Plenty of games, especially strategy and simulator games, have game mechanics related to politics or economics. From Recettear’s “Capitalism Ho!” to Hearts of Iron 4’s focus trees, political descriptions can be added to flavor game mechanics, and because different game devs have endless variation in personal worldviews, these additions can be absurdly bad at times. Even if the mechanic itself is good, it can have dunk-worthy labelling. Post the worst that you can think of, even if they come from an otherwise great game.
I’ll start: In Civilization VI, different government types you choose have different slots for policy cards, which let you select political policy bonuses for your civilization. In the modern age, two of the government types you can choose are “Democracy” and “Communism”. Already this is liberal drivel conflating Communism with non-democracy and “authoritarianism”. But the policy slots for these governments are even dumber, as Democracy gets more “diplomatic” and “economic” policies, and Communism gets more “millitary” policies. Famously, America and the west (clearly what Democracy is inspired by) never destabilized the world with arms manufactoring and invasions, I guess.
the USSR focused DLC for HOI4 has a mechanic around the Great Purge where “Stalin’s Paranoia” is gamified, you essentially have to purge random generals in the game to keep “Stalin’s Paranoia” down but the funny thing is if you ignore this mechanic, trotsky comes back and coups you lol, so i have zero idea what sort of political message paradox is making. So Stalin was bad for randomly killing people but he was actually proven right in the end?
bear in mind that this is the game that still refuses to model anything bad that Axis does (holocaust etc) or anything bad that the western allies do (bengal famine etc)
Old meme I had lying around
In Civ 6 at least comunism finally gets bonuses to production which makes it most powerful system in the game because at least this one thing civ always got right that the productive forces are the most important factor (and indeed, civ 6 is the first civ game where you even can go in something resembling production build, in all previous you just got military/science/money). In previous games, if communism was even there, the bonuses were strictly military.
In previous games, if communism was even there, the bonuses were strictly military.
Not entirely. I think ideology was done in an okay way in Civ 5, with “Freedom” having spies good at rigging elections in city states and “Order” (communism) being the overall best ideology. It had some military bonuses, but a lot of Order stuff was focused on kickstarting production in new cities, and combining that with scientific advancement. Forgot what the fascist ideology was called but it was mostly good for waging war and stealing tech when you’re lagging behind.
stealing tech when you’re lagging behind.
Any game that defends monarchy is the worst. “oh no we gotta put the good, rightful king on the throne!”
Do we? Do we really?
There are so many fantasy games that do this that I don’t need to name any.
It’s status-quoism, usually both in-universe and in a meta sense in that monarchism is the Tolkienist default for fantasy stories.
It’s interesting that despite us making fun of Paradox map nerds for frequently being nazis, we don’t have that much Paradox (admittedly, we (as in Hexbear) like Victoria 3) in this thread.
Hearts of Iron (3 and maybe 4) had the political triangle between democracy, fascism, and communism, but more egregiously both games fail to represent the causes of the war except maybe as flavour text in some events. The economic foundation of Fascism being the same as settler colonialism (which Capitalism is partly rooted in) is entirely unaddressed. It is very addressed in Victoria 3, which still has some brainworms (especially to do with the “social” tab of the tech tree).
Sim City, Cities Skylines (and 2) assume cars as a default and enforce it mechanically (often public transport is a mid-late game upgrade from your previous car owning suburbanites).
Rimworld has random raids that don’t seem to be at all related to what you’re doing. Its just assumed there are vicious tribes out there in this virgin-but-extremely-arable land that send randos to you. Its very much the most naive form of “settler experience” (i.e. what USAmerican kids are taught about Settlers). Its a shame because I like a lot of the mechanics, layout, and modability.
Tropico has a lot of weird little ones, some of them deliberately funny and some of them just insulting, but that’s kinda the nature of the game. I kinda wish there was a slightly less toony more free-form Tropico but whatever. Unfortunately, Workers and Resources often feels like work.
My partner looked over my shoulder while i was playing rimworld and asked “are they called ‘colonists’?”
Yes
Rimworld fumbles at something better with the pollution mechanic, where other societies get mad for you destroying the land.
Unfortunately in typical rimworld fashion the game heavily incentivised dumping all your pollution on native tribes via drop pods who retaliate by walking at machinegun emplacements so uh mixed execution.
Yeah, I’d prefer something like that. Local negotiations etc. Maybe someone’s made a mod for something like that, but everytime I think about rimworld modding it eventually winds up being a whole new game.
Rimworld really not beating the Gamer gate allegations lmao
Hearts of Iron (3 and maybe 4) had the political triangle between democracy, fascism, and communism
HOI4 doesn’t have the triangle, instead measuring country alignment based off of whichever party has the largest share of the “ideology pie chart”, but it does keep the democracy/fascist/communist definitions. It also says that Democracies can’t declare wars unless certain restrictions are met to represent “public anti-war intersts”, but Fascists and Communists can declare whatever wars they want. This is of course ignoring that, IIRC, the USSR didn’t actually declare any offensive wars during the period.
Sim City, Cities Skylines (and 2) assume cars as a default
This is a funny one because there’s an anecdote out there somewhere of Will Wright working on Sim City 1 (or maybe even Sim Town?) and designing it around cars but not being able to figure out parking lots because they’d just wreck the city. The “solution” they came up with was to just not have parking. Genius!
If my car disappeared when I wasn’t using it… In workers and resources I wind up having a few cars here and there, but my parking lots are tiny and infrequent. In Tropico I just forget about them until the Capitalists ask for them.
I think a lot of brainworms in HoI4 comes in the little niche fascist nation mechanics, which I avoid playing so I’m not familiar with them. It does wind up sorta justifying Stalin’s “paranoia” though by having a Trotskyist (I think) rebellion if you don’t engage with it. I think conceptually I prefer HoI3’s more fluid mechanics (rather than HoI4’s event based ones), but they are less accessible and do come with a lot of assumptions about ideology and production baked in.
HOI4 literally added a “Stalin’s Paranoia-ometer” in one of the most recent DLCs lol.
Yeah, and it justifies the paranoia because if you don’t, trotskyists show up
I never thought about rimworld like that
It’s come up a few times before. There’s a bunch of assumptions baked in. That said, I’ve found it more accessible than dwarf fortress just from an interface perspective.
it’s a colony simulator, u can assume
CIV is hardcore lib “love knows no bounds” utopia from the 90s, except when they made fascism the requirement for Mount Rushmore that was good
that was civ3 right? very funny effect, the same as nuclear BJP ghandi
4
also the last civ with Mao tse tung :(
And Stalin
In civ, the base mechanics enforce the idea that nationalist countries are natural eternal beings that have existed throughout history
Cleopatra, clear leader of the westphalian state of Egypt.
On the other hand, 6000 years of Stalin in civ 1 seems pretty good. I wonder how many times he would try to resign.
Infamous
where the good playthrough inevitable involves helping the cops expand their influence
frostpunk
Somehow using propaganda is more evil than child labour, also the religion gov got treated with kid gloves :::
To be fair on Infamous, the cops are marginally better than the doomsday cult full of mass murderers.
Sure but can you say the same for infamous 2, and second son?
The way the religious government was treated is weird. The really bad parts are treated too nicely and the bad but not remotely as bad as historical examples too harshly. Apparently if I declare food horders and murderers as sinners to be violently punished (in the middle of a famine apocalypse) that’s roughly as bad as becoming god emperor and doing unthinkable things for power.
Yeah, just killing the bastards would have been less cruel, but when people do that you said they’re evil anyways! Make up your mind Frostpunk.
Frostpunk’s endings are all but at what cost?! lol
I made it through with only one scripted death that happened because I built a state newspaper office and some guy was just really angry about that, and it still did that “wAs tHiS pAtH wOrTh tHe CoSt” shit. Like everyone is happy, healthy, alive, and the only loss was one asshole who got mad about a state owned printing press for ??? reasons, this is literally the best possible situation they could possibly be in.
you avoided all moral compromises and were a shining example of humanity but how dare you accomplish that with a state run printing press. how dare you
Plus you’ve automated all the dangerous mining jobs with robots but at what cooooost
19·1 day agoIt literally says “the city survived but was it worth it” if you “cross the line”
Every game that takes place in a feudal setting has people buying shit with gold coins even though most feudal societies didn’t even have a formalized money economy. Tax-in-kind was a thing for most feudal societies. Peasants weren’t giving their one (1) gold coin to the tax collector.
I’m also annoyed by the fact default* currency even is gold coin in nearly all the games, especially with prices of some trvial commodities going into dozens and hundreds of gold coins. In real world medieval period they weren’t even in open circulation for most of the time and barely any country even released the gold coins in significant numbers. Not even the big scale trade and finance were done in gold even theoretically on paper, the usual unit was certain weight in silver. Even the games that do have silver and copper coins do it bad like WoW or paper Warhammer Fantasy where gold is soon the only used coin and in hundreds and thousands.
*Some games go for specific currency, like Elder Scrolls game having septims (which is big and heavy and prices are high so gold is apparently pretty much worthless in Tamriel) which leads to even funier things like when you loot an ancient ruins where nobody living came in for thousand years only to find a lot of currency which was at first emitted 500 years ago. Though arguably Tiber Septim using Dragon Break to put money with his face everywhere in Tamriel is both in character and canonically at least possible.
the player is never the peasant though, the way most games in these settings are played is from perspectives of the kinds of people that interfaced with the economy through coinage. mercenaries, adventurers, rulers, urban traders, in a ‘real’ premodern economy these are small proportions of the population, but they were also first in line for interacting with a monetary economy.
Plenty of those games have quests to do for gold, I figure just cut out the gold and have quests unlock more of the shop’s gear for you rather than pay for it. You could even just rename gold to influence points or something, that way the devs could still have the players spend an amount of things for an amount of something else.
The Rogue Trader CRPG was a little like this (for different reasons, obviously) - your wealth was immeasurable, but purchasing things involves your reputation with a faction and an abstraction of the degree of your wealth.
The ttrpg it was based on also had this mechanic. Only extreme material investments, like equipping a regiment with plasma guns, put a dent in your profit factor
I’ve toyed with this idea in my head for a while, and I think it has a lot of promise from a game design perspective. Like one problem players run into in Skyrim and others like it is that they wind up with piles and piles of gold that they don’t know what to do with by the mid game - but if you linked staying at the inn, buying food and getting better gear to your reputation and tracked reputation separately in each of the game’s holds, then you could really smooth out the progression and keep your “currency” relevant all the way to end game.
You could also track “peasant rep” and “nobility rep” separately, having your character be disrespected by the wealthy for most of the game and barring the ability to go to certain places behind getting enough nobility rep to be invited there. Once you start getting nobility rep, then you start getting quests for gold, and people start talking to you about investments, and you very quickly have more money than you know what to do with and can buy anything you want from peasants without thinking - but by that point in the game the lower classes don’t have anything you need, so the currency that really matters is collecting reputation and favors from the rich to get rare goods and magic items and stuff.
It would be a pretty visceral way to create a feeling of “moving up in the world” for the player, and you could tie it into the narrative by having noble quests put you directly at odds with the people you were trying to help during the peasant quests. Imagine how powerful it would be if you come to a crossroad in the game, where it has dangled infinite wealth and access in front of you, and then after you learn to like the taste it forces you to choose between that and doing something heroic, giving a real cost to the choice to be a good person that almost every other game lacks.
It’d be more interesting than choosing between the racist blue team and the racist red team, at any rate.
I liked the way Ys VIII did it, there’s no money to collect since you’re stuck on a desert island, so to buy new stuff and upgrade it you just gather resources. There’s a storyline reason for it, but something like that could be implemented in any other game to have a system that doesn’t directly involve gathering money.
This really pisses me off about Disney’s Robin Hood lol.
I think we can give the kids movie from the 70s a pass.
In Fable 3, all your political decisions as a monarch come down to “Do X or Y” based on what your advisors tell you. X is either ‘do nothing’ or ‘do something reasonable as opposed to Y’ and Y is the worst thing you can think of.
For example, one decision is “what do we do with all the poor children on the streets, of which you were once a part of?” and X is OPEN A SCHOOL while Y is INSTATE CHILD LABOR FOR THE CAPITALIST WORMTONGUE FIGURE.
Much nuance.
Peter Molyneux is both a visionary and a hack. He’s been trying to make “the game where your choices have consequences and real moral dilemmas” for decades now, and every time he tries it fails in a different way.
As long as you ignore his own hype, he makes some of the weirdest and interesting games. I still like Black And White because of this. A true “missed the moon and landed among the stars” guy.
He made some awesome games in the 90s. Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper, etc.
I’ve been saying there needs to be a Syndicate reboot that isn’t a FPS but more like the old games, just with better mechanics
Black and white is so weird and cool. Nothing like it. I love it
Nah, he is just a hack that got lucky once.
Also, the best way to win the game is to amass a lot of property and be a landlord who charges high rent. People will start hating you (
), but you can just lower the rent to the minimum level and they’ll like you again 
If my landlord dropped my rent to pennies because they had enough money I’d be hard pressed to hate them personally rather than as representatives of the class
Fable 3 taught me that there’s no point collecting rent from the poor, because they have no money, so you should set their rent to zero so everyone loves you while making the rich pay double to give you a fat treasury. It also taught me that every public works project can be funded easily if the state just takes ownership of all land and housing.
Monarcho-communism
not really on topic i guess but the way stellaris handles pre-ftl societal progression bugs me, they go from stone -> iron -> renaissance -> industrial -> space etc basically mimicking our societal progression. except that just because we had that sort of progression (and arguably some of it was forced on us) doesn’t mean every civilization ever is going to have that same progression, esp fucking hive mind societies
Stellaris suffers from a lot of simplification. The ethicsand civics lack nuance, and megacorps are just reskinned oligarchies etc etc I bet other people could come up with tons of other examples.
But that’s the goal. Stellaris is not a space civilization simulation game, it’s one half 4x one half roleplaying with a distinct style and flavour and kinda rigid mechanics.
Every time I touch Stellaris I realize that I’m severely disappointment with it.
A question I have in general to people on this post: how to do it “better”? Like how do you represent societal evolution on alien worlds? whatever “better” means
(On a side note, off topic too, I really dislike the species classes. They would work much better with a tag system. For a more realistic, less carbon chauvinist and maybe kinda cool approach, you could differentiate species by their biochemistry. But this is outside of Stellaris’ scope and I think I would enjoy a more esoteric and creative approach like in Endless Space 2
edit: Spore was worse lol)
one of the annoying parts about species in stellaris is how they are so linked with empires
like every empire has a primary species which kinda makes sense early game (when it’s so heavily linked to the homeworld) or for xenophobic empires. But later on, especially with plural xenophilic societies, it’s super weird to still have this thing just kinda being like “yeah this empire belongs to this species”
especially especially dumb with Broken Shackles where from the start there isn’t a majority species and it’s not even based around a homeworld. There is literally no reason to have a primary species (and there is no reasonable way to select one) other than the fact that the game is just set up that way 🤷♀️
also annoying me as I’m writing this, terms like ‘empire’, ‘settler’, ‘colony’ etc, which have fairly specific and moral meanings irl and are then used in this super generic and morally neutral way
A question I have in general to people on this post: how to do it “better”? Like how do you represent societal evolution on alien worlds? whatever “better” means
There’s not really a good way to do it. If your aliens are humanlike in a vague sense, pre-communist and communist, I guess, with pre-communist being synonymous with a home planet centric economy.
You mention different biochemistries, but the issue there is that would require a lot of novel research. Like, what sort of fossil fuels could be produced by such biology? How would this affect technological development? How does class society proceed? Liberal developers aside, it’s no wonder games with aliens take place after all this annoying worldbuilding would have relevance. Creating real aliens is a massive undertaking.
megacorps are just reskinned oligarchies
tell that to my Sabotabbies, a mammalian worker coop that has that negative trait with the sabotabby icon
I’ve posted about it many times in the past, but in the first Civ democracy has no corruption.
SimCity is pretty bad too, more cops = less crime.
I remember a cities skylines mod that replaced cop shops as union halls and that was pretty cool
Don’t have another example but just wanted to say the Civ implantation was so bad it kinda ruined the game for me. Thankfully Victoria 3 does it very well and has filled that gap when I’m itching to play that type of game.
Personally I am looking forwards to EU5
