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All of the systems in this game are very complex. Policies have all sorts of knock-on effects, and voters are effected by any number of them.

But if I perform the exact same actions in multiple runs of the game, will I get exactly the same result?

It would be nice to know the answer to this question right down to the individual voter level, but probably only the developer could answer that, so I'd settle for an answer at the election level.

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  • You might want to read up on general Chaos Theory...
    – Shadur-don't-feed-the-AI
    Commented Nov 12, 2013 at 18:25
  • @Shadur ... in Eve, we call it "The Sandbox"
    – user57112
    Commented Nov 13, 2013 at 13:36
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    I can't say for certain, not being intimately familiar with the game... but it's highly unlikely. Random chance is a go-to method of adding complexity and interest in game design, especially in simulation games, and I'd be very surprised if Democracy 3 was any exception.
    – SevenSidedDie
    Commented Nov 13, 2013 at 16:29
  • @SevenSidedDie I'm not sure I agree that random chance is that much of a given. If the simulation is complex enough, with enough variables and enough interdependencies, then even small changes to a couple of variables can have all sorts of follow-on effects. Which to me is more interesting than just rolling the dice each time you play. My gut feel was actually that Democracy 3 probably is deterministic.
    – Cam Jackson
    Commented Feb 16, 2014 at 3:55
  • The game can't be deterministic because some of the monthly events are random, unless it stores the save to prevent you from reloading an event. I don't have the game installed but someone should check if the seed is saved
    – Lawton
    Commented Jun 30, 2014 at 23:47

2 Answers 2

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Have a look at http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy3/modding.html, where the game model is described. Most of the game turns out to be deterministic, however some things like dilemmas can use _random_ as input, i.e. some events happen randomly. As an example, my Prime Minister was recently assassinated, but upon reloading the autosave (the game crashed) he had instea survived.

So tl;dr: If you do everything the same, the randomness of some events will still yield a different outcome which may be severely different.

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  • That's good enough for me, seems there's definitely some random elements in the engine.
    – Cam Jackson
    Commented Dec 9, 2016 at 10:59
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According to a few let's plays I've watched, the game starts with different stats every game. So if that was correct, doing the same thing every time would lead to a different outcome for each game.

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  • 14
    I guess that technically answers "if I perform the exact same actions..., will I get exactly the same result", but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not deterministic. The game's initialisation may be randomised, but the simulation may be deterministic if you save right at the start and then play from that point, multiple times, in exactly the same way.
    – Cam Jackson
    Commented Dec 25, 2013 at 12:11

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