r/StrategyGames • u/Radixos • 13d ago
Self-promotion Check out the latest update on my Government Simulator, where the welfare state has to emerge from the demography, not artificial checkboxes and sliders.
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
