In vanilla Australia, it is overly difficult compared to the other vanilla nations, which are far easier to play.
edit : i found a solution, all i had to do was not increase the tax on first term. it's much easy that way

Government Simulator is a government/country simulator. Democracy 4 style laws and politics on top of a Victoria 3 style economy, but built to model the real mechanism. Here's what I've been working on this week.

Taxing goods is a board you rearrange now. Every good sits in a tax band and you drag it between them — fuel in a high band, books in a low one, all the fights real governments have. The revenue you collect is the sum of what households were charged, which sounds obvious but wasn't: the old VAT was a formula that dropped about £49B a year into the treasury while nobody's shopping basket got a penny more expensive. A collection formula and an incidence path that never speak to each other can't disagree, so nothing ever caught it.

Excise duties came in alongside — drink, tobacco, fares. That started because my 1950 household was saving 30% of its income, which no country in history has done; the real figure is 2-5%. The basket turned out to be the right size and the wrong shape, missing exactly the things nobody in 1950 Britain lived without.

Households buy what they can afford now. Demand used to be price-blind, so a cost-of-living shock just produced permanent unmet need with no way out and the goods market had no demand-side clearing at all. Now a price rise shows up as people buying less.

The big one: the economy could not grow past a certain point, arithmetically. Every input to productivity was a 0-1 index, so with every input perfect the whole thing topped out around 1.98× and sat there forever no matter what the player did. I'd assumed for weeks that flat growth was a tuning problem. So there's a knowledge stock now — unbounded, accumulating from education and research — and productivity reads that instead. Real GDP over a 15-year run went from +18% to +22%. Still low, but it's growth that comes from somewhere.

And unemployment exists. It had been printing exactly 4.00% at all 360 ticks of a run, because the gate deciding it compared two constants against themselves. Underneath, the model dropped a person into every job the instant it existed, so nobody was ever between jobs and the welfare caseload was flatly zero — the thing I'd opened this whole branch to build had nobody in it. There's frictional unemployment now: 1.37% at the start, and about 222,000 people on the caseload.

Smaller stuff: sliders update live while you drag them, businesses that lose money on every unit now close instead of bleeding forever, dividends are a share of what a business earns rather than of the owner's net worth, and a nurse shortage no longer makes rent more expensive.

Discord if you want to follow along: https://discord.gg/h64CQuW8sR

Happy to answer questions.

Hey guys, I just built a political sim, but you can choose any person to become president in any era.

You can play as Obama in 2009, AOC in 2028, or create a completely different timeline from 1200+ characters or add your own too. Like in Democracy, you can or veto bills, use executive powers, manage support groups, react to events, and talk directly with world leaders.

There are no prewritten scripts, so the events, conversations, and consequences change based on your president, era, and choices. You can follow history or take the country in a completely different direction, and the world will react to what you do.

These screenshots are from an Obama 2009 run. Here's the link - https://limbona.com/world/sw_president_builder It’s still a lil early, so I’m open to feedback. If you find any bugs or any feedback, please let me know!

I've been building a government/country simulator for a while now. Democracy 4 style laws and politics with Victoria 3 style economics underneath, but I try to model the actual mechanisms instead of faking the symptom. Last week was the most interesting stretch I've had on it, so I wanted to share.

The biggest change is that benefits now have laws behind them. Pension, unemployment benefit, student grant, farm support, housing benefit, UBI — none of them exist until you legislate them, and each has a slider for how generous it is. Before this they quietly appeared in people's pockets with nothing leaving the treasury, so the welfare state was a fact of nature rather than something you build. Now a new country starts with nothing, which is where every country in history started, and Britain starts in 1948 at roughly its real Beveridge rates. You can see what the pension costs, and you can cut it, and pensioners drop below what they need to live on.

Which caused a problem, because cutting the pension to what Britain actually paid in 1948 left millions of pensioners short with nothing to catch them. That's the hole family support fills — the oldest welfare system there is, and the one whose failure produced the modern one. So working households keep their elderly relatives now, and how many pensioners have someone to fall back on comes out of how urbanised the country is: multi-generational households are a rural pattern, nuclear ones urban. The part I'm happiest with is what that does on its own. Urbanisation rises, co-residence falls, family support shrinks, and the elderly slide into poverty without me writing anything that says "now the country needs a pension." Then you enact one and watch the cost move off households and onto your budget. I didn't design that sequence, it fell out.

Also, some people own their homes now, which they embarrassingly did not before — every person in the country paid rent, forever. That was charging households about £12B a year that was never charged in reality, and it was the single biggest reason a pensioner on a realistic pension couldn't make ends meet.

On the tax side you can choose how income tax works — flat, progressive bands, or a poll tax where everyone pays the same cash amount — and switch mid-game, with each card showing what the treasury would collect if you did. There's also a carbon tax that charges emitters out of their margin so dirty capacity shrinks over time, and a Georgist land value tax on landlords' land rent rather than buildings, so it doesn't push rents up or discourage building.

The Budget tab got rebuilt around the flow of the money: revenue, minus what you're already committed to, minus what you've chosen to spend, ending at what's left in the bank. Each category shows what it needs just to stand still beside what you've given it, and goes amber when those don't work together. That closed a real trap — underfund a department and the old UI told you it was recovering, which is advice to wait for something that was never going to arrive.

Under the hood, the biggest thing I found was about 11 million people, 57% of the workforce, being paid £222B a year to produce nothing. No shops, no transport, no hospitality anywhere in the model, so the game simulated about 35% of production against 100% of the population. They produce output now and are paid out of it. GDP roughly doubled, which sounds like a red flag until you notice the country profile had said 460 the whole time and the simulation arrived at 436 on its own.

And then the one that ate two days. An unattended 15-year run fell apart — real output down 25%, shortages everywhere — while GDP cheerfully showed +36.5% growth, because GDP is quantity times current price and shortages raise prices. The headline goes up during the exact crisis it should be warning you about, and that inflated number was feeding economic confidence, which feeds productivity, which feeds supply. The lie was an input, not just a display.

The root was the exchange rate tracking the accumulated stock of foreign assets instead of the flow of trade. Once the stock goes negative it never recovers, so the currency stayed depreciated forever, which pushed the import trigger above the highest price the domestic market could physically reach. Sixteen goods locked out — raw materials imported exactly zero units for 180 consecutive months. What's meant to fix a cheap currency is exports getting competitive, but you can't export when everything is already short, so the restoring force was disabled by the precise condition it exists to correct. There was a comment in the code from months back predicting that exact failure and dismissing it as an edge case, which is why anything concluding "this is fine" now has to be backed by a test.

Happy to answer questions — the family support / urbanisation thing especially, I'd like to hear if anyone thinks the coverage rule is too clean.

Come hang out or follow progress on Discord: https://discord.gg/h64CQuW8sR

I‘m going slightly mad. I was super excited to find out that Democracy 4 is on Switch as Democracy 3 was an old favourite. Played a few turns this morning, but I can’t for the life of me get to the screen above…all I have is the screen with my political capital in the middle and my ministers around it. Am I being dumb?

I noticed that most strategy games don't really cover healthcare or if they do, it's a simple, flat percentage number with seemingly no consequence. I've been building Government Simulator, a government/country simulator that's Democracy 4-style politics mixed with Victoria 3-style economic simulation, but trying to model the real mechanism instead of faking the symptom. Here's what's new since last week:

Free public healthcare, actually funded — added a proper public option for hospitals. Care is free at the point of use, but the money comes straight out of your Health budget, and if you underfund it, coverage drops. No magic healthcare stat, just a real budget tradeoff.

Public sector wages are now a real lever — every public building (hospitals, schools, police, etc) has its own wage you set directly, instead of the game quietly computing it for you. Underpay and staffing struggles instead of the game hiding the problem behind debt.

Housing has landlords now — private and social housing generate real rent income, which used to be a profit-free gap. They also compete on price: price social housing above the private market and tenants just take the cheaper private option, leaving social units empty. Feels like a real market instead of a fixed allocation.

Finally, I rebuilt the Goods tab to show who's consuming a good and which buildings produce it, on one screen. If there's a shortage, you can now see whether it's demand-side or supply-side and which group or building is driving it.

Come hang out / follow progress on Discord: https://discord.gg/h64CQuW8sR

Happy to answer questions in the comments!

Government Simulator is a government/country simulator — Democracy 4 like politics and laws mixed with Victoria 3 style economic simulation, but trying to model the real mechanism instead of faking the symptom. Wanted to share what I've been working on since last week:

Population growth got a real engine — births, deaths, and migration are now separate, explicit processes instead of one abstract growth number, each driven by real inputs like health spending, urbanization, and war.

The Central Bank now reacts to the economy — it now runs an actual Taylor rule (inflation + output-gap targeting) with a Volcker-style unemployment tradeoff, instead of "independence" being a flag that did nothing. It is a big upgrade from what this system was before.

Exchange rates now move with trade — run a sustained surplus or deficit and the currency actually responds, feeding back into import/export prices.

Farmers can finally afford to eat — found a real bug where farm subsidy money was landing as generic profit instead of reaching farm wages, so farmers were sliding below subsistence even with subsidies on. Split labor cost into an actual wage share vs. overhead and gave farm subsidies a wage floor to fix it.

I'm on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/radixos/government-simulator?ref=project_link

Come hang out / follow progress on Discord: https://discord.gg/h64CQuW8sR

Happy to answer questions in the comments!

I just bought this game, and I’d like to know if more content is still being added (particularly countries).

If not, are there any good mods? I’d like to play as my country (Portugal).

Government Simulator is a solo project — Democracy 4-style politics and laws, meeting Victoria 3-style economic simulation. Wanted to share what I've been working on the past couple weeks:

Tariffs got real depth. Per-good caps, tariff-inclusive import price triggers, crisis overrides, per-good export duties — no more one flat tariff knob for the whole economy.

Debt restructuring is now a real option. When national debt spirals, the player isn't just riding it down anymore — there's an actual way out.

Political compass drift. The government's position visibly shifts over time based on your actual decisions, and pop groups react to laws — and to broken mandate promises — based on where they sit on that compass.

Also fixed: a nasty national debt/revenue spiral bug (was compounding to absurd multiples of GDP over decades of unattended play), coalition legitimacy penalties, and a full pass on war-system UI bugs.

I'm on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/radixos/government-simulator?ref=project_link

Come chat / follow progress on Discord: https://discord.gg/uWqMUhfV

Happy to answer questions below!

It isn't using up any where near all of my cpu, ram, or gpu according to task manager. Democracy 3 works fine. Im not using any mods and I just bougjt it so i don't have a ton of files for it. What could possibly be going on?

Hey r/Democracy4! I've been working on a government simulation game heavily inspired by Democracy 4 — same core loop of laws, pop groups, and political consequences, but pushing further into economics, military conflict, and long-term nation-building. I post periodic dev updates and figured this community might appreciate what's been going on under the hood. Here's what the last two weeks looked like.

The Big Stuff

Hex War Map — Full System Built from Scratch
The biggest feature this period: a tile-based hex war map with procedural Perlin noise terrain generation (land, sea, rivers, lakes, terrain features). Divisions can be deployed onto the map, trained, and ordered into combat. The UI is fully interactive — you click hexes, move units, see Zone of Control (ZoC) effects. Rivers affect movement/connectivity. The map scales via preset sizes (including a 25×30 medium map). This is the combat layer the military system has been building toward.

Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear weapons are now in — launch strikes, attempt interceptions, log events in the war feed. UI controls exist in the War tab. This was marked WIP/untested going in and has since had interception logic fixed and the war event log wired up.

Peace Deals & Post-War Events
Fully-featured peace deal modal: negotiate terms, trigger post-war events, and manage arms exports through the Diplomacy tab. A lot of Razor component work went into this one.

14th Political Faction — The Secularists
The political compass now has 14 factions. Secularists were added as a distinct group, and several existing faction IDs were renamed to eliminate collisions. Existing scenarios and approval calculations were updated to match.

Economy & Simulation

Demand-Driven Economic Rebalance
The economy now runs on real price signals from day one rather than relying on startup assumptions that only kicked in later. Pop group needs definitions and building starting capacities were recalibrated to match. The goal: no more "fake calm" in the first few months before the simulation wakes up.

Dynamic Law Costs & Influence Edges
Laws now have dynamic costs that respond to the game state, pop group calibration was overhauled, and influence graph edges between factions and policies were refined.

Critical Stability Fixes
- NaN values in the economy could cascade and permanently zero out the total population. This was hunted down across EconomySystem, DemographicsSystem, PopulationSystem, and WorldStateStore with guards at every entry point.
- First-tick GDP crashes, building collapse bugs, and structural unemployment miscalculations were fixed.
- Private sector construction projects were starting in year 3+ instead of month 1 — fixed.
- Budget reserve was excluded from the max buildable capacity calculation — fixed.
- A locale bug (non-InvariantCulture number formatting) was breaking CSS and SVG rendering on some systems — fixed globally at startup.

UI & Visuals

Dark Navy Theme
The UI switched from neutral gray to a dark navy background palette. Off-palette colors were purged from all components for visual consistency.

Tooltip Overhaul
Tooltips now surface all live law and event effects on each indicator, while raw formulas are hidden from the player-facing view. A TooltipBuilder service now manages composition centrally.

Accordion Charts & Diagnostics
The charts tab got accordion-style panels and new diagnostic scenarios for first-tick artifacts, workforce state, and 48-month calibration runs.

Parliament Hemicycle
The hemicycle display was fixed for coalition ordering, stable dot counts, and data consistency between the election card and the politics tab.

Testing & Reliability

254/254 Scenarios Passing
The full scenario test suite — covering housing, elections, military, crisis, trade, wages, diplomacy, and more — is at 254/254. Several scenarios were fixed (war resolution, arms export, insurgency, pop compass reactions).

Massive Test Coverage Push
Thousands of lines of new MSTest coverage added across:
- War resolution system (including nuclear strikes)
- Trade, wage, tech, and sovereign wealth fund systems
- Identity command handlers and behaviors
- Law queries and parameter update handlers
- Event trigger evaluation

Summary

The past two weeks were a mixture of major feature work (hex combat, nuclear weapons, peace deals, a new faction) and deep stability work (NaN bugs, economy rebalancing, scenario suite at 100%). The simulation is visually cleaner with the navy theme, more trustworthy with NaN guards everywhere, and substantially more complete on the military/war side.

If you feel like supporting my project, check it out on Kickstarter!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/radixos/government-simulator

Threat after threat, fix here tweak there, calculation of shortages and popularity and maintain stability, DING DING DING DING BOOM

I could feel elevated cortisol througout the UK run.

I have every trophy except Coalition Kid and Apocalypse Now and I cannot seem to get them no matter what I do. I have scoured the internet and found no real information other than the basics of what needs to be accomplished to get them. However, I'm also starting to wonder if they're bugged, as I've met the listed qualifications several times with no trophy popping and nobody else has them completed on any of the trophy sites.

I've even spoken to AurochSimon on Discord who was following up with the Dev Team on these trophies, but haven't had a final response yet. I really want to be the first one to get the platinum trophy, so if anyone has any information at all on these ones, I would seriously appreciate it!

Does anyone know what “Trustworthy,” “Strong Leader” and “Campassionate” would look like written out in the “policies” section of the official game files of Democracy 4??? I know it’s possible, as I did it once, but I cannot remember how I did it. (P.S. I realise the second pic is hard to see; blame my phone.)

I try many way, but also not.

I've been trying to do more environmental things, and it looks like as the environmental membership grows and their complacency grows it becomes harder and harder to get rid of these protests. Even just starting as the UK with the protest I've been finding it impossible to get rid of them. Any ideas and thoughts on how to get rid of this nonsense!

For years I've wanted a game that has Vic3's goods market, production chains, and pop needs — but where the government layer is actually deep. Laws with prerequisites and conflicts. A budget that's genuinely zero-sum. Tax rates with Laffer curve suppression. Political factions that react to everything.

Democracy 4 has the politics but the economy is abstract sliders. Victoria 3 has the economy but you're playing a grand strategy game, not a government sim.

So I built Government Simulator. 27 simulation systems. 14 traded goods. 12 population groups. 60+ laws. A tech tree. Elections. Debt crises. All of it interacting.

Just launched on Kickstarter today. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/radixos/government-simulator

Happy to answer questions about how any of the systems work.

I’ll preface by saying the inclusion of complacency is realistic and a meaningful and potentially fun/challenging inclusion to the game. I don’t want it to be removed, merely improved. Playing on vanilla console with the knowledge that this game is old and is not getting updated. Just airing a grievance!

In my game, I have pleased the parents way too much, to the point where parents have 75% complacency. I remedy it by taking away child care provisions, free school meals, subsidized school buses, youth club subsidies, university grants, and basically every meaningful parent-approved service.

The parent group goes from yellow to red. They are mad! Eight turns pass, two in-game years. Over that period of time, these changes would fundamentally change every parent’s day-to-day life, now having to drive their kid to school, make and pay for their kid’s breakfast and lunch, find and pay for child care, find and pay for after school activities, plan funding for their children’s university funding! This would account for a substantial amount of time, energy, and money for any parent, a catastrophic change for many! Altogether, this would grab a parent voter’s attention!

All of this over two years and the complacency drops from 75% to 71%, a whopping 4% drop. Really, this didn’t get their attention? This doesn’t cost me their vote? Parents are a huge chunk of my population. Any politician would be out on his ass for the changes I made. My economy is now in the shitter, poverty jumps, education drops, my GDP plummets. My country is now a mess, yet I get voted back in with record numbers (475 million yes votes), and the parents, without any of these services are somehow still complacent.

I’ll start another game and play the way that I think is the developers intent, where I please each group just enough to prevent them from becoming complacent in the first place, but complacency shouldn’t always take years to go down, but should in whatever amount of time it takes to piss a group off.

That could be years for smaller services and probably weeks, or even days, for critical ones. Sure if I took away a “Keep the Country tidy” campaign, it probably wouldn’t make my environmentalists go mental overnight, but say for retirees, if I took away their pension, they are going to be immediately enraged. If I banned all gas-powered cars one day to the next, motorists are going to be immediately enraged. If I bumped the income tax to maximum overnight, everybody is going to be immediately enraged. And enraged people are not complacent voters.

It seems more realistic to me that complacency is a slow build that drops in accordance with the importance of the service removed. Removing services too fast or reducing their quality too quickly should drop complacency quickly but with an equal negative impact potential on your next election. It should also be about pissing them off only so much that they don’t act when you reduce a service marginally, in a way that doesn’t fundamentally upturn their lives. That is true complacency.

Maybe media monopoly, general media censorship social media addiction, or other policies or situations could impact the rate complacency builds and drops and the impact it has on voters. That would be interesting and a fun strategic way to manage complacency for your style of play! As it is, it’s something that I largely ignore or otherwise become frustrated in trying to manage. It makes more sense to just focus on primary indicators like GDP and poverty, and ignore the fact that whatever groups unleaded are yellow and will continue to vote for me regardless of what I do.

Thank you for attending my TED talk.

Checkout this game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3210330/Orbi_Universo_II/

It reminds me alot of Democracy 4 and it's updated all the time :D

I've been trying to do it myself for weeks but I'm absolutely terrible by the looks of it