Lower complacency

[chad thundercock]

So I understand how complacency works and think its a good feature, but is there a good way of decreasing it once it has set in? I'm trying to increase socialist happiness to grab the viva revolution achievement but theyre stuck at like 70% happiness because of the complacency. It feels like something you can only prevent before it sets in. Could some kind of crisis drop it or is there like a policy that can decrease it?

[19th Century Jim Dandy]

Complacency, bureaucracy and uncompetitive economy are, without a doubt, my least favorite parts of the game. They're all brutal and make it seem like it's impossible to win the game.

[eric_in_the_sky]

Originally posted by 19th Century Jim Dandy:

Complacency, bureaucracy and uncompetitive economy are, without a doubt, my least favorite parts of the game. They're all brutal and make it seem like it's impossible to win the game.

Agreed....at one point uncompetitive economy was relatively easy to deal with but that seems to have changed. The other two are just there to be a nuisance.

Bureaucracy would be easier to deal with if we could get an indication of what policies are redundant without having to go through every single one...anything to make it easier for us to identify unnecessary policies would be great.

I get the idea of complacency, but it irks me a bit when I've worked to give my citizens an almost literal utopia (max education/health care for all, egalitarian society, cancel out countries debt and am increasing reserves, no poverty, no poor, no homeless, no crime etc) and some voter hates me just because i've been around awhile.

[cliffski]

Thanks for the feedback. I have to admit, the uncompetitive economy thing might need a tweak, but to address each point:

Complacency:
This is annoying, but omg it is such a real world thing. Take any group of campaigners or voter groups and you can definitely see it. When you are *in* a voter group personally, its hard to detect. As an example: Environmentalist (I pick this because I consider myself one :D)
We campaign for lead-free petrol, and you did that. Great.
We campaign for pollution controls on power stations next...
We campaign for catalytic converters on cars
We campaign for hyrbid cars
We campaign for electric cars...

...and so it goes on. If you asked an environmentalist if they are happy with a government, they will likely say no. If you say "but we have lead-free petrol, catalytic converters and some ethanol in fuel right?", they will not give a government any credit for it. In a sense, those past victories have been 'banked'. The only voting impact now of lead-free petrol would be a negative, if it was un-banned.

As a game mechanic, it can be annoying if you find it creeping up, but its definitely a real world phenomena that massively influences politics. The US gun lobby aren't cheering a candidate who wants to ban assault rifle because they still allow shotguns. The earlier wins are banked.

Bureaucracy:
This was introduced when play-balancing Italy. I thought this might be a stereotype, but some research showed that its absolutely a major problem in Italy, and a number of other countries. Its a bit of a blunt instrument, because it treats all policies the same (except UBI which nerfs Bureaucracy), but I didn't want to over-complicate the UI by manually adding inputs to it from every single policy. Perhaps we need a 'policy simplification dept' policy that can fight it?

Uncompetitive Economy.
This may suffer from a slightly harsh name, but the reason its in the game, and the reason so many people get annoyed with it, is that yes...it is pretty prevalent for almost every country in the game. How can that make sense? ...because its meant to represent uncompetitive with respect to developing world countries and their labor costs.

For example, the US is probably considered a pretty competitive and successful economy by most Americans BUT... so much stuff bought in the US is actually manufactured by cheap labour in China. Iphones are assembled in China. The Ford Mach-E electric car is assembled in Mexico. A lot of products people think are German are assembled in Poland or eastern-European countries with much cheaper labour.

In some ways, uncompetitive economy is just a reminder that there are other countries out there with lower wages, fewer holidays, and worse maternity pay and sick pay. It absolutely does not mean that this is neccesarily a bad trade off. I think the problem is a lot of player see it in red and think this must be a bad thing I have to fix, whereas really its just the flipside of decent healthcare and employment protection.

I know not all players will agree with my reasoning on these topics (and this is one of many reasons we make modding easy, so people can adjust this stuff), but I hope that it helps to hear that its been thought about.

[PARAdoxiBLE]

My two cents to add

For Uncompetitive Economy, you can actually remove it by going a bit extreme. If you want to compete with third world countries exploiting cheap labor, you need to either flood labor market with immigrants or automate lots of jobs. Or you can impose high import tariffs too. If you are not doing none of these, you really can't overcome their labor cost advantages.

Nonetheless, I want to see more factors affecting it. Like Currency Strength. Devaluing one's currency is one of the typical ways to regain price competitiveness for exporters.

For Bureaucracy, I find it kinda okay in the base game. But it is bit troublesome for modders. What modders generally do is adding policies over and over. It's not that hard to find mods adding dozens of new policy options to implement. While it is possible for modders to add an invisible simulation and make it reduce Bureaucracy, many modders don't. And I personally feel like introducing a simulation for this purpose alone in every single mod is rather inefficient.

For Complacency, I find it okay. Why should people elect the exact same leader or party just because they have done an excellent job for decades? Voters don't think that way. While I acknowledge that you can't endlessly find new policy ideas to appease the voters in the game, I still don't think voters should vote for you just because you created an utopian society 30 years ago when you have run out of options to boost your approval.

[chad thundercock]

Yeah I have no problem with any of these features I actually like them all, I am just wondering if there's any strategies to lower complacency once it's already reached a relatively high level

[PARAdoxiBLE]

I find it rather hard or damaging to wait for complacency to wear off. You need to lower happiness of a given voter group below a certain threshold and just wait. Doing so effectively means getting no support from that group for a while.

Therefore, I just try to prevent it from accumulating in the first place. It might sound bit evil but don't just give everything they want. If you need more votes, appease the least satisfied ones (of course ignore if their size are negligible). When some groups become way too supportive, do something they will dislike. You will lose their fanatic support because of complacency anyway so just spend it right away. If you happen to need their support again, you can simply reverse what you did. In summary - try to mildly satisfy as many groups as possible.

[cliffski]

And actually it does seem thats the way politicians think in the real world. The right wing in the UK has talked for decades about how they hate inheritance tax, but never changed it when in power. Meanwhile the left have talked a lot about how nationalisation of industries is needed, but didn't do that either. Always keep them wanting more I guess?

[eric_in_the_sky]

For me a big issue with complacency is that you just can't do anything about it, unless the strategy is to only make the population just happy enough to win elections, and drip feed each of the voter types to keep complacency down?

Whatever the reasoning behind it, it's just a penalty applied for doing well.

[PARAdoxiBLE]

I see your point but a lot of videogames, especially strategic ones, do give a penalty to players for doing so well, explicitly or otherwise. There are several examples like resource caps, expansion disapproval, warmonger score, coalitions, and many others. Without complacency, the game will get increasingly easier as you play.

Nonetheless, I can agree that gaining fanatic supports is worse than mild supports in nearly all aspects - possibly except for boosts on minister loyalty, which can contribute to higher PC/turn (& PC cap). I think it might be okay to give a small reward of additional PC generation for those who achieved high approval from voter groups. It won't really make the game too easy to win but access to drastic policies can become a good reward. It is actually kinda realistic too. More extremists will make it easier to take drastic actions.

[Sarellion]

If you want an anti-bureaucracy policy, maybe something like digitized bureaucracy?

Originally posted by cliffski:

Uncompetitive Economy.
This may suffer from a slightly harsh name, but the reason its in the game, and the reason so many people get annoyed with it, is that yes...it is pretty prevalent for almost every country in the game. How can that make sense? ...because its meant to represent uncompetitive with respect to developing world countries and their labor costs.

Which sounds overly focussed on the secondary sector and big industry and ignoring the tertiary sector. AFAICT I can't expand the tertiary sector to shuffle the guys replaced by robots into other jobs despite my country having top notch education. And it seems to me that increasing the number of self employed people doesn't do much to combat unemployment, same for small business grants besides adding GDP that's already hitting the upper limit. A bit weak compared to labor laws with the triple whammy of high wages, lowered working hours and production penalty. I find that a bit odd in general that wages affect producitivity that highly. For some sweat shop okay but a highly skilled workforce in a hightech country should expect to be paid well and deliver well in return.

[cliffski]

True, although even in a high skilled workforce, wages can impact productivity (when expressed as ROI on labour). For example, in the US California is certainly seeing an exodus of tech companies to Texas and other states due to the high salaries that are demanded for California workers.
It could be argued that California tech sector is in some ways, an uncompetitive economy, as tech workers can theoretically be anywhere, and california house prices mean it can make sense to pay lower salaries to the same people in different states. Especially now work-from-home is more prevalent.

[Harambe]

I never have a problem with complacency, as you can stack most of modifiers high enough that it doesnt matter much and I play very long games sometimes.

[kryvnus]

Originally posted by cliffski:

Thanks for the feedback. I have to admit, the uncompetitive economy thing might need a tweak, but to address each point:

Complacency:
This is annoying, but omg it is such a real world thing. Take any group of campaigners or voter groups and you can definitely see it. When you are *in* a voter group personally, its hard to detect. As an example: Environmentalist (I pick this because I consider myself one :D)
We campaign for lead-free petrol, and you did that. Great.
We campaign for pollution controls on power stations next...
We campaign for catalytic converters on cars
We campaign for hyrbid cars
We campaign for electric cars...

...and so it goes on. If you asked an environmentalist if they are happy with a government, they will likely say no. If you say "but we have lead-free petrol, catalytic converters and some ethanol in fuel right?", they will not give a government any credit for it. In a sense, those past victories have been 'banked'. The only voting impact now of lead-free petrol would be a negative, if it was un-banned.

As a game mechanic, it can be annoying if you find it creeping up, but its definitely a real world phenomena that massively influences politics. The US gun lobby aren't cheering a candidate who wants to ban assault rifle because they still allow shotguns. The earlier wins are banked.

*performs necromancy* As a concept complacency is fine and mimics a certain aspect of real world voter activity. But what the game fails to do is it doesn't have a mechanic for a voter group to make demands about policy changes that would make them happier. Electorates in the real world make demands of their representatives all the time. With that ability of the electorate not being functionally integrated into the game there is limited ability of a party/leader to address the issue. When an environmentalist complains that the government is not doing enough, they tell you why they feel that way most of the time. They complain, they write letters, they call political offices, and you hear from the loudest members of that electorate group exactly why they feel you aren't doing enough. I don't have that in this game to respond to those concerns. It just tells me how they feel about existing policies, it doesn't tell me what policies those members want. And if I have implemented literally every policy in the game that favors them (probably to the detriment of my economy) and have nothing new to pass for them, I will have no means of reducing complacency... unlike the real world where those people will tell politicians want done, and if the politicians want their vote they will try to make changes based on that voter feedback.

[cliffski]

Well bizzarely this does feed into the classic political dilemma:
Should politicians solve problems to make their voters happy, or should they 'almost' fix those problems, but promise they will definitely fix them next time?

It is a genuine dilemma, because voters seldom give credit to a political party for what they get right. Nobody is celebrating the US republican party for the fact that voters have a choice of private healthcare options. Nobody in the US democratic party is celebrated for the fact that there are laws against racial discrimination, or for the fact that medicare exists.

Some battles are considered 'won' and therefore given no credit.

So for example, there is a legitimate argument that when it comes to environmentalists, you absolutely should not give them everything that they want. How will you get them to vote for you then!

Obviously thats deeply cynical, but the game does intend to represent political reality, and politicians are cynical. Does Trump really want a border wall, or an argument over whether or not to build one? etc...

But getting back to your specific point on not knowing what voters want, its an interesting idea. You can look at policies in the new policies screen and see what voter groups they are likely to please, but voters do not directly petition for policies, outside of the TV news events that only trigger for some things...