Revolutions - Feature #3 - Politics
Politics is the art of the possible.
Written by King
We had two goals with the political system to make monarchies more powerful in the beginning and to make politics in general more relevant to the player. Rather than election being something that just happens we wanted to make it an important event, and make the banning and choosing of parties a real option that a player would consider. However rather than going for a massive overhaul we decided to do a series of small improvements. When taken together though we feel that this achieves the goals we set ourselves.
Now for those of you who follow our weekly sneak preview will know that the economic policy of the government has some major impact on the game. As a little spoiler I’ll mention that military policy has some minor effects too. However in order to keep some suspense and mystery about the game I’ll not discuss that at the moment.
The first change was to add a new ideology, fascism. It covers various right wing ultra nationalist groups; it becomes active in 1905 and is the favourite ideology of soldiers and officers. However if you are suffering from revanchism or high militancy then more pops tend towards fascism. So nice stable countries tend to not go fascist, angry and bitter ones do.
So here is my Germany in 1905. As you can see I’ve got all my cores and my people are happy. The Fascists are a very small party, and should stay that way unless I do something stupid.
We’ve also made sure that each country always has one party from each ideology from the year the ideology becomes active. This prevents rather interesting things like a liberal revolution in Japan putting the conservatives in power. In addition if a country allows parties then we’ve tweaked the set up in the Grand Campaign so you’ll have a choice of parties. This gives those countries that start as a monarchy a real advantage, you’ve got the power to steer your government in whatever direction you choose.
Now we’ve also made one slightly ahistorical change to the starting party set ups. Each Country will have at least one state capitalist party, usually the reactionary one. Still for those of you who like to control the economy totally, the option is there. All you have to do is pay the price.
So here is Austria at the start of the GC, as you can see you have a nice choice of parties there that allow you to set your own destiny. You’ll also notice those little icons below the ideology of the party. These tell you if your party is a major party, a third party or a party that only takes votes from a certain culture. With the importance of voting in the game we felt that this was a very useful addition to help you judge the chances of victory for your favourite party.
Another change we have done is how democracies function. If you have low plurality then your people don’t understand how democracy works and will get upset if their party did not win the election. This again makes monarchy a more useful form of government early in the game.
Now we’ve also made a few changes to pop promotion, you can no longer automatically promote and demote every pop as right, for certain pops it depends on the policy of the government. The biggest change is that if you do not have full citizenship then you cannot promote non state cultured pops. Having a pacifist government, will severly restrict your military capabilities.
No doubt there are a few other changes I have forgotten to mention, but this gives you a run down of the major changes.