes you make will often take many turns to kick in. So after you think you have enough solutions in place, check in to see your progress and spend your time while waiting on a different objective.
Staying Alive
The art of not dying.
There are 2 ways to lose the game: be assassinated or lose an election.
Now actually surviving an assassination attempt is basically random luck as far as I can tell.
I will admit that I do not understand the mechanics of assassination really at all.
However, I do have one critical piece of advice.
Popularity is the best defence
If you look at the intelligence screen you will notice that each group with a gun lines up with another group and they all link back to the membership of sub group of your population.
Unhappy Patriots creates high membership of the Defenders of the Flag which creates True Patriots that try to keep killing you.
The best defence is to increase your popularity with everyone enough that while they might not like you, they will not pick up a gun.
Bonus, this will help you during the election. Focus on the big groups and the angriest groups first.
You may also use some of the policies listed in the Intel screen to help prevent assassination. I usually end up boosting Intelligence Services to max and then focus on boosting popularity.
Advancing Your Goals
It should be obvious but you actually want to advance your goals.
So the middle of your first is often the best time to get started on this.
Winning Your First Election
Ultimately, your first election will be won or lost on how well your choices have made people like you.
You are not likely to be a political genius. So aiming to have more than 50% popularity before your last few turns is a good star.
From here you can play with the election mechanics to try and get over the line.
I would suggest your first game uses compulsory voting as it will make things easier to understand.
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2370932090
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- The Democracy 4 Modding Guide
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- Extensive Modding Guide + Template
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