Unrealistic points in country modelling
Posted: Sat Dec 24, 2022 12:52 pm
At the moment without a faction intervention a nation with certain stats with develop in almost completely predictable way, barring that at high unrest a revolution may occur at different times. (Also the default stats pretty much doom less developed nations to a violence spiral). Plus different uncontrolled countries will have similar predictable spending distribution. It seems that while the current system is mostly ok for predicting average situation, there should be outliers. E.g. when nations change governments (anocracies and democracies every few years, auth/totalitarian much more rarely, but also check after every revolution) there should be a chance for the situation to worsen or improve. E.g. a particularly good roll may see a country's cohesion target increase, shift spending towards development and give a temporary bonus to development spending. A bad roll may decrease cohesion target, increase spoils spending and temporarily make spoils more damaging. Meaning occasionally mid-tier stable nations might see the situation worsen and go into unrest spiral and every once in a while a nation may get out of it on its own. This might also happen to countries controlled by factions but more rarely, as special events - even if the faction controls a country, there can always be a popular movement or group appearing.
Another point is that in reality if you don't consider countries with large percentage of income coming from windfall sources, like natural resources, no country ever has successfully implemented a decent welfare at low economic development (and not through lack of trying). In practice countries get developed first before successfully implementing welfare. Usually subsequently they see a certain decrease in economic growth - if you look at lists of countries/periods with highest economic growth, high-welfare countries will never feature there. I think a more realistic adjustment will be to have lower inequality provide a certain reduction to economy priority (but past a certain point extremely high inequality would not provide any benefit), meaning that if you can handle unrest, it's better to develop first and increase welfare later. Also potentially very low economy can cause a soft cap on inequality, meaning that effect of welfare priority on inequality will drop below certain inequality levels depending on per capita GDP (for lower per capita GDP this effect will manifest at higher inequality levels). Though that soft cap might be too complicated to implement in a way that's visible and clear to the player.
Another point is that in reality if you don't consider countries with large percentage of income coming from windfall sources, like natural resources, no country ever has successfully implemented a decent welfare at low economic development (and not through lack of trying). In practice countries get developed first before successfully implementing welfare. Usually subsequently they see a certain decrease in economic growth - if you look at lists of countries/periods with highest economic growth, high-welfare countries will never feature there. I think a more realistic adjustment will be to have lower inequality provide a certain reduction to economy priority (but past a certain point extremely high inequality would not provide any benefit), meaning that if you can handle unrest, it's better to develop first and increase welfare later. Also potentially very low economy can cause a soft cap on inequality, meaning that effect of welfare priority on inequality will drop below certain inequality levels depending on per capita GDP (for lower per capita GDP this effect will manifest at higher inequality levels). Though that soft cap might be too complicated to implement in a way that's visible and clear to the player.