Yes its true! after all these years, Democracy has finally returned to steam! Democracy 4 is now in Early Access, and your people are eagerly awaiting (or dreading!) your leadership! So far the game supports English-language only on PC (but more languages are coming soon), and we have the following coutrnies in need of governing: The USA! The UK! France! Germany! Canada! Democracy 4 already has steam achievements and steam workshop support, and a full modding guide is available.
If you have ever found yourself getting angry in online debates about what the government should do, now is your chance to prove conclusively that you could do a better job. Its actually way harder than it sounds, especially if you think you will be able to stick to your principles AND win re-election over multiple terms... What will people think when you legalize LSD? when you double alcohol tax? when you give the police machineguns? when you force everybody to sing the national anthem? Will they be happy you introduced Universal Basic Income? Democracy 4 is $26.99 Go grab a copy and take control of the country :D https://store.steampowered.com/app/1410710/Democracy_4/

Exciting times! Not only does today mark the first Presidential election debate in the US, its just a week away from the launch into early access of our political strategy game Democracy 4. If you want to try your hand at implementing Universal Basic Income, or maybe you want to ban teaching evolution in schools, perhaps build a border wall, or legalize heroin, or go crazy with the money printer with some helicopter money or quantitative easing... these are all options available to you in Democracy 4. Currently the game features the USA, UK, Germany and France, and we expect to add Canada before Early Access starts, with a list of other countries coming after that as we continue to work on the game in response to player feedback. Here is the official trailer: https://youtu.be/kuJGiYC4cyg I also just added a new steam guide that explains how people can create mods for the game, which we support through steam workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2242250360 ...and we will add a steam guide for basic gameplay soon too (although this is also built in to the game just by hitting F1...). I'm also doing developer videos on youtube every other week to go over whats been added to the game where you can see how it plays, and you will already find some youtube lets play videos of early builds of the game. If you are thinking of getting the game (its $26.99 BTW), then please add to your wishlist now and help us get more visibility on the store :D https://store.steampowered.com/app/1410710

Great news fellow citizens! The latest installment in the geeky-but-popular political strategy game 'Democracy' series is coming to steam very soon, in a US election year no less. Just imagine how calm and peaceful our forums will be :D Its been 7, yes SEVEN years since the release of Democracy 3, and global politics has changed a lot. Democracy 4 takes the series into the modern age with new features like coalition governments, media reports, Quantitative Easing & Helicopter money, Fake news and Social Media. Here is the trailer: https://youtu.be/kuJGiYC4cyg Democracy 4 will be released soon on steam, so please check out the store page and add it to your wishlist to keep up to date with developments. We will be coming to early access, so will have plenty of opportunity to get feedback from players on how to best balance the game, and what cool new policies to add. Before you start typing, YES, Universal Basic Income is a policy in the game :D And yes, we are modelling cryptocurrencies too :D As well as updating what the game covers, D4 has a revamped user-interface using slick vector graphics to dynamically resize the main screen icons based on a number of factors, and allow for infinite modding potential. We also have a palletized color system so you can play in dark mode (and soon...colorblind modes). Without a doubt D4 is the very best version of the game, and we are very excited to share it with steam players soon.
By the way, most of the features and policies from all the Democracy 3 expansions are rolled into Democracy 4 base game, so we have all the electioneering features, and policies from extremism (plus some new policies that go further, like border walls), social engineering and clones & drones. Plus there are some new screens and visualisations that are completely new for this game, like the voter distribution screens and the disposable income breakdown.
Anyway... we are very excited about releasing this game, and if you are interested in playing, go ahead and bash that wishlist button :D https://store.steampowered.com/app/1410710/Democracy_4/?beta=0

Hi there! We are releasing our second expansion to Production Line: Car Factory simulation on the 23rd October! This expansion is a cosmetic-only change to double (yes DOUBLE) the variety of car design styles in the game! You can now pick from 2 different looks for every car design in the base game (Sedan,SUV,Sports,Compact,Offroad,Pickup & Small van). Mini trailer showing the new designs: https://youtu.be/LkRcorWhNcc Here is the store page so you can add the DLC to your wishlist :D https://store.steampowered.com/app/1174730/Production_Line__Design_Variety_Pack/ Plus if you have not checked out the game for a while, please do as we have released a whole bunch of updates over the last few months that massively improve the playability, performance and stability of the game, mostly in response to player feedback, which has been excellent. Oh and if you enjoy the game but have not got around to reviewing it, leaving a positive review is REALLY appreciated :D Oh and if you bought the game way, way back when it first entered early access...you will not be aware that we already released one expansion for the game, which added both a supercar design and the silly doors on the cars of millionaires and billionaires, appropriately titled 'doors that go like this', which you will find here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1067630/Doors_that_go_like_this/ How can you run a sprawling car factory without gull wing doors? :D BTW we keep this forum thread up to date to tell people what changes we make to the game, so you can see if an idea you have for the game is already being worked on: https://steamcommunity.com/app/591370/discussions/0/1290690926863304299/ Thanks for all your support. production Line has over 100,000 happy steam players and that makes us very very proud (and pays for food for 3, yes THREE cats). :D

Hi, we have finally updated the windows build of the game to include an assorted bunch of fixes, optimizations and improvements related to the Unicode translation of the game which we undertook to allow support for Chinese and Russian languages. As far as we know, this should fix all issues regarding startup crashes or missing / corrupted text. We are now working on implementing those same fixes into the linux and OSX builds of the game. Sorry this has taken so long, Unicode is hell... For anyone who still prefers the build before we changed the text engine, there is a 'classic' beta still on steam, with no passwords. Just right click the games name or icon in steam, select properties, then the betas tab, then the drop down box for the betas.

Hi, we have finally updated the windows build of the game to include an assorted bunch of fixes, optimizations and improvements related to the Unicode translation of the game which we undertook to allow support for Chinese and Russian languages. As far as we know, this should fix all issues regarding startup crashes or missing / corrupted text. We are now working on implementing those same fixes into the linux and OSX builds of the game. Sorry this has taken so long, Unicode is hell... For anyone who still prefers the build before we changed the text engine, there is a 'classic' beta still on steam, with no passwords. Just right click the games name or icon in steam, select properties, then the betas tab, then the drop down box for the betas.

Hi, we know some users have problems with the game not starting, and others (often with low spec laptops) cannot see text. We just uploaded a patch to the windows version today which should fix these issues. As usual, please let us know (with as much detail about the problem and your setup) if the issues are not fixed. Thankyou for your patience, its really hard for us to track down stuff like this because we cannot reproduce it on any of our machines.

Hi, we know some users have problems with the game not starting, and others (often with low spec laptops) cannot see text. We just uploaded a patch to the windows version today which should fix these issues. As usual, please let us know (with as much detail about the problem and your setup) if the issues are not fixed. Thankyou for your patience, its really hard for us to track down stuff like this because we cannot reproduce it on any of our machines.

Hi, as I'm sure some of you know already, we recently released an update to the game to support Unicode text, allowing us to support some new languages such as Russian and Chinese. As a result of the new code, some players experienced problems with text rendering and fonts, making the game unplayable. We are deeply sorry for this. We set up the original (pre-Unicode) build under a beta called 'classic' which you can still access, but obviously this was no help to those of you who bought the game in the new languages such as Russian, Portuguese or Chinese. We have now (we are 95% sure) fixed this issue for everyone and uploaded a new build today which should work on all PCs, all languages. if you have in the past switched to the 'classic' beta, you might want to leave that now and re-join the main build of the game. Hue apologies to everyone who was inconvenienced by this. This has been a code nightmare, but hopefully its fixed now and allows much wider language support. We would really appreciate it if people could let us know either here, the forums or directly at cliff AT positech dot co dot uk, if this new build fixes font problems for you. The new build is 1.32 and you can see the build at the top right of the main menu screen. Thanks for your patience! we are a very small team and had not encountered this issue before (most developers never deal with Unicode support but we wanted to support Chinese and Russian players).

Hi, as I'm sure some of you know already, we recently released an update to the game to support Unicode text, allowing us to support some new languages such as Russian and Chinese. As a result of the new code, some players experienced problems with text rendering and fonts, making the game unplayable. We are deeply sorry for this. We set up the original (pre-Unicode) build under a beta called 'classic' which you can still access, but obviously this was no help to those of you who bought the game in the new languages such as Russian, Portuguese or Chinese. We have now (we are 95% sure) fixed this issue for everyone and uploaded a new build today which should work on all PCs, all languages. if you have in the past switched to the 'classic' beta, you might want to leave that now and re-join the main build of the game. Hue apologies to everyone who was inconvenienced by this. This has been a code nightmare, but hopefully its fixed now and allows much wider language support. We would really appreciate it if people could let us know either here, the forums or directly at cliff AT positech dot co dot uk, if this new build fixes font problems for you. The new build is 1.32 and you can see the build at the top right of the main menu screen. Thanks for your patience! we are a very small team and had not encountered this issue before (most developers never deal with Unicode support but we wanted to support Chinese and Russian players).

Hi everyone! We just updated the windows build of the game so that its now the new unicode build, which means it supports a lot more languages. The new language list is...

• English
• German
• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Chinese

Hi everyone! We just updated the windows build of the game so that its now the new unicode build, which means it supports a lot more languages. The new language list is...

• English
• German
• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Chinese

Hi all. As we did last year, we are commemorating remembrance day (veterans day in the US) and donating 100% of the developer revenue from this game to War Child for the next week. Democracy 3 is currently 20% off during the sale, and all our revenue goes to help children who have been affected by war. You read more about the work this charity does here: https://www.warchildarmistice.org/

Hi all. As we did last year, we are commemorating remembrance day (veterans day in the US) and donating 100% of the developer revenue from this game to War Child for the next week. Democracy 3 is currently 20% off during the sale, and all our revenue goes to help children who have been affected by war. You read more about the work this charity does here: https://www.warchildarmistice.org/

This is cross-posted from our website dev blog at: http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2017/09/18/the-democracy-3-unicode-post-oh-yes/ Right then…here goes… A while ago, we decided that what we really needed to do was translate our biggest selling game (Democracy 3) into Chinese and Russian, and also probably some other languages too. This probably sounds easy but its not, because Chinese and Russian and other fancy languages use non-ASCII characters, so we had to translate the games engine to use unicode instead of ASCII. In theory this is easy, in practice not, especially because there are a LOT of Chinese characters, and you cant just whack em all in a phat bitmap like you do with western characters. This means a lot of assing-around which was all done by jeff from stargazy studios (of Democracy 3 Africa fame) who is my able assistant in such matters. Anyway, the ups and downs of this process are enough to write a major opera over, but suffice it to say, we think its actually done now. As a test, we are dipping our toe in the water by releasing just now (OMG!) a new beta build of Democracy 3 on steam. (Windows only, steam only right now). If you right click the games icon/name and select betas there is a no-password beta to opt in to this version. This version will only be served to you if your steam language is set to English (we will be changing this…), but it now gives you the ability to change language in the game and select from: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese. You can do this under the options screen in a new drop down box. You can then enjoy wonderful screens like this:
And this:
Which excite me more than they should. In practice what this means is we will be able to simultaneously support a bunch of new languages AND get rid of the silliness of separate builds for German French and Polish (WTF were we thinking…?). It also means we have some cool new rendering etch built into the engine which we have secret plans for… ANYWAY… If you are an English speaker who also happens to be fluent in one or more (or even none!) of the above languages, and have Democracy 3 on steam, and feel like opting in to the beta and giving it a spin, we would really like to know what you think. Ideally you cannot tell ANY DIFFERENCE to how the game used to be (although perhaps the text is crisper). All we are really worried about is if it just fails or bugs-out on certain video cards. Any feedback is welcome! Its so shocking that I’m posting about Democracy 3 again isn’t it? Next thing you know I’ll be telling you we have a release date for shadowhand :D

This is cross-posted from our website dev blog at: http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2017/09/18/the-democracy-3-unicode-post-oh-yes/ Right thenhere goes A while ago, we decided that what we really needed to do was translate our biggest selling game (Democracy 3) into Chinese and Russian, and also probably some other languages too. This probably sounds easy but its not, because Chinese and Russian and other fancy languages use non-ASCII characters, so we had to translate the games engine to use unicode instead of ASCII. In theory this is easy, in practice not, especially because there are a LOT of Chinese characters, and you cant just whack em all in a phat bitmap like you do with western characters. This means a lot of assing-around which was all done by jeff from stargazy studios (of Democracy 3 Africa fame) who is my able assistant in such matters. Anyway, the ups and downs of this process are enough to write a major opera over, but suffice it to say, we think its actually done now. As a test, we are dipping our toe in the water by releasing just now (OMG!) a new beta build of Democracy 3 on steam. (Windows only, steam only right now). If you right click the games icon/name and select betas there is a no-password beta to opt in to this version. This version will only be served to you if your steam language is set to English (we will be changing this), but it now gives you the ability to change language in the game and select from: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese. You can do this under the options screen in a new drop down box. You can then enjoy wonderful screens like this:
And this:
Which excite me more than they should. In practice what this means is we will be able to simultaneously support a bunch of new languages AND get rid of the silliness of separate builds for German French and Polish (WTF were we thinking?). It also means we have some cool new rendering etch built into the engine which we have secret plans for ANYWAY If you are an English speaker who also happens to be fluent in one or more (or even none!) of the above languages, and have Democracy 3 on steam, and feel like opting in to the beta and giving it a spin, we would really like to know what you think. Ideally you cannot tell ANY DIFFERENCE to how the game used to be (although perhaps the text is crisper). All we are really worried about is if it just fails or bugs-out on certain video cards. Any feedback is welcome! Its so shocking that Im posting about Democracy 3 again isnt it? Next thing you know Ill be telling you we have a release date for shadowhand :D

Today's Deal: Save 75% on Democracy 3!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Thursday at 10AM Pacific Time

Watch this video: https://youtu.be/GZnBgWd_R2g Starting Today, and running for twelve days, Positech is donating all its steam revenue from the Democracy 3 franchise to a charity called war child. Thats the full price of each game, minus steams cut. Hopefully we will raise about $20k. As gamers, we spend a lot of time (me included) shooting guns in virtual wars. Lets spare some time to consider the impact of real; life wars that are happening right now on children around the world.

Watch this video: https://youtu.be/GZnBgWd_R2g Starting Today, and running for twelve days, Positech is donating all its steam revenue from the Democracy 3 franchise to a charity called war child. Thats the full price of each game, minus steams cut. Hopefully we will raise about $20k. As gamers, we spend a lot of time (me included) shooting guns in virtual wars. Lets spare some time to consider the impact of real; life wars that are happening right now on children around the world.

Today's Deal: Save 75% on Democracy 3!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Wednesday at 10AM Pacific Time

Hi, we updated the game today to version 1.286. the only difference is a fix for voter approval weirdness where approval can suddenly go nuts and the focus group values stop making sense for certain voters. This will be rolled into mac,linux and other language builds soon.

Hi, thanks to some great help from community members we have finally tracked down and (we strongly suspect) fixed a seemingly random crash in the electioneering DLC. We have patched the windows version 1.285 which includes this fix, and OSX and the Africa version will get their fixes tomorrow. Sorry for all the hassle!

We had some bugs reported with electioneering on OSX (and other DLC) when certain scripts were run, such as firing a minister. This has (As far as we can tell) been tracked down and fixed now with this latest tiny update. Sorry about that, and hopefully its fixed now! (this was OSX only)

Version 1.282 ============== 1. Fix for electioneering spin events bug. 2. Increased chance of Telecoms Meltdown event. 3. Increased chance of School Shooting event. 4. Increased chance of Church Attacked event. 5. Increased chance of Disastrous Crop event. 6. Increased inputs to Aerospace Contract Won event. 7. Increased inputs to Tech Firm Closure event. 8. Increased chance of Overseas Famine event. 9. Added input to Celebrity Kidnapped event. 10. Adjusted inputs to Market Meltdown event. 11. Reduced inputs to Superhero event.

Version 1.281 ============+= 1. Balance changes to the following events: Mad Cow Disease, Car Company Shuts Plant,Highway Collapses, Spy Scandal, Telecom's Meltdown, Train Crash, Disease Cured, School Shooting, Church Attacked, Prison Riot, Pension Fund Scandal, Natural Disaster, Flagship Company Leaves, Disastrous Crop, Age Concern protest, Aerospace Boom, Oil Tanker Sunk, Tech Firm Closure, Credit Crunch, Overseas Famine, Poverty Report, Celebrity Kidnapped.

Here are the changes: Version 1.28 ============ 1. Added impacts from Black Market situation on tax revenue. 2. Strengthened effects of Corporate Exodus situation. 3. Reduced impact of University Grants and Technology Colleges on education. 4. Poverty now boosts Drug Addiction, and Drug Addiction is harder to beat once triggered. 5. Fixed bug regarding labor survey event. 6. Adjusted triggering of Nobel Prize event. 7. Fixed display issue for some income effects on policies. 8. Consolidated duplicate entries for effects of tobacco consumption on cost of state health service.

Version 1.27 ============ 1. Added impact of homelessness on Street Gangs. 2. Increased effect olf unemployment on Street Gangs, 3. Reduced impact of Police Force on Street Gangs. 4. Added inertia to effect of Police Force on Street Gangs. 5. Added inertia to impact of Armed Police on Street Gangs. 6. Increased impact of Poverty rate on Street Gangs 7. Adjusted curve of unemployments effect on Doctors Strike. 8. Reduced impact of unemployment benefit on Black Market. 9. Reduced trigger threshold for Black Market. 10. Reduced impact of Armed Police on Race Riots. 11. Increased impact of Unemployment on Race Riots. 12. Added impact of pollution on Contagious Disease. 13. Increased effect of Income Tax on Brain Drain. 14. Increased effect of Traffic Congestion on Gridlock. 15. Doctors Strike & Hospital overcrowding now both feed into Contagious Disease. 16. Increased impact of Public & Private Health care on Doctors Strike.

We added some more changes to the balance test build you can opt into, under 'betas' (no password). Ok, we updated this build with some more changes today: 21. Increased inertia of effect of science funding on technology. 22. Increased inertia of effects from tech grants and tech colleges on technology. 23. Reduced effect and increased inertia of intel services on crime rate. 24. Reduced effect and increased inertia of phone tapping on crime rate. 25. Added inertia to effect from prisoner tagging to crime rate. 26. Reduced impact of youth club subsidies on crime rate. 27. Increased impact of poverty on crime rate. 28. Increased chance of armed robbery when handgun laws are low. 29. Increased chance of armed robbery when equality is low. 30. Pollution now slightly reduces tourism. 31. Increased cost of telecommuting initiative. 32. Reduced the impact of technology colleges on education. 33. Clean fuel subsidies now take longer to improve the environment. 34. Hyrbid car policy now takes longer to improve the environment. 35. Slowed down impact of hybrid car policy on car usage. 36. Hybrid car policy now boosts the income of the wealthy. 37. Lowered the triggering threshold for gridlock situation. Once you have opted in and played some games, we really appreciate feedback on the changes. Thanks

There are more details here: http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2016/05/19/new-beta-balance-patch-for-democracy-3/ But basically we are trying a new 'beta balance patch' for the game that introduces a whole bunch of changes to the simulation which we think makes the game better balanced, more accurate and more fun. Here are the changes: Version 1.26 ============ 1. Unemployment now contributes towards obesity 2. Increased impact of car usage on traffic congestion 3. Increased base likelihood of a teacher shortage. 4. Unemployment now reduces the chance of a teacher shortage. 5. University Grants now increase the chance of a teacher shortage. 6. Reduced impact of CCTV on Armed Robbery. 7. Added impact of low inequality on Armed Robbery. 8. Changed equation for GDP impact on Alcohol Consumption to be non-linear. 9. Added impact on doctors and teachers strikes from trade union membership 10. Adjusted impact of state school funding on teachers strikes. 11. Added effect of wages on Teachers & Doctors Strikes. 12. Added effects of science funding and the environment to contagious disease. 13. Arts subsidies, Bus subsidies and community policing now reduce unemployment. 14. Adjustments to triggers for various events. 15. Increased impact of refugee crisis event. 16. Effects of corporate exodus event worsened. 17. Increased impact of Unemployment on CrimeRate. 18. Impact of religion on antisocial behaviour now linked to membership, not frequency. 19. Unemployment now linked to antisocial behaviour 20. Trade union and Socialist group memberships now contribute towards general strike. You need to opt-in to the beta (right click the games name on steam no password...) right now to see the changes.
Please note this is currently windows english version only. Let us know what you think...

Our last update screwed up some voter group membership calculations. We have (we think!) fixed it today. Thats the only change.We are working on a bigger re-balancing patch, which should come in a day or two.

Hi, Just an update from the Democracy 3 developers to fill you in on news about the game. Firstly, although we released a new game (Democracy 3 Africa) that doesn't mean than the base D3 game is being neglected. In fact we have been working for months on a new expansion for the base game which we will officially announce in a month or so. Secondly, we have been doing our best to fix some stability issues a few people have experienced, especially under windows 10. yesterday we patched the Clones & Drones DLC which we found to cause problems under very specific circumstances. Thirdly, we know our list of supported languages could be bigger, and that the GUI for language selection is a total mess. We are planning on a Democracy 3 update that will re-engineer all of the translations and make it possible for us to support many more with ease. That should happen a fair bit later n the year (after the above-named expansion is complete). Fourthly, some of the tweaks and improvements we made for Democracy 3 Africa should also be making it over to this game, such as some tweaks to the way income tax/flat tax work, and far greater stability in the face of corrupt or badly coded mods. Just letting you know we are still working on stuff. Expect teasing screenshots soon :D

We had fixed XP support in an un-named interim update, and now today we have this minor patch to the windows version which should fix support for low spec hardware that may have caused some occasional crashing on certain setups.

Hi, thanks to a very helpful steam community member, we think we have tracked down and fixed a problem that several Windows XP users were having with the game, hence today's update. Sorry about that!

Yes, its been a year since we last patched the game, but that doesn't mean we have forgotten it, far from it! We just released a big chunky update with a ton of new features. A full breakdown is here: http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2015/09/30/democracy-3-updated-after-over-a-year/ But to summarize, version 1.2 includes a dozen new achievements, 4 new events, tweaks to some of simulation variables, and a great big long list of improvements to the GUI to make information more accessible and to reveal a lot of the 'hidden' data that people wanted to see. This patch is currently windows only, but linux & mac versions are coming in the next few days... We hope you like the new GUI tweaks, and good luck maxxing out all of those new achievements :D

We are happy to announce that our new expansion pack for Democracy 3: Clones & Drones is now on sale! Get it Here: Democracy 3: Clones & Drones What challenges are to come for the politicians of the future? Mass unemployment due to the automation of factories? or will this lead to a leisure society and equality? Will ubiquitous drones lead to better law enforcement and less traffic congestion or to widespread crime and infringement of privacy? Should we give the go-ahead to human cloning? will climate change cause problems for our country? Are we going to run out of rare earth metals? or oil...? The people look to YOU for leadership in these turbulent times. Can you keep the country happy and prosperous as we head to the 2020s and beyond? Clones & Drones adds new dilemmas, policies, events and simulation values to the ultimate political strategy game. Available now for PC/Mac/Linux.