Good news: Government Simulator 2 will soon be available on Steam!
It comes with a modernized simulation engine, support for simulation emergencies and situations, economic relations, social media, and a lot more. We will also merge some of the improvements back into Government Simulator 1, where it makes sense.
Here is a short trailer giving a quick overview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zxDT7EmaCA
Emergencies like pandemics, power shortages, energy criss, inflation and similar have become important recently, and the game will simulate these as well.
Additionally, economic relations to other countries (like trade agreements and tariffs) have been become more and more popular recently, and even social media now has more influence on politics, so these are modeled now as well:
This update is the first after update after a long time adding some minor improvements and changes everywhere:
Adjusted economic growth for larger values of inflation later in the game, to make it more realistic.
Unemployment rate is now also simulated a bit more in depth in scenarios like these.
Fixed scrollbar theme when running on some systems on Windows 11
Adjusted military strength for a couple of countries slighly to match more real world data. Note: This only affects you when you start a new game, existing running games are not affected by this.
Hope you'll like this update. More updates likely to come in the near future again. Feedback is welcome as always!
This update adds Import Tariffs and a few bug fixes and improvements. Details:
Import Tariffs
You can now impose import tariffs using the "Laws" tab. You can specify a total average rate for these, and the engine will uses this value for calculating the simulation. The effect tariffs will have depends on how the internals of the country you are running look like.
Limitations: There are no individual types of goods or countries of origin on which you can impose tariffs, it is just an average factor, since the simulation isn't fine grained enough for this.
Economic growth rating values have been adjusted a bit, causing the labels on the economic growth statistics screen to show better values (like 'Excellent' for a value of 6% instead of previously just 'good')
Added a scroll bar to the 'satellite states' page on the military conflicts tab, so that you can see all satellite states if you have many of them.
The Steam "Economic growth" achievement wasn't reachable after the last update anymore, this is fixed now
Environmental destruction simulation has been adjusted a bit
Hope you'll like this update. Feedback is welcome as always!
This update adds cheats (possibility to circumvent the implementation effort points mechanism), a new law, gameplay tweaks, and improvements here and there. Details:
New law: Plastic bag ban
In order to reflect current developments, the game now has a new law to select: 'Plastic bag ban'.
Also, when you start a new game with France, the plastic bag ban law will be active there to reflect France's bag ban starting in 2016.
Cheats
There are now cheat codes in the game. If you play though the USA scenario and finish it successfully, cheat codes in the game will be unlocked. The cheat code 'NOMORELIMITS' entered in the game will give you 100 implementation effort points.
Note that if you already played through the USA scenario previously before this update, you need to do this again to unlock cheats, unfortunately.
Debt Explained
There is now an explanation in the statistics tab on the "debt" entry, explaining how the current debt was generated.
It shows the old debt, the defict and the interest which had to be payed on debt. This makes it probably a bit more clear for people not understanding that their debt sometimes would not be reduced although they had a negative deficit.
Crime rate adjustments
Crime rate calculation has been adjusted a bit and factors such as tax burden, income, unemployment rate, police budget, prison budget, punishment rate, alcohol ban, torture, surveillance and similar influence it a bit differently now.
The description of implementation effort points now also shows that a lower game difficulty gives you more points.
Fixed a problem when dragging game window accross multiple screens.
Various minor gameplay tweaks and improvements here and there.
Hope you'll like this small update. If you want specific new features in a future update, don't forget to post this into the discussion forum (the comments section below this news is a bit difficult to use for discussions). Further feedback is welcome as always!
This update adds balancing tweaks, fixed problems, improvements here and there, and a new scenario. Details:
Gameplay balancing
The amount of efford points needed for changing critically underfunded departments has been reduced quite a lot. For example, previously, you needed a lot of points for increasing the budget of 'Bike Ways' in the transport category in the US scenario, or 'Police' in the Russia scenario. This is no longer the case now.
New scenario: UK after Brexit
This new scenario simulates the UK after a possible brexit scenario. Note that this scenario might contain errors and unrealistic or made up values.
You can play this scenario by selecting the "Downloadable scenarios created by users" in the "new game" dialog.
Family Support
Changed the way people react to changes in the amount of family support budget a bit.
Budget adjustments
Adjusted the evaluation of the budgets for the simulation of various departments such as hospitals, internet, telephone, muesums and monetrary system for a handful of countries, to make this more realistic.
Performance improvements
The game now runs a bit faster on slower systems, especially on Windows 7 (Windows 8 and 10 were already quite fast)
Fix for Newspaper animation problem: On some system, the newspaper animation would sometimes be stuck, this has been corrected now.
Fixed a problem where downloadable scenarios could specify a different start date, but the month would be ignored.
This is no longer the case now.
Thanks again for all the feedback! Hope you'll like this update. If you want specific new features in a future update, don't forget to post this into the discussion forum (the comments section below this news is a bit difficult to use for discussions). Further feedback is welcome as always!
This update adds a new country to the simulation, a new supported language, makes some minor changes to the simulation, and improves other things here and there. Details:
New country: United Kingdom
You can now also try to take command and change the fate of Great Britain in Government Simulator.
The UK has some unique challenges, all as always based on real world economic data. This was the country most people wanted to have added into the game, so this was done now.
Tip for playing: Note that the UK has a relatively high GDP-to-Dept ratio, so it is a good idea to reduce this in the beginning by either increasing certain taxes or to reduce spending (or by other methods like introducing a high quantitative easing rate), otherwise it will be very difficult to handle this country in the beginning of the game.
New supported language: Italian
You can now select italian as language in the game, if your operating system is italian, it should be automatically selected.
Coporate Tax Income Factor
The simulation now has a new factor named 'FactorCoporateTaxIncome' which is set to default to 1.0, but makes it possible to model more countries more easily, especially when modding. See the manual for details.
New currency: GBP
The game now supports the pound sterling (official currency of the United Kingdom) as currency, you can select this in the settings dialog. This is also the default currency when you play the UK scenario, of course.
Compulsory Vaccination Change
The value set in Compulsory Vaccination laws now has a slightly different influence on Public Health depending on Government spending budgets.
Adjusted a few minor values in the simulation to make the model work in some edge cases more realistically.
Fixed a bug where Government Simulator would not display the game manual on certain system configurations.
Thanks again for all the feedback so far! Hope you'll like this update. If you want specific new features in a future update, don't forget to post this into the discussion forum (the comments section below this news is a bit difficult to use for discussions). Further feedback is welcome as always!
This update adds some changes to the economic model simulation, and improves the gameplay. Note that for existing running games, not all changes will have an effect, but it also might mean that the current state of your existing game might change a bit (budgets might become too low and similar).
Long Time Economic Growth Change
Previously, if you successfully played many years with the same country, everything would become very easy, because the economy usually would grow to an unlimited size, but the needed expenses didn't adjust accordingly. This is no longer the case, and the simulation now includes some internal inflation for this, so the game becomes a bit more challenging in later stages of the game.
Public Relations Changes
The approval boost rates for public relation actions have been adjusted a bit:
It is no longer easily possible to boost your approval rate using public relations.
One Child Policy Fixed
The one-child-policy (if active) was ignored by the majority of the population, in most cases. This is no longer the case.
Fix for exploding Economic Growth
Sometimes, if you had a very well set up country, your economic growth might get to a state where it would explode, and not stop growing very strongly. This has been fixed now.
Fixed a problem wich caused a fixed maximum economic growth of 6.1% under certain circumstances
Thanks again for all the feedback so far! Hope you'll like this update, and further feedback is welcome as always!
One day after the release, this is the first update to Government Simulator, including some minor improvements suggested by users on the Steam forum.
Thanks to all for the constructive feedback, and even as some people apparently expected a bit different game, most people posted really helpful, constructive criticism so far. With a nice community like this, the game can be improved and extended with following updates.
There is an update with some gameplay improvements planned already, but this first quick update includes only minor improvements:
Maternity leave duration has been changed for the USA to 0 from previously 3 months, reflecting reality better.
The currency "Swiss franc" is now displayed in the game as "CHF" instead of "Fr." previously.
The list of "past military conflicts" now clarifies that this is a list of military conflicts
which have been ended in this game.
Fixed a few typos (like Broatcasting -> Broadcasting)
Because a lot of people asked to create their own localizations: You can download the .doc template file from here
http://www.government-simulator.com/gs_translation_template.doc
and replace all translations: Only translate the text after the "=" and inside quotes.
Then, send me the file (mods@government-simulator.com), and I'll integrate it into the game. Please also note:
It is probably quite a bit of work to do the translation. If you have finished a translation on your own, and I've verified that its quality is ok, I'll send you steam keys of Government Simulator, PostCollapse and CopperCube as thank-you.
Before starting a translation, post into the forum into this thread that you are doing a translation:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/731920/discussions/0/1489992713708012496/
In this way, you can ensure that no one else is working on the same language. I cannot accept translation of the same language by multiple persons of course. First come, first served.
Please don't send in 100% machine generated translations, because I will verify them and detect this.
Thanks again for the constructive feedback so far! Hope you'll like this update, and further feedback is welcome as always!
