u/Candid-Dish-2749

I’m currently building a political/economic simulation game focused on systemic decision-making and delayed consequences.

This short clip shows a small part of the sector simulation prototype.

In the video, I open the energy sector, inspect the internal dependencies behind its “health” and productivity, then trigger a public R&D investment and let the simulation run for a bit.

The goal is that policies are not isolated modifiers, but interconnected systems.

An investment is not just:

“pay money → get growth”

Instead, it affects multiple layers over time:

- productivity
- capital
- technological gap
- sector viability
- employment
- political pressure
- budget stress
- future growth potential

Different sectors react differently depending on their structure, maturity, dependencies and current conditions.

For example, a sector can look healthy on the surface while internally becoming fragile because of energy costs, weak margins, poor policy support or supply dependencies.

I’m also experimenting with dependency graphs to make the simulation more readable.

Instead of hiding calculations, I want players to actually understand why a sector is improving or collapsing.

The challenge is finding the balance between:

- realism
- readability
- depth
- and making it still feel like a game instead of a spreadsheet

This is still heavily work in progress, but the reaction to the first post genuinely motivated me to keep pushing this project harder.

I’d honestly love feedback from people who enjoy strategy/economy games:

- Does this level of systemic depth interest you?
- Would you want to see the simulation exposed like this?
- Or should more of the complexity stay hidden behind simpler gameplay?

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a political and economic simulation game about governing a modern country.

The game is still in prototype, so the UI you see in the screenshot is not final. I’m sharing it mainly to show the kind of systems I’m building, not to present the final look of the game.

The idea is to make political decisions feel less like instant modifiers and more like policies with costs, delays, trade-offs and consequences.

For example, in the screenshot the player is managing Italy’s economy by sector and preparing a sectoral R&D investment. It is not just a button that gives “+growth”.

The policy has parameters, a cost, a duration, a delay before effects appear, political support and opposition, and expected impact on things like productivity, tech gap, GDP and deficit.

That is the direction I want for the whole game.

A tax reform should not only change revenue.
It should also affect consumption, business confidence, approval, inequality and future growth.

A public investment program should not pay off immediately.
It should cost money now, increase deficit pressure, and only later improve productivity or growth if the conditions are right.

Austerity should not be simply “good for debt”.
It may reduce deficit pressure, but also damage approval, increase social tension and create political risk.

The goal is to build a simulation where the player can understand why a policy matters, what it costs, who supports it, who opposes it, and what kind of consequences it may create over time.

I’m not trying to promise a perfect real-world model. I’m trying to build a game where political and economic systems are connected in a believable way, and where decisions have first-order and second-order effects instead of being isolated bonuses.

For the first playable demo, my current idea is to focus on one country scenario rather than many shallow countries, so the systems can actually be felt by the player.

The ambition is to make something serious, readable and systemic: a political/economic sim where governing means dealing with trade-offs, delays, pressure, and imperfect choices.