this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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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.

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[–] NaevaTheRat@vegantheoryclub.org 10 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 3 points 21 hours ago

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.