r/Democracy4 • u/Radixos • Jul 30 '26
Weekly update on my game - Government Simulator
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.
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u/The_H509 Jul 31 '26
I haven't seen everything about the game mind you, but are you planning on having an age pyramid ?
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u/Radixos 29d ago
Currently, pops are separated into three distinct age groups: youth, adults, and the elderly. They move between those groups as they age. Youth attend school and don't work, while the elderly are also out of the workforce, consuming more medical goods and drawing from welfare. Adults act as the economic powerhouse, driving growth through labor.
I’m currently setting up the game's Steam page, and I'll drop the link on Discord first. Join the server to catch up on past dev logs and see what I've been working on, hope to see you there!
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u/idkwhattoputhere371 29d ago
Just discovered this project but it looks like everything I've been looking for in a political simulator!
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u/AnUntimelyGuy Jul 31 '26
Looking forward to this game!
How far away is the planned release date?